Month: July 2012

memory and assumptions

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I’m learning to be more careful when it comes to reading the past. For instance: I believed my father’s stories about his mother and her journey to the new world. This world, though of course North America was very different in the early part of the 20th century, before the wars, before the Great Depression, before climate change and the migration of populations to the cities that swell and strain at their seams as I write. So when did your mother come to North America, I asked, and he told me 1911. But the passenger manifest proves it was 1913.  The second mistake is mine entirely. I read the names on the manifest — Anna, Josef, Jan, Paul, Barbara, Franc –and assumed the Josef was my grandmother’s first husband. But then I scrolled over and saw that in fact Anna was travelling with five children. Josef was her son! So she was alone on the Mount Temple in the winter of 1913, in steerage, with five children. Paul and Jan (who became John) were twins, and were 4; Josef was 3, Barbara, 2, and Franc was a year old. It seems that Anna’s husband had a brother in Drumheller, Paul Yopek, and I’m guessing (or assuming) that Josef senior had gone on ahead to make arrangements for them. His name appears in the Alberta Homestead Records for this parcel of land: Section 11, Township 29, Range 20, Meridian 4.

Did he meet them in Saint John when the Mount Temple arrived on March 4? Or did she travel across Canada by train to Drumheller with her five small children? I know that a sixth child was born 9 months after her arrival so things must have gone well, in any case.

fish, unwaxed

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Today was warm and still, a good day for preparing a bucket of indigo dye and plunging in those squares of waxed fish. Well, since I last wrote about them, I stitched the squares in a kind of clumsy version of mokume, then pulled the stitching tight so that lines of the cotton squares would be protected from the dye. This is called thread-resist. Here’s what the squares looked like before they entered the bucket of dye.

The dye process is a bit lengthy — the squares sat in the bucket for half an hour while I stirred them frequently; then they were removed, some soda ash was added to the dye as a fixative; then the squared returned to their indigo bath and sat for another hour, with me stirring them every ten minutes or so.

Then they got rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed. I sat on the grass and removed the threads, hoping for lots of contrast: white wavy lines across the deep blue squares, the mostly white fish marbled with blue. And I have to say I was a little disappointed that the watery lines didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I know why this is. My batik fish took up quite a lot of the surface space so I couldn’t pull the threads as tightly as I think they needed to be. But a project like this is so much about the process, the immersing of one’s self into the various steps required. So here are the squares drying on an old red sheet on the grass:

I love the blue — and that’s a good thing because my hands are stained for…well, the time being anyway. I did wear rubber gloves for the dye process but for the last part of the rinsing and squeezing out of the water, it was easier to use my bare hands. It didn’t take long for the squares to dry so I set up the ironing board on the deck by the front door (where the robin’s empty nest still waits among the roses) and gathered up as much paper — newsprint, without the print, the kind of paper books are often packed in; we save it all for High Ground Press shipping — as I could find and then began to iron the wax out of the cotton. I know that one can also boil or steam out the wax but I’m not entirely certain of how securely the dye is fixed so I thought it best to use the old iron my mother dropped on the basement floor and then passed along to me for batik projects — the steam function no longer works and the base is a bit wobbly but it heats! I’m not entirely satisfied with the finished squares because there’s a halo of wax which no amount of ironing will remove, even with absorbent paper towel. But then I remember that I do this because I can’t draw, I can’t paint, so the whole process has been really interesting and I can’t wait to piece together a quilt with these fish in their indigo water.

Their journey

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This is the ship’s manifest where I found small details of my grandmother’s journey from Europe to North America in 1913. Her name, her first husband Joseph Yopek, and 4 of their children, the ones born in Horni Lomna. (5 more were born in Canada, with one, Myrtle, dying in infancy. My grandmother had two more children with her second husband, my grandfather John Kishkan; one, Julia, died in infancy, and the second was my father…) I see that they are listed as Poles — I know that my grandmother’s husband was, but she was described in all her papers as Czech. So much to find out, so much to decipher…

surrounded by gods

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Last night, just before bed, John saw a huge bull elk standing by our vegetable garden. Our camera would’t work so you will have to imagine this: Cervus elaphus (ssp. roosevelti), golden brown, with a dark throat, holding the moon in his antlers. We scared him away — you don’t want these guys eating your trees, though he’d already devoured part of an ornamental cherry tree — and heard him crashing through the woods with his harem of cows and their calves behind him. This morning I found his beautiful prints in the damp grass.

And here’s another god of the trees and vines (and in this case parsley):

Playlist for summer

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After weeks of rain, a time when the province’s rivers flooded, when cherry growers mourned the condition of this year’s crop, when the berry growers in the Fraser Valley prayed for sun, when the roses lost their petals in sodden clumps, when driving home in darkness meant being alert for frogs on the highway, when the slugs (I swear) grew to the size of mice, well, yesterday afternoon the sun came out. And we are promised weeks of it. The UV index this morning is 7. Or maybe 8.

So it’s time to bring out the summer music. I confess I’m not really sure what a playlist is. I don’t have any of the latest technology, I still play cds and have only once or twice downloaded a song. What I’ve always loved about vinyl records and then cassette tapes and compact discs is the sense of narrative in the playing of them. You start at the beginning and you listen to the whole thing (mostly). You realize that the musician had a particular kind of listening in mind as he or she decided on the sequence of pieces. There’s a trajectory and the listener is part of that.

Last night friends came for dinner and we listened to a collection of Romska balada, a cycle of Roma songs that are individually beautiful but form an extraordinary extended expression of longing, sorrow, prayer, and joy. Somehow this was perfect music for sitting under grape leaves while the sapsuckers flew from tree to tree and we talked of absent children, gardens, and waited for the lamb to finish grilling.

So what would my summer playlist sound like? Some Dylan, Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You”, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”, played by the marvellous Hilary Hahn, Steve Earle singing “Jerusalem” (and not Blake’s Jerusalem, though maybe I’d want that too), two “Four Strong Winds” – Ian Tyson and Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris singing “Boulder to Birmingham”, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Drew Minter  singing “Son nata a lagrimar” from Giulio Cesare, a duet that gives me goose bumps just typing the title, Dire Straits (“Wild West End”), Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in its entirety, and then maybe Jean Redpath singing the songs of Robbie Burns. I’m sure I’ve left out key elements but it looks like I’ll have the whole summer to perfect my list.

Empty

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“So there is also an alas in this song of tenderness. If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.” — Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

On the evening of June 11th, I noticed some strands of moss and grass in an elbow of the New Dawn rose growing around the window over our kitchen sink and venturing along the top of the front door. By mid-day June 12th, it was clear a robin was building a nest. We had guests for a few days and we were in and out the front door. John barbequed lamb one of the evenings of their visit and salmon the next; the barbeque is on the patio just down the stairs from the front door. In some ways it’s not a great place for a nest because of so much human activity in that particular area but in another way, it’s perfect. There’s a generous overhang of eaves to shelter a nesting bird and her eggs and there’s a birdbath hanging from the eaves. We watched from the window over the sink as the robin brought mud in her beak, worked it into the nest with her feet, then shaped the inner nest to the dimensions of her body. On June 13th,  she settled herself in the nest and so I posted this sign on the inside of our front door:

We stopped using that door. We stopped making much noise in the kitchen. When I was washing dishes, I’d sometimes see the robin watching me, alert but not exactly fearful. Sudden movement resulted in her flying away briefly but she always returned.

Assuming she laid eggs soon after building the nest, I expected to see hatchlings mid-to-late last week. The incubation period is, on average, 12 days from the time that the last egg is laid. She was very patient, leaving for brief periods to feed herself. We could hear males singing nearby and thought that one of them was no doubt her mate.

This morning I didn’t see her when I got up. And every time I looked out the window, she wasn’t there. In the woods, males were still singing in the rain. By noon, I suspected the worst: that she’d abandoned the nest for whatever reason. I waited another hour and then took a bench out to the deck below the rose and held the camera over the nest. I couldn’t see anything myself but the camera told this sad tale:

I don’t think the nest was robbed. There are no fragments of shell anywhere near. And when I reached my hand into the nest, after viewing the photographs on the camera’s small  screen, I could feel that the bottom of the nest was completely smooth, like a pottery dish: no remains of dead nestlings or shells.

In the meantime, there’s a male robin singing as I write this. Maybe the couple will try again – there’s still time! And just out the window of my study, I’ve been watching a house wren investigage this little house that Brendan (Brendan, who will marry Cristen in less than three weeks!) gave me two Christmases ago.