Last night we slept with our bedroom windows open. The night before, a wolf howled and then the coyotes raised their voices. In response? In challenge? A saw-whet owl has been calling so close I think it might be in the arbutus tree just to the south of the house. I hoped for more of that last night but heard only thumps as the cat jumped from one level of the deck to another, hunting mice. And I listened as the cars from the first ferry from Saltery Bay to Earls Cove passed on the highway below. There weren’t many cars this morning and I thought of the passengers on the ferry drinking coffee and watching the moon as the ferry approached the dock at Earls Cove. The same moon that I saw rise over Hallowell and set in the west just before I got up.
I had a restless night, maybe because of all the moonlight! I was awake around 3, thinking about the past few months. It was a cold winter and there were times I wished it over. I fell and cracked my tailbone at the very end of November and still have pain, sometimes quite a lot. And the tears in my retina that were a result of the impact of that fall were repaired, though now I have a small black fly that darts across my vision. My ophthalmologist says this is normal and probably won’t go away. There were some dark days and nights over the winter as I shivered (we heat with wood, mostly, and not everything I need to do in a day is close to the fire!) and thought about mortality. But I’ve learned, or am learning, that adjusting my perspective is the most useful thing to do when stuff gets hard. for example, I could have cracked my head when I fell, or fractured my wrists. I’m alive, in short, and so many people I’ve known and loved have died this winter. Yesterday I received an unexpected call telling me I was being given an literary windfall. And the novella I thought would be impossible to publish is going to be published next year. An essay written partly in response to my fractured tailbone will also be published later this year (I found things out I wouldn’t have known if I’d never fallen). The small dwarf daffodils are blooming everywhere, there are pots of bright crocus by the front door, and a tree frog leaped out from under the hot-tub when John was hosing off the decks the other day. Guys from Egmont (the village at the end of the road) are going to come and make a skookum fence around the vegetable garden because deer and elk tore the old one apart last fall when everything in the woods was so dry and parched and the cabbages and kale were too succulent to ignore. (The fence is something we would have rebuilt ourselves even a few years ago but these guys have a post-hole auger and they’ll sink 4×4 cedar posts 2 feet deep; digging with a pick—the way we’d have to do it— is a bit daunting to us right now. Page wire instead of deer mesh. We’ll help if they need us to.)
Alive, in short, and full of energy and ready to finish the collection of essays I’m working on. Ready to plant greens. Ready to make a quilt for a grandson turning 3 in September (they get quilts when they move from their cribs to beds…) and ready to try Edmonton again (last time was when I fell…), even venturing to Drumheller with Brendan, Cristen, and the kids to visit the Tyrell Museum and the graves of ancient Kishkans.
So it’s spring, or will be by the time we go to sleep tonight. It’s the “Super-Worm Moon”, which is fitting because when we dug out the compost the other day to top-dress the raspberries and garlic, the worms were the size of small snakes. The days are getting longer and the nights are so clear that looking into them I feel like I can see forever. Stars, Jupiter to the south, Saturn over Hallowell, a chorus of coyotes and wolves and the insistent call of the saw-whet owl. Too-too-too-too-too-too. You too.
Above the tower — a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!–Du Fu
...Theresa Kishkan 