Month: December 2019

a blue patchwork for 2019

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It’s the last day of the year. It’s raining. John and I are both sick and won’t be driving to Oyster Bay to share a feast with our friends, one that will extend into the small hours so that the New Year will be be properly greeted with sparklers and champagne. Instead, we’ll be long asleep by midnight. People are making lists of what they’ve read over the past year, or what they’ve published, or, or, or. I don’t separate things. Reading, writing, sewing, cooking, gardening, time with my family and friends, swimming my slow kilometer and a third, listening to Bach or Emmylou Harris, taking the Canada Line out to the airport on the first leg of a journey, waiting for the first salmonberry blossoms, feeding the Steller’s jay in the morning, correcting proofs, taking a bottle of Prosecco to the beach for happy hour with my daughter on a trip to the Pacific Rim, trying to scrub the stains out of tablecloths, picking tomatoes: it all seems part of a scrappy patchwork that is my life. I’m grateful for all of it, even the uneven stitches, the courses of squares that won’t align properly, the stars that often need to be picked out and begun again (measure twice, cut once), and when I look back, squinting a little to focus on the smallest scrap, I’m pretty happy with the year, though it had its share of challenges, losses, frustrations, and sadness.

needle
beginning a diagonal patchwork, for Angelica

 

on the line
a dark path, cobbled from scraps and buttons
happy hour2
looking towards Lennard Light, glasses in hand
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you will find “A Dark Path” in here
autumn postcard
door to the workshop
beginning
spirals stitched into indigo-dyed linen
ivankivtsi church2
the church in Ivankivtsi where my grandfather was christened
rosebud river
bridge over the Rosebud River, with Brendan’s family, enroute to Wayne
breakfast
my morning breakfast companion
under the bridge
the meeting of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, locus of my novella The Weight of the Heart
eddy and grandad
the oldest and the youngest, at Trail Bay
so much depends on dinner
my beautiful family

“…the harmonic scales of a fenceline…”

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jocko creek horses
“The foal was still damp from her mother’s tongue. I put my hand out and her soft nostrils rested briefly on my palm. Then she returned to sucking. Her eyes, when she paused to look at me, were deep pools. They had only known daylight for a few hours and I thought of her still curled up in her mother’s body while I’d slept the night before; she was curled up with her brother who didn’t even taste his mother’s milk. I thought of them asleep in their watery darkness while I swam in the river, wanting to let go of life to join my own lost brother. Touching the filly’s spine as her tail flickered, I was surprised to find myself wiping away tears.“

Last night we arrived home from a few days in Ottawa, celebrating Christmas with our family there. I made stone soup with one little boy, read “The Wheels on the Bus” many times to the other. We ate large meals, we walked (slowly, because of Grandad’s hips) to the park, and we slept in a room completely filled with books. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…) This morning I reviewed copy-edits of my novella The Weight of the Heart, due out in spring from Palimpsest Press. When I began to write this novella, the two small boys didn’t yet exist. Yet as I looked at the text this morning, I imagined them into the landscape their dad loved so well. One day we will go there with them and show them everything we love about the dry country in the interior of B.C.

at pavilion
“So we were taking that same route, but backwards; we were driving up Pavilion Mountain rather than down and we were heading north to Kelly Lake, then east to Clinton. But my body felt the road’s contours, the rich feathery growth of the pines, the tickle of those soft grasses. I could relate these things to a map but I didn’t use the map to see how to get from one place to another. I used it as a literary text of its own.”

Reading again of the main character Izzy as she searches for the places at the heart of The Double Hook, Swamp Angel, and Hetty Dorval, and as she tries to understand the final days of her brother’s life before he drowned in the Thompson River, I felt myself to be there, in autumn, among the sumac and dried rabbitbrush, the air pungent with sage, weathered wood and lyrical pines at every turn in the road. Writing a book is one thing. Editing it is another. This stage of fine-tuning the language is a gift on the last days of the old year.

above the fraser
“I wanted them to know that I’d found the contours of their language in hills, above rivers, in the shadowy reeds of a lake, the harmonic scales of a fenceline; I wanted them to know they have written books so beautiful that they’ve entered my body, have shaped the way I see the land.“

“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

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This morning, offered the option of reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas in Latin or English, John chose English. And how the years collapse, telescoped into the long continuum of Christmases past, decades of them, and I listen for the old familiar rhymes. Later, the little boys and I will make stone soup, using a beautiful green stone from Trail Bay beach, our coast to Vanier.

Saturnalia

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rose hips2

It’s dark and cold here on the edge of the Pacific coast, the light almost completely gone, though after today, we can expect it to return again, slowly, slowly. Our house is warmed by a wood fire and there’s an extra quilt on the bed for the long night. This afternoon, I noticed the little moments of colour—hips from the dog rose around my second storey window, the first tiny blooms of winter jasmine. When I went to feed the birds this morning, the chickadees were so eager (and hungry!) that one paused on my wrist as I tipped seed into their feeder. The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia this time of year, from December 17 – 23, feasting, singing, lighting fires, and gifting each other with candles to signify the return of the light. Are we any different?

Solstice

We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun!

— Elizabeth Arnold

A late note, an hour after the Solstice: John called upstairs to say there was a small bird, a golden-crowned kinglet, fluttering at the window. Was it trying to get in the house? Was it confused? Who could say. I was reading upstairs and then I turned out my light. About ten minutes later, I heard fluttering at the curtained window by my bed. Looking out, I was eye to eye with the kinglet. Small bright eyes, black lines on either side of its splendid golden crown. Was it the spirit of one we’ve loved and lost, asking us to remember? A tiny life in the dark night, a tiny king in a wild country, on the darkest night of the year.

redux: “neatly chiseled”

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Note: 5 years ago, and I’m still thinking about novellas (I was up in the night, working on The Occasions, my novella-in-progress); I still keep Swamp Angel on my desk. (A year ago I had the pleasure of talking to Michael Enright on CBC’s Sunday Edition about Ethel Wilson’s book.)

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I’ve been rereading my favourite novellas lately, trying to fix in my mind what it is that makes the form so attractive. (Someone, somewhere, wrote that a novella is a bit like a recit in opera but I’d argue against that, I think. Some of them are full of arias, lyrical and serving exactly the same function as, say, an aria in a Handel opera: to balance and contrast the narrative work of the recit.) This afternoon I was reading Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel and came to this beautiful passage:

The sound of the cranes’ silver music approaching in all that silence would take her at once out of a cabin with her broom, and into the open, to look up, to listen, and when they had passed over, to recapture the sight and the silver sound which moved on over other lakes and hills. She would walk up the long overgrown trail to the far end of the lake and, in the evening, approach softly, and stand, waiting to see the heads and backs of beaver in the water, leaving their lodge and returning again. She would hear the gunshot sound of the beaver’s tail upon the water as, startled, he dived. She would examine the stumps of the birches, neatly chiseled to clean points by the sharp teeth…

Swamp Angel is set mostly on Three Loon Lake which I believe is a fictional stand-in for Lac Le Jeune, near Kamloops. We often take the Lac Le Jeune Road when we’re in that area, an old route leading past the Jocko Creek Ranch and past small lakes and the larger Lac Le Jeune. Years ago I camped there with Forrest while on a research trip on the Thompson Plateau and we watched a wood duck hen lead her ducklings down from their nest hole in a tree by the marshy end of the lake. And south of Lac Le Jeune, near Nicola Lake, I once heard the sandhill cranes before I saw them, their singing like creaking wooden wheels across the sky. But what I loved about this passage of Swamp Angel is the bit about the beavers. In a marsh on our route from home to the mailboxes, there’s a small marsh where we hear red-winged blackbirds every spring and occasionally ducks in the more watery areas. But there are two alders on the edge of the marsh and a beaver has been chiseling them for the past week. Every day we say, “It won’t be long now!” and today I asked John to take a photograph when he went alone for the mail. (I was busy getting things ready for a birthday party for him tomorrow!) The photographs are blurry because it’s raining and because, well, it was nearly sunset (just before 4). But it won’t be long!

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“What you have heard…”/”The inventory of echoes…”

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There are two books on my bedside table, one of them read a month ago, and one of them my current reading as I close the curtains and prop myself up with 3 pillows after dark. What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché, remembers the arrival of the relative of a friend, at her door in California, and his compelling invitation to join him in El Salvador in 1978. Forché, whose poetry I began to read in the mid-1970s, accepted the invitation and becomes educated in the workings of death squads and political upheaval. When she arrives in El Salvador, the place she stays was once the home former dictator, General Maximiliano Hernández Martinez, president of the country from 1931-1944. “Your bed belonged to the man responsible for those thirty thousand dead. Or eighty thousand, depending on your source.”

The second book, the one I’m currently reading, is a novel, Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. A mother, a father, and two children leave their home in New York City set out on a road trip across America in summer, the father to pursue a project on Apacheria and the mother to try to locate children detained at the border. Both parents have been involved with a team of people recording “the keynotes and the soundmarks that were emblematic of the city: subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministers preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange.” Their job specifically was “surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak.” In a way, the trip they embark on continues this work. The couple, nameless in the novel, as their children are nameless also, carry their recording equipment but gradually begin to use it in ways that shadow the unravelling of their relationship, the singularity of each evolving purpose. The husband is obsessed with the Apache leader and medicine man Geronimo and uses his boom to try to catch sounds that might remind us what has been lost. An inventory of echoes. The woman collects sounds, images, and stories that she hopes might become an elegy for children lost in the terrible struggles of those heading north from countries terrorized by militias, death squads, the work of their own governments. The back of the family car holds banking boxes, each a particular archive. And the two children, the boy (10) and the girl (5), listen to stories and songs and develop their own personal versions of what they hear.

When I was reading What You Have Heard is True, I realized that the book provides a profound background to the current border crisis. Forché’s account is clear and deliberate. The title comes from “The Colonel”, a poem in The Country Between Us.

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread…

…The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said.

It is not only El Salvador’s violent history that she shines a light on but her own country’s complicity in the terror.

Lost Children Archive is so intricately structured that I keep stopping and asking myself how a particular element fits into the larger schemata. How birdsong, country music, and the voices of the children in the backseat are part of the inventory of echoes. How the boy who has received a Polaroid camera for his 10th birthday is learning to record the lines of children filing onto a plane to be flown back to an unsafe country, how he is also learning what happens when an accepted social contract dissolves.

Both books speak to terror, to violent political action, and to people who do what they are able to do to bear witness, to record in whatever ways possible the lives and losses, and they remind us that an individual might not be able to do much but to do nothing is far worse. Something like 70,000 children were held in detention at the American border over the past year, a record number. Most of them arrived from Central American countries. Separated from their parents, at risk for every kind of abuse imaginable (and unimaginable), they deserve more from all of us, as part of the human family.

redux: winter work

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Two years ago, I was quilting indigo spirals. Today? A kite quilt for grandson Henry. Winter work continues…

winter work

It’s cold out and the fire is warm, the coffee dark and strong. I’m thinking about the past year, how it was filled with strange medical adventures, a few wonderful road trips (Waterton Lakes before the fire with its hills covered in arrow-leaved balsamroot, bluebirds on the fence-posts, bighorn sheep watching us eat breakfast at the Prince of Wales Hotel), time with friends and family. Oh, and a book, Euclid’s Orchard. I suspect I may have posted this passage before but I’m doing this exact thing today and everything that has ever happened seems to happen again. Or at least that’s what I want to believe.

Inside I am stitching a spiral into the layers of the orchard I have pieced together, a snail shell curled into itself. That’s what I’ll see when I’ve finished. I begin the spiral at its very heart, keeping my course as even as I can as it opens out and widens. Not the complicated pathways of the sunflower, some turning left, some right, so that an optimal number of seeds are packed in uniformly, or Romanesco broccoli, its arcs within radii resulting in something so intricately beautiful I wonder how anyone could cut into it to eat it. On windowsills, pinecones. The plump Ponderosas, brought home from the Nicola Valley, and a few long Monticolas. They’re dry, open, but at the base, where their stalk connected them to their trees, two spirals are still visible, like a relaxed embrace, lovers asleep. My spirals are simple, my hands sewing to follow a path from its knotted source, around and around, until I’ve learned that my pleasure comes from the journey itself, a needle leading me outward, towards completion. A quilt elegant and sturdy, a sequence emptied of its numbers.

— from Euclid’s Orchard, Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017

P.S. I have some copies of Euclid’s Orchard if you are interested in purchasing one. 22.95 and a few dollars for postage.

redux: “…we may quite literally become ocean.”

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From this day in 2014:

Composer John Luther Adams has intrigued me for years.  In Listen to This, my favourite music writer Alex Ross describes The Place Where You Go To Listen,  a sound and light installation created by Adams in the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska: “…a kind of infinite musical work controlled by natural events occurring in real time. The title refers to Naalagiagvik, a place on the coast of the Arctic Ocean where, according to legend, a spiritually attuned Inupiaq woman went to hear the voices of unseen birds, whales, and unseen things around her. In keeping with that idea, the mechanism of The Place translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into a luminous field of electronic sound.”

As I write this, I’m listening to Become Ocean, the John Luther Adams orchestral composition commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, first performed in June 2013; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2014. The composer noted, “Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.” What I’m hearing are the most ravishing harmonies, like wind, water, the swoosh of whales feeding. Dark chords ascend and everything is in them. A song of the universe in a time of crisis, it’s music for our time and I can’t help but think if enough of us listened to it, it might also serve as a call to us to fully address the huge issue of anthropogenic climate change.

Earlier this afternoon we walked over to Haskins Creek to see if the coho had entered this small swift stream from Sakinaw Lake where they’ve been waiting for some time now. And yes, there were fish undulating in the water, a dipper feeding on insects (and maybe eggs) near the creek’s mouth, and the low wintry light spangling everything dull gold. Everywhere huge trees, dense ferns, eagles on their way to feed on the spawned-out carcasses and then distribute them over the ground. The marine-originating isotope Nitrogen 15 is found in the big trees of our coastal rain forests as well as in the hair of bears, wolves, and other animals that feed upon salmon and distribute their remains on land. (I eat salmon weekly and imagine I have my own stores of marine nitrogen too!)

It’s the final movement now, the tidal crescendo of what Alex Ross suggests might “be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history”, and it makes me want to weep — for the beauty of our waters, the salmon cycle, the humpback whale and her calf we saw feeding in Davis Bay earlier this year, and the falling of the sun over the western horizon I am watching from my south-western window as I listen and write. Sometimes music takes us so utterly by the heart and the soul into mystery that we are unwilling to come back to a room, a chair, a wooden desk. In contemplating this beautiful piece of music, I am entirely willing to become ocean.

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“Everything I am remembering is burnished with moonshine…”

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I am preparing some gift boxes to mail to the children I won’t see this Christmas. What goes into them: small gifts, boxes of buttercrunch (to be made this afternoon), gingerbread (made this morning),

gingerbread

some homemade items, and this year, rushnyk from Ukraine. Rushnyk cloth is used for rituals and ceremonies; when we arrived somewhere, we would be met with a tray of tiny glasses of horilka, or moonshine, a little bowl of salt, and a loaf of bread wrapped in the most beautiful cloth embroidered with symbolic elements I learned to decode, or at least some of them. They speak a language I sometimes understand. A little. In churches they draped the ikons. They were also a means for women to communicate. They hold wishes, dreams, history, and the cycles that bind us to each other and our homes: fertility, childbirth, harvest, marriage, death, the afterlife.

rusknyk

Sometimes I can’t believe we were actually able to travel to Ukraine and I’ve dreamed of the moment when my relatives came in the door of our hotel, presenting us with champagne and a beautiful rushnyk I’ll use to wrap bread the next time my family is here. Somehow these threads become more important to me as I age and as the occasions for my family to gather become more complicated. The final essay in the collection I’ve mostly finished is about Ukraine—what I hoped to find there and what I did find.

Everything I am remembering is burnished with moonshine, the taste of cherry-filled varenyky, sweet butter on dark bread. Mornings I swam in an unheated pool, the bottom littered with drowned insects, while all around me mist rose from the valley below our mountain slope. The mountains above me, source of the Dniester, Tisza and Vistula Rivers, the upper streams of the Black Cheremosh and the White, the Prut. I thought of those mountains forming a long spine to the Beskids in the Czech Republic, where my grandmother was born, 2 years after my grandfather, though they didn’t meet until 1919, in the badlands of Alberta, she a widow, and him? I have no idea of his romantic history, though in his small archive of papers there are two photographs, one of two women, taken in Chernivtsi, one of whom resembles him enough to be a sister, and another of a woman with a generous mouth, dressed in a fur vest like the Hutsul women wore. Everything I am remembering, burnished with light too faint to read by, like the moonlight that came through my curtains at Sokilske, haunting the room like old history.

–from “Museum of the Multiple Village”, part of Blue Portugal.

“when sorrows come”

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hellebore

The hellebores are blooming by the front door. Sometimes on a grey day that’s all it takes to boost the spirits. Sometimes a little sleep would help too. For the past few nights I’ve had difficulty sleeping—last night I got up at midnight to spend a few hours at my desk and then went back to bed. I was still awake at 5. I feel as though I’m underwater, moving slowly, asking for everything to be repeated. But to be honest? I love to be up in the very small hours of the morning, just after midnight, when the house is so quiet you could hear a mouse. And sometimes it is a mouse, one brought in by Winter, scurrying around and trying to find a safe place. Last week a mouse huddled under a wooden box and I used a feather duster to brush it into a rubber boot. When I let it go on the upper deck, it raced to the grape vine and disappeared down its woody trunk, as though it knew exactly how to navigate the sides of our house. But no mouse last night. Utter quiet. I was trying to puzzle through some family connections and had a file folder, an actual paper one, on my desk. Just as we were leaving for Ukraine in September, in fact sitting in the ferry lineup at Langdale enroute to the airport, an email arrived on my tablet from the young woman who is my aunt Ann’s great-granddaughter. (Hello Amanda, if you’re reading this!) We share some relations but not all. Her great-grandmother was my father’s half-sister. My grandmother was Amanda’s great-great-grandmother. But Amanda is on the same quest as I am, finding out how people fit in our vast family tree and she’s been very helpful in locating documents. What arrived in September were some death certificates as well as a marriage certificate. And they weren’t what I expected. The story I’d always been told was that my grandmother’s 9th child, the last one born to her and her first husband, died of diphtheria, just 7 months after my grandmother’s husband died of Spanish flu. I’ve known that story and a few years ago I learned another sad part of it: my grandmother’s brother, who’d come to Drumheller just a month after she arrived in 1913, and whom my father never knew anything about and who isn’t remembered in the village he and my grandmother came from in what’s now the Czech Republic, died within days of my grandmother’s first husband. I learn from the forms sent by Amanda that my grandmother’s brother died in her home, a bare shack in a squatters’ community in Drumheller, and that he died of Spanish flu, yes, but also of blood poisoning. And that the baby, 10 months old at the time of her death, died not of diphtheria but of malnutrition and whooping cough. Malnutrition. I was shocked to read that but maybe I shouldn’t have been. A woman with 9 children, one an infant, loses her husband and her brother within a couple of days of one another, without much English, with no means of support, in a shack in a small town ravaged by a flu epidemic—how difficult it must have been to simply go on, let alone produce milk to keep an infant alive and strong. In later years, my grandmother had a cow but not then. So that infant died in May of 1919 and less than a year later, my grandmother re-married. Her new husband was the man who became my grandfather. They had a child in 1921, her 10th child, his first, and almost exactly 3 years later, that child died too. My father told me his sister had died of diphtheria but on the death certificate, the cause of death is “Septic tonsillitis”. Two years later, my father was born.

In the night when I was puzzling through these details, making a little drawing to figure out the time-frame of each event, I thought how sorrow must have been the abiding atmosphere in my grandmother’s house during those years. One death after another, two of them the frayed threads that connected her to the home she’d left in the Beskydy Mountains, the young husband she’d married in her early 20s and her brother, who lived in a dwelling dug into a bank of the Red Deer River, the third a thread of hope, a small life to care for and to survive for. Or maybe she simply couldn’t care for the baby, couldn’t rise from her bed, couldn’t nurse it. There were 8 other children in the shack. Probably not much food. I thought of Claudius, in Hamlet: Oh Gertrude, Gertrude, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

Hellebores have their roots deep in folklore and the one growing by my front door is a Christmas rose, its name alluding to an old legend in which a young girl who had nothing to give to the Christ child wept; her tears fell onto snow and hellebores sprouted from them. They are lovely, yes, but also toxic.