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When I get the call, the only thing near me you could link to the word home is the potato garden mat I'm working on. That was sold before I started it.

Mary Hanna's daughter says, 'She left you an old picture.' I tell her that picture's the only home I ever had. It's every mat I've made. It moves while I remember it, something like the hologram of crab habitat my husband cut out of Canadian Geographic; anemones, pincers, sea glass; but soft, not sharp. What might be kittens or light is skittering down two girls; me and your foster girl Mary Hannah Vardy. Curls down our frocks or music in your kitchen? In my hologram we wriggle. Catclaws click and hitch our skirts and collars.

Last time I almost got that picture back was ten years ago. Your nun daughter called saying your house was gone. It got left to the wrong child who had Jefford's Excavation bulldoze it. Sister Beatrice took courses in Vermont that said to get over something you have to go through it, but her voice said let's get this over with.

You can have a husband and two children thirty years and they can be a pretty good husband and children, but nowhere as good as by-the-way things that weren't even supposed to be. So when Beatrice said come get a few things George has in his barn across the road, I drove down and stood on the gravel where your house was, an unbelievably tiny patch.

***

Half a plate in the rubble has a whole ironstone rose. Your white rose bush is gone. The one blowing petals on us that day you gave me my second cup of tea and waited for me to find your ball end of green yarn in it instead of a teabag. The house isn't gone, I tell the cabbage garden. I rip the air over this square of gravel and see you turn a herring in the pan, fry it til you can eat the bones. Eating the bones is easy; fry them crisp, tear bread. Eating the bones is something no one does now. There is no step between stopping bone-eating and stopping herring eating. No one eats herring in the other houses. They eat boiled ham, peanut butter, cheese slices not sliced from anything. This square of gravel was sliced from something. It's the crumby heel-end of your house, herringless. I, Anne, swallowed your rafters, mat frame, bedposts, hot birch junk. Persian rose wallpaper, lace on the landing over the screaming turre islands.

I didn't swallow your neighbours.They're happy to watch schools of uneaten herring leave the cove, bones in the millions, impossible to remove; you never tried to remove them. The herring are glad enough to leave the cove since you were the only one left who knew how to eat them. The glittery leftovers you wove to the cove with your mat hook. Nothing would be more lonely for the herring than hanging around while your loops unravel. People think not eating herring is of no importance.

The last silver, pink and green herring slip behind alders. Their scales illuminate the last stories your house wanted to tell. Crumb and heel-end stories, lit the way lightning lights a night garden; one white rosebush, not the red one. Two delphiniums, handle of Loyola's blueberry rake, not the statue of Mary. Spot on the kitchen wall where you had my picture. I was always going to come back for it.

I haul a paling from cow parsnip smothering Loyola's cabbage garden. One of these palings was my toy husband and another one was Mary Hannah's. We kissed them goodbye every morning and laid them in grass by the gate. That meant they were gone to work. At five o'clock we brought them in again and stood them up for their suppers. Mary Hannah's had a black crayon moustache and mine had orange sideburns. They were pretty good husbands. Even then I cut my pretend turnips like yours, in rectangles so it looked like someone gave them a lot of care to get them looking nothing like when they were found. You said they're boiled enough when the edges are blunt.

At our house my mother forgot to put soda in her dumplings and to keep the waste from my father she hid them under the big rock by our rhubarb. It rained and the dumplings greeted him by the back door in the morning. They boarded me with Liz and Eddy Mowbray next door to you. Liz and Eddie were old. Store bread squat around thin bologna, orange crystals in a glass of water. After my dinner there you gave me mashed potatoes chicken and gravy. I could see my teethmarks in your bread and butter, then you sent me out with the brush for my job; scrubbing your mats on the fence. One day Marg Vokey had to go in for tests so you asked me to draw a cat out on a brin bag and said I was a better hand to draw than she was. Between the houses and the water is that big meadow where the Mowbrays cut their hay. Keegan Aspel's bat's in the grass from where he grew up a million summers ago but Ron Tibbo's shack is not there any more.

It made no difference to me and Mary Hannah that Ron was the town drunk. You could learn a lot from Ron. Wear a singlet all year, not just September to June. Carry an apple in your pocket in case you meet a horse. Know where you have left your nails and string. Never leave home without a bucket. If you don't bathe for more than six months you don't smell any more because of the wind and sun. We looked out through Ron's curtain ragged as the gas station flag, at Goat Island and Hallorans' place and Loyola bringing water to his pony. After Ron's cat had kittens I beat a path to his door twice a day to play with a patchy black white and orange one. Ron said I could have it when it was old enough to leave its mother. He had a green pitcher on his table full of warm Freshie he'd pour when he wasn't lying down. We dipped coconut bar cookies like pieces of burnt box in it til we got sores on our tongues. Ron had two hens that walked in and out of the shack like Min Halloran going to bingo, and one morning we went in and he had his arms up to his elbows in a bowl of bread dough, he asleep making bread and the hens standing on his table pecking dough.

I told Liz and Eddie Ron said I could have the kitten. They must have told him off because when six weeks came and I went down with a baby quilt in a mustard pickle box Ron said the mother had taken the kitten away and hidden it. That was when he took the picture off the wall over his table and gave it to me. I don't know what Ron Tibbo was doing with a picture like that. I brought it back to the house and Liz wouldn't even let me keep that. She said it was too filthy to clean but it wasn't. You cleaned it for me with a piece of Loyola's shirt in a basin of Sunlight and vinegar. The frame was like the piping on Marg Vokey's niece's wedding cake dipped in gold. You scrubbed down into the ridges with a toothbrush. The glass had a BB hole in the corner. 'That glass is no good,' you said. You fitted half a storm window in the frame, hung it by new wire in your back kitchen and said it was mine. Every grocery day I put lemons in a bowl with a doily under them to remind me of the lace frock on the girl that was me.

When Ron's shack fell down you fed his mother cat even though you hate cats. Ron went to live in half the post office. The post office was on stilts in the water. It had two doors. The boat came in and passed mail to the postmaster in one half. When me and Mary Hannah opened Ron's door his room would be half filled with fog. He'd be on the day bed and we couldn't see him til he sat up. Everyone fed him boiled ham and scoops of potato salad through the week and beef and cabbage on Sundays. I visited you once after he died and you said, 'Poor old Ron, I wonder did he go to heaven?' I was drawing your stove and blue oil lamp in my mat sketchbook and you warned me, 'A mat's no good without a bit of red in it.'

George is out in his boat and his wife says there wasn't much in his shed. She says he was going to have a yard sale. I play hopscotch in the gravel patch. Here's the end of the back kitchen pipe to Loyola's spring. Frozen nights you let the tap drip. Here's where the woodstove was; bread before the moon sank, the crossbar Loyola hung from sick on his daybed, pan where you flung the cat's turre scraps, codskin, bacon fat.

This gravel is too small to have held white clapboard, red marine paint door, stairs. Sister Beatrice hated the stairs and the inconvenience of your top front bedroom. Nowhere to hang clothes. You've got nice dresses, she said before the Mother Superior came to visit. Get rid of that brown cardigan, go up and put on what I've laid out on your bed.

You threw the birch junk for warming your sheets downstairs, screaming every time it thumped so Sister Beatrice thought you broke your neck. I said what does she expect in a house where Jesus hangs over the kitchen door Scotch taped to his cross. But she's mad at me, you said. I said that's what comes of always calling your own daughter Sister. They put cheese on fish in the convent, you said, I never heard the like. But she is a Sister. I should treat her the same as any other Sister. That didn't stop you from telling your lobster joke to everyone at the Mother Superior's wake. The one where Bill tells Joe he's sorry, they found Joe's wife on the bottom drowned, her body covered in lobsters. You shouting over and over again, And Joe said to him he says, pick them off and set her again. When you died Sister Beatrice told me the whole time you were tending Loyola you had a tumor of your own as big as a pineapple. Now that's something you never saw in your life, a whole pineapple.

George says he doesn't have my picture. I want to get out of his shed and go look in his kitchen. If he doesn't have it I know it could only be Mary Hannah that does. George has: your blue oil lamp, dented; money box from when you had the store, Japanese sugar bowl, garden cherub, English nickel teapot.

Not hot tea with two spoons of sugar and buttermilk buns. Not the photo of you in the wedding dress your mother made out of a silk parachute she found on the barrens after saying nineteen novenas to St. Jude. Not your story about riding a white horse over the swinging bridge before the tidal wave made everyone move to Parsons' Cove. Not your mat hook. Not a plank of the orange crate with the rooster I copied on burlap for Sister Beatrice's Christmas mat. Not your frying pan with two frilled eggs.

Not that you were warm or ample. You filled one kitchen drawer with jam crusts for pudding and half the time me and Mary Hannah ate them before you could put them in to soak, and you roared at us over that. You cried over the electricity bill to me who was no more than fourteen. The foster children leaving lights on all the time. You who always had enough of everything, buckets of herring, saucers of fat scraps, afraid over money.

***

My house has none of that nonsense and I hate it. This house is what my children and husband wanted; a water cooler that heats water as well as cools it, the microwave, no window the right light for a St. Joseph's coat or a geranium. Nothing humble can live here, not even a kettle. The more I said I love it small the more my husband kept building on; sunroom, new master bedroom, bathroom for the new master bedroom. He gave me money for take-out breakfasts with hash browns on the weekends, the table full of ketchup packages and the children whining how come I ordered sausage patties not bacon. I only ever completed one mat the whole time I was married; the Captain's wheel from my husband's crab boat, Northern Voyager, with a border of things I imagined clinging to his crab pots.

My new mat is made of my daughter's Brownie tunic cut up for the drills, sweatpants Ellen next door gave me for the potato plants, and a silver scarf from Greenland for the caplin on the ground. I warn people about this house; the living room is full of rags. They think I mean there are a few rags on the piano stool and the floor, maybe some on the couch. The rags are up past your knees. My husband couldn't stand it when I made the Northern Voyager mat even though it was for him. Bad enough shrimp fishing in Greenland without being covered in beads and sequins and foam and eels when you get home. When he was home he wanted all oceans hidden. Not his wife swimming around waving rags and hooking them into bits of sun and moon and fish that speak. I threw my rags out and hoarded tricks I learned from you. Things no one could trip over. Rub the end of thread between bars of soap to get it through a needle. Fling water out of a teacup to mop the floor. Turn an armchair round so it looks out the window. Things I use now my children and husband are gone. The chair-back I always lean my latest mat against in its frame so I can see if the design says what I want it to. If I had Roy Tibbo's picture I could hook how the cat sat on the frock of the girl that was me. How I twirled my hair round my finger on your step to make it glitter like hers.

***

Mary Hannah's daughter wastes no time. She comes Sunday after mass with the picture. I unwrap it when she's gone. It is a Victorian picture of a woman leaning out the door saying goodbye to her soldier husband. It's not my picture. Then in the background there's a daughter sitting on the floor; one girl not two, and she's playing not with a kitten, not even with a puppy, but with a full-grown spaniel I begin to remember. It is my picture, but it's nothing like what I came to think it was over time. For the purpose of making mats that picture is of no more use to me than the four rolls of film Sister Beatrice has in two albums of you standing stiff as your ash shovel on the Basilica steps reading for the Pope's visit. All these years waiting and longing for my picture, and now any mat I make that has to do with you and your house I guess I'll have to make from out of my own head.