A photograph arrived the other day, two grandchildren in new hats at an Alberta campsite, and it brought back memories of our summers, our camping trips, the scent of woodsmoke and the sting of mosquitoes. Time to pull out last year’s The Summer Book, an anthology of wonderful essays and reflections on sunlight and swimming and the passing of time.
The light is our clock. We talk quietly in bed, listening to the birds. In the night, there were loons, and we’re glad they’ve chosen the bay below us for nesting. One of us remembers a summer when the house was filled with children. Another remembers waking in the tent to face a day of house-building, framing and lifting walls, running out of nails, measuring and measuring again the bird’s mouth notches so that the rafters would rest snugly on the wall plates. One baby slept in a basket on the sleeping bag in the blue tent. (The others were still unborn, waiting to be dreamed into being.) One baby slept in a crib in the new wing of the house, in a room next to the one with bunk beds, while I walked in the garden in a cotton nightdress, coaxing the peas to attach themselves to wire. Three children didn’t sleep as the sun set later and later, long past bedtime, and we made campfires in rings of stones, sat on a cedar plank while the smoke rose to the stars. In the garden, the sundial (Grow Old With Me, The Best Is Yet to Come) was smothered by lemon balm.
—from “Love Song”, in The Summer Book, Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017
...Theresa Kishkan 