Month: July 2020

It’s the last day of their visit. We count tree frogs—5 or 6 in the area out our front door, on leaves, on ivy, huddled under the petals of a Casablanca lily. There was no spawn in the old bathtub turned into a pool but we’ve decided there must be a depression under the house where these ones grew this summer. (There are some damp areas and perhaps water collected over the winter.)

This is a good place to be a child. I keep overhearing my son talking to his older son and I am taken back nearly 40 years to similar conversations. Conversations arising from books read (including Charlotte’s Web), songs sung. An hour ago:

A: Look, Daddy, a beautiful spider web! But there’s no writing.
F: Maybe that spider can’t write.
A: Maybe it just doesn’t have a creature to save. It can write but it doesn’t need to.

I heard them down in the bush, looking for a good cedar for A. to climb while his little brother naps. But as our climate changes, many of the younger cedars near the house are dying. The big ones are healthy and established but there are no low limbs for a boy to swing on. Still, I heard them talking, anticipating a walk to Francis Point and hopefully (if the tide is right) a last plunge in the sea before we have supper at the local pub. A small bowl has been set on a low table for the frogs, a few stones arranged in it for basking, and water carefully poured in by a boy kneeling on the table, his body so like his father’s at that age that I have to turn away. Tiny frogs climb the ivy leaves and we hope they’ll find their water.

Nothing can be inferred
from the forecasts

Tree frogs
are ignoring their ladders

—from W.G. Sebald’s “Barometer Reading”

Where do the years go? Somewhere beautiful and green, scented with cedar drying in summer heat, spangled with sunlight.

 

…some of us are working on our books. I’m taking advantage of my historian-son to improve the endnote citations for my essay collection. (Having simply kept endnotes of materials used with little notes to self saying, “Fix this later”, I now need to make sure the citations are correct.) A., who is 4, is making a book of all the creatures he has seen on his two-week visit to us. The orca, first a single animal, then a mother and calf, then a pod, was yesterday, in Powell River, when we went for a beach trip. He also saw seals (that page is in progress as I type), otters, a blue heron, starfish, and assorted giant insects at Gibsons Beach, north of Wildwood. Luckily his father found a field guide to seashells at the second book store so the bucket of shells he collected there can be identified with some accuracy because he is a details boy. I am looking forward to the hares, the northern alligator lizard, the tree frog, and oh, particularly the young bobcat that sprang from the woods and ran in front of the car as a group headed down the driveway to the lake.

I woke an hour ago and thought about the past week, how full the days have been. Every morning we swim, as we have since late May, and most mornings the little boys come down with their dad to play in the sand as we plunge into the deep water green with sunlight. We sit on the upper deck among the sweet peas and tomato plants while the boys play on the grass below. We make the meals I love to set out on the table under the vines, the ones I thought about this past winter and spring when our life was reduced to the house, the garden, the two of us talking and reading by the fire. On a walk yesterday (because now it’s nearly 3 a.m.) we found chanterelles on the edge of the path and brought them home in my hat for Grandad to have with an egg for breakfast tomorrow, which is now today. The boys were watching for the barred owl they’d seen the previous day, swooping from one tree to another by the trail to Sakinaw Lake. It’s no wonder they saw an owl. The woods are full of them these late July nights. Maybe it’s what woke me an hour ago. Maybe it was starlight. Or the realization that there was still a glass with a little wine out on the table under the vines and that I didn’t want the bear who’s been around to find it. That’s the last thing we need.

The table looked strange without us, expectant—the bowl of sweet peas, the empty wine bottle (Desert Hills 2013 Mirage, perfect with the prime rib and little roasted fingerling potatoes Eddy helped me dig in the afternoon), two of the faux Murano glasses left out with the napkins, one of them with a few mouthfuls of wine, undrinkable now because of flies. I sat for a few minutes, listening. What did I hope to hear? All winter and spring I thought of my family, my immediate one and also the one I came from, those long dead and stretching back in time so far I can’t keep track. I got up on those winter nights too and sat in the dark, listening to coyotes. I knew there was a message in their calling, the female keeping track of her mate as he hunted our woods, their own offspring grown and spread out in the world, another generation familiar with the winter sky, the sunrises over Mount Hallowell, the long weeks of rain.

Sometimes it’s so quiet I can hear myself think. I can hear the shimmer of ideas forming as I sit at the empty table, the beginning of an essay tugging at my mind, hazy with starlight and lack of sleep. Write this down, I am saying to myself. Write it down in all its detail—the no-see-ums stinging your bare shoulders, that rustle below the deck, the empty glass and the other one, with its wine and flies, its millefiore lovely under the single light you’ve turned on in the night, the scent of sweet peas unexpected as you brush crumbs from the table, the little huddle of moths around the lamp.

The kitchen was fragrant with dill and scallions. We were making varenyky, based on recipes from Olia Hercules’s wonderful Mamushka, but adapted to what we had available to us. We had dry curd cheese and cream cheese, potatoes, thick-cut bacon, and frozen sweet dark cherries. We had savoy cabbage to braise for a side dish, and beets with their tops. Manon and I stuffed the dough and pinched the triangles closed, 8 cookie sheets of them, and those rested for a few hours on top of the freezer while the beets were roasted for salad, and the cabbage cut into thin slivers with apples and shallots. John set the table outside, under the grapes and wisteria, and there were bottles of Bricker cider, Prosecco chilled in the cooler, and a gooseberry galette for dessert.

I grew up with aunts and a grandmother who made delicious pedaha–what we called pierogi. My grandmother made fresh cheese to stuff them with and she also used sweet golden plums for a dessert version. We ate this food when we visited Edmonton in summer. I remember lying in grass and hearing the women make the pedaha together in the kitchen, windows open for any breeze that might find its way into the hot room. In my kitchen with Manon, with the sound of the little boys making a mural of our patio with sidewalk chalk, I knew what the women must have felt in those days: a sense of familial history. They were doing what they’d been taught to do, anticipating appetites and the prospect of long meals on summer evenings with far-flung family returned for a visit.

In Ukraine last September, I kept seeing versions of families that might have been my own. I even met some members of the family that stayed in Ivankivtsi. And I knew that those who were eating under vines as we passed their farm on our way to our hotel above Kosiv were remembered by others living elsewhere.  We could be them. We are sometimes the couple with the apple basket, sometimes the children asking to return. Sometimes we are all together at a table and the food we eat is the food I dreamed about as a child, dreamed of its creation. Driving from B.C. to Edmonton, I could already smell the dill and the sharp onions being sliced in the capable hands of the women.

At each farm, someone is picking apples, by ladder, by filling a bucket with windfalls. A man, a woman with a child, a couple, with a basket between them. Stooks stand in the fields. Horses graze, dogs sleep as though dead in the dry grass. There are pumpkins still in the gardens, heaps of watermelons, horseradish leaves lush by the houses. At the farm where we turn to climb the road to Sokilske, an old table is balanced under a pear tree and a family is seated around it. The man raises his glass. A horse lifts its head as our wheels spin briefly, gaining traction for the steep rise. We can almost smell the Cheremosh River. And listen—there are chickadees in the sunflowers. Chickens scatter at the side of the road.

–from “Museum of the Multitude Village”, an essay from an unpublished collection.

There have been kingfishers at the lake when we go down for our morning swim. They fly from low branch to low branch. I suspect we’ve interrupted their breakfast. This morning, in grey air, a single crayfish claw on a rock.

From her roost the water hen stretched out
her purple-green sleek neck,
the kingfisher’s quick glance
shook droplets from his crown,
and I thought love would always be
that brilliant on the wing and wild.

–Ibykos, 6th c. BCE, trans. Brooks Haxton

…around 2 p.m. and the curator, age 4, led us in the front door, past the archaeopteryx cast on the side of the house (our own welcome sign)

to the main display. Earlier I’d been asked to be the copyist, making little notes of information dictated to me to accompany the curator’s drawings of his favourite objects in our house. His father found a box of things from his own childhood and so a few fossils from that were included.

Some bones from windowsills, teeth from the elk skull in the garden (a sort of presiding spirit, in the nature of a scare crow), a couple jaws from my desk

and an antler (also from my desk). The curator was willing to have his photograph taken.

The museum will close shortly and the curator will go with his little brother for a swim.

 

Last night we had our first grand meal since February. Some members of our family are here for a summer visit and we are doing the things we love to do: swims in Ruby Lake, watching children play on the grass as the sun moves from east to west, and eating dinners under the vines on the deck. Nothing much changes, though everyone is older, there’s one new person to get to know and love. Yesterday Forrest prepared smoked pork ribs and cauliflower on the barbeque (using the apple prunings I’d saved for just this sort of occasion) and I cooked prawns, made a watermelon and feta salad with mint brought decades ago from John’s grandmother’s garden in England. There was Wild Goose Pinot Gris on ice in the silver bowl Angelica gave us a few years ago. There were also mosquitoes and early wasps but it didn’t really matter. We do this whenever we can and it’s as predictable as the sun’s passage. I’m reminded that I wrote about our summer dinners in Mother Tongue Publishing’s The Summer Book:

And now it’s time, the sun-dial showing itself beneath a tangle of green leaves smelling of lemon and loud with bees, the yellow-faced, orange-rumped, Sitka, and western. The table is set; time to come up from the lake. Old songs play on the stereo, the ones we’ve sung all these years in summer. You can’t hurry love. Come along, your bodies cool, duck-itchy, the baby fat turned to muscle, your own children in your arms as you scatter damp towels and hang bathing suits on the railings. Friends are bringing food from their cars, even the ones who’ve died and are remembered on birthdays or the anniversary of a wake. Here they are, with their dishes of tomatoes, prawns, skewers of chicken, the familiar brownies dusted with icing sugar. They are standing on the patio where the young robins are learning to fly, where the lizards cross from woodshed to stones in the blink of an eye. I’ve waited forever to welcome them here. The table is set, beautiful platters with barbecued salmon, chunks of lamb stuffed with garlic and rosemary, warm bread, little potatoes drawn from their earthy nest and roasted in olive oil, that salad gathered in early morning. Bowls of raspberries wait, picked from the canes that have only just been planted, cream whipped to soft peaks. I’ve gathered enough chairs for everyone to sit, taken the summer plates out of their box, painted with figs and dark grapes. The fig tree a seedling, the grapes sending out first tendrils. Wind-chimes are making music of the air and the Supremes sing. There are babies and children and the very old. Time to open the cold wine, fill the glasses all polished and shining. Nighthawks swoop for mosquitoes, quick as sparks in the falling light. The loons are mourning the end of the day.

You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait,

You got to trust, give it time.

No matter how long it takes.

It’s still too early in the course of the pandemic to invite our friends but expanding our pod of two to include some family means everything to me after an isolated winter and spring. It did take a long time but last night it was as though nothing bad had every happened.

It was after midnight and I woke up, hearing owls. I think the young barred owls are out in the world now, guided through the darkness by their parents. I heard a tentative call, then a loud firm one. Back and forth. I came down to my desk to see if I might be able to finish the essay I began just at the beginning of the pandemic that has changed our world and our lives. The other day I wrote about how I laid out the draft of what I had written thus far, to see the pattern, to adjust the sequence, to try to figure out where the gaps were and how to fill them. Yesterday as I swam I knew that I had the last five or six pages mixed up. The material was there but it didn’t work as I’d arranged those passages. I swam in the water lit by morning sun and it was as though I was alight too. I swam and I thought and when I came out and wrapped a towel around myself, I knew how to fix some of the troublesome areas. I worked on it on and off yesterday while I tidied and readied rooms for some of my family arriving later in the week. But something was still not quite right. This essay is truly an attempt, a weighing, a nod to the proto-Indo-European root of the Latin exigere “drive out; require, exact; examine, try, test,”, anyway, the root ag, which means “to drive, draw out or forth, move”. I examined, that’s for sure. Old documents, photographs, death certificates, cemetery records. And I needed to find a form for what I was examining, drawing out, moving forth. I have three kinds of sections: those following my progress in figuring out some historical information about my grandparents, in particular my grandmother’s experience of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, those are justified to the left margins of the page. They are also geographically set on the south bank of the Red Deer River. The passages that detail some groundwork I did with my husband to find evidence of the homestead on the north bank of the river where my grandmother moved after the pandemic (or maybe even during) are justified to the right margins of the page; and the hinged doors of the essay, the openings and closings, are centered on the page. My hope is for a sinuous movement between the pages, not just a little trick to make reading difficult. So maybe I should think of this as a compostion rather than an essay?

Late 14c., composicioun, “action of combining,” also “manner in which a thing is composed,” from Old French composicion (13c., Modern French composition) “composition, make-up, literary work, agreement, settlement,” and directly from Latin compositionem (nominative compositio) “a putting together, connecting, arranging,” noun of action from past participle stem of componere “to put together, to collect a whole from several parts,” from com “with, together” + ponere “to place” (past participle positus).

–from Etymonline

I like that. I’m reminding of the small device in our printshop John uses to set type: the composing stick. Or musical composition, combining elements and phrases and parts of music to make something whole. Or, or, or.

In the night I realized how to rearrange the last few pages and by 2:30 a.m. I was finished. I went back to bed with such gratitude. To have been able to work most days on writing that helped me to understand how people survived hardship and loss, my people, gave me perspective on the daily news of infection rates and spread. Sometimes the world tilts. It does. There are terrible results, ones you can’t stop thinking about. So you think about them and write them down, passage by passage, finding your way through the night as owls do, calling out, listening. It’s a kind of music, composed of scraps and yearning. It’s 8000 words that I couldn’t have imagined in early March, laid out, margin to margin, river bank to river bank, a little door opening into the dark.