Yesterday John and I celebrated the 39th year of our meeting. (I know I’ve written about it before.) We always have a special dinner—last night it was duck breasts with a port and dried cherry sauce, followed by little molten chocolate cakes with raspberries and creme fraiche. A bottle of lovely Vacqueyras from the Rhone Valley, full of cherry and red currant.
But before dinner, a friend dropped by. She saw the quilt I was working on and said it reminded her of seeing the Northern Lights on a recent flight back from England. I said I felt at this point in the quilting that I was seeing snow angels. Those too, she exclaimed. She wanted to know how we met and John told her the story of the poetry reading at Open Space Gallery in Victoria, with bill bissett, and how we’d had dinner together with a mutual friend who was hosting John overnight (though he ended up staying with me instead!). And how the ferry he’d taken to the Island that afternoon was the only sailing that day because of high winds. We almost didn’t meet at all. Would he have remained with the woman he was with then? Would I have returned to Ireland to the nice man I’d left behind while I sorted out my life to try to find a way to go back? My friend said, But if you hadn’t met, then all this—she indicated the gallery of photographs taped to the fridge: our children, their children; and by extension, the whole of our life together—would never have happened. I looked at the photographs of my beautiful children. And the three grandchildren I adore (soon to be four). I would have been another person if none of this had occurred. Another life, another man (or not), other children (or not). But not these beloved people.
This morning, folding towels and looking out at the snow that fell last night, I kept hearing this poem. It’s one of my favourites. If anyone knew about time and its strange metaphysics, it was Stanley Kunitz.
The LayersI have walked through many lives,some of them my own,and I am not who I was,though some principle of beingabides, from which I strugglenot to stray.When I look behind,as I am compelled to lookbefore I can gather strengthto proceed on my journey,I see the milestones dwindlingtoward the horizonand the slow fires trailingfrom the abandoned camp-sites,over which scavenger angelswheel on heavy wings.Oh, I have made myself a tribeout of my true affections,and my tribe is scattered!How shall the heart be reconciledto its feast of losses?In a rising windthe manic dust of my friends,those who fell along the way,bitterly stings my face.Yet I turn, I turn,exulting somewhat,with my will intact to gowherever I need to go,and every stone on the roadprecious to me.In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.
...Theresa Kishkan 
Congatulations T & J. Lovely Kunitz poem. Ron & Pat
Oh how nice to see this, Ron! How the years pass…Best to both of you across the Strait.
A beautiful poem. And congratulations on your long, happy union with your husband. It is indeed interesting to ponder on roads not taken; what would have been, could have been …
It was never my intention to live in France for so long (25 years, can you believe it?) Had my parents not died, I would’ve returned to Toronto to be with them throughout their “golden years.” But they died, six years apart, in the 1990s, leaving me somewhat bereft in Paris. The rest is history, as they say.
Thank you, Juliet. We’re in Victoria for a few days, staying with our daughter, who lives across from the school I attended for grades one and two. When we pass the school, I almost see my self. And in many ways my daughter has a life I might have lived — she works in the Museum here, she shops at the places I knew as a child, walks the same streets. Time is doing its strange and lovely pleating and wrinkling this morning.