If a sukkah is a metaphor for the conflicting nature of our life, both fragile and surprisingly sturdy (after all, we manage to eat and sometimes sleep in it for a week, usually without incident), then nothing represents my family’s journey better than our sukkah.

 We started off with a wooden sukkah that would take a couple of men a few hours to put up. It was spacious and lovely and impractical.

 When I became a single parent, I knew that sukkah would have to go. I gave the wooden pieces away and searched online for a sukkah that could be shipped to my front door, since we were living in a place without Jewish stores nearby.

That year, my two boys, then 10 and 13, who had never constructed more than a Lego house, put up the sukkah. It was not as lovely as our wooden one. The new one has a metal skeleton and a green plastic tarp, all secured by bungee cords, but it was, as advertised, easy to build.

We invited friends to join us for dinner that first year, and they later told me how relieved they were that my little family had a sukkah. It was a message to my kids that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. We were flying solo, but we were not abandoning the rituals that were so filled with meaning and memory.

We moved, and that decidedly unlovely sukkah moved with us. Over the years, we became ambitious and ordered an expansion set (additional tubular beams, green tarps and bungee cords arrived in the mail) so that we could invite more friends to join us in the sukkah.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. There’s been some grumbling and sulking about putting it up, and even more when it came time to store it away after the holiday ended. There were a few times we barely got it built before the holiday, and decorations were but a hasty afterthought.

 But there are golden memories too – of the boys cranking up the music and building the sukkah in happy companionship, of a raucous game of crab apple baseball played in the backyard while we decorated our temporary dwelling.

There are memories of meals savoured and songs sung in the sukkah, which glowed like a jewel box at night. 

We reminisce about the wildlife that has visited our sukkah. The first time we ever saw an opossum it was snuffling around in the sukkah, gobbling up dinner crumbs. Here in Toronto, a gang of raccoons impatiently hangs around the backyard, barely concealing their annoyance as they wait for us to leave before they devour whatever we spilled in the grass.

This year, our sukkah is an all-female project. The boys who built the first edition of the sukkah are away at university, and my teenage daughter and I have started construction. Soon the two of us will be hanging the battered paper chain, the ramshackle collection of lights and the art project made at summer camp long ago. The silk-screened banners that welcome the ancient biblical guests to our sukkah – both male and female visitors are represented – will be dangling from their appointed beams.

Occasionally we talk about the grand old wooden sukkah and the wonderful parties we hosted in it. We miss it, and all that it represented, but my kids have a hard-won understanding that life sometimes changes in ways we can’t predict. The important thing is that we are sitting, sometimes swatting mosquitoes and sometimes freezing, but together in our ever-so-slightly shaky dwelling. Our sukkah may be fragile, but like us, it’s resilient.