Today, on my shelves, a book of poetry by Annie Dillard. Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. This is a season I celebrate — not for any religious reason but because moment by moment, the earth is coming alive. In “Feast Days”, Dillard takes us through a strange arrangement of Christian holidays. And I’ve remembered the conclusion since I first bought this book as a student in 1974:
God send us the spring lamb
minted and tied in thyme
and call us home, and bid us eat
and praise your name.
The names I praised were those of my family. All morning I worked on an essay for Euclid’s Orchard, one that explores my deep past in the Drumheller valley. So those names. The Yopeks, the Kishkans, poor Joseph Klus who died in a dugout house on the banks of the Red Deer River, of Spanish flu. Calls or texts came from my children. I’d sent my sons their childhood paper mache eggs, filled with little chocolate treats and toys for their children, my grandbabies. I wondered if they’d remember their eggs and oh, yes. They did.
In the afternoon, I worked in the garden where spring has eased itself into every bed — Spring Tonic, where I grow salad greens; Long Eye, where garlic is planted and kale is volunteering; Wave, where the peas have yet to sprout against their fence and, fearful that slugs will nip off the new sprouts, I scattered crushed oyster shells (from my birthday oysters) over the length of the furrows. I planted ten hills of French Fingerling potatoes in Old Deck and weeded mint volunteers from Thin Deck to pot up to take to Edmonton in May when we will all gather (except Angie, alas) to build a deck and porch for Brendan and Cristen and where I know the young’uns will want mojitos come 5’o’clock. (John and I would rather have a glass of wine. Call us stuffy.)
The spring lamb made an appearance on the Easter table, tied not with thyme, but stuffed with garlic and rosemary. A pan of Greek potatoes, lemony, and fragrant with olive oil from Crete. Eggplant with garden dill and chives in yoghourt. Salad of feta, tomatoes, and Kalamata olives. And for dessert? A galette with last year’s gooseberries and this year’s rhubarb. The most beautiful Desert Hills Syrah.
Today I’ve been naming
the plants of the southern forest:
arrowwood, witherod,
hobblebush, nannyberry
and the loblolly, longleaf
and shortleaf pine.
No, I’ve been looking at the pink new growth on the huckleberries, cerise salmonberry blossoms, Douglas fir, watching two sapsuckers chase one another up and down the trunk of a small cascara, and brushed a bumblebee from my shoulder as I put away the shovel. And thinking of my grandchildren, opening the eggs their fathers loved 30 years ago, on the table that still looks west. And misses them.
...Theresa Kishkan 