Under the green roof, a hummingbird hovering in the cactus orchids, the urgency of a Swainson’s thrush, again, again, again, and the scent of rosemary. It is almost too hot to drink coffee. Almost.
2.
It is not the summer you expected. The lilies are sun-burned, the bees are lying low. But when you see 8 of them in the hypericum, busy at the long stamens with the pollen grains quivering under their wings, you cut a bouquet and place the flowers at the base of the tomato plants, hoping your trick will work.
3.
While you were swimming, swallows were stitching sky to water, water to sky. Two kingfishers further along the shore, swooping out, a flash of blue grey, like water, like sky. And what was that, a bird skimming the surface of the lake, dark until it turned, and you saw the brilliant shoulder patches of a red-winged blackbird. On your way home, 6 vultures in the tree above the lagoon where eagles usually watch for ducklings. Who has died on a summer morning, who is left?
4.
Yesterday you were putting gifts in a box to mail next week for a 7th birthday and then the celebrant herself on your phone screen, proudly showing her certificate for Citizen of the Year.
It is a very unsettling time to be human. To be trees, to be weeds, to be vast areas of the western North American continent currently on fire. To be a reader of documents detailing atrocity. We are in the middle of a heat wave here on the Pacific west coast. Yesterday I closed the door of my greenhouse at 8:30 (leaving the roof vent open) and it was 44. Outside, 32 in the shade. We swim in the mornings and that’s a blessing but the idea of a late dip is unthinkable because the place where we swim, where we’ve gone for more than 40 years, is packed with people. The man who rakes the sand and takes away the garbage said this morning that he was taking away 200 cans from yesterday. Those are the ones left, mostly in the bins but some on the beach. Many people take their cans and other stuff away with them. I was awake for a lot of the night, hearing boats on the lakes, traffic on the highway at 2:30 a.m., and even gunshot around 5.
On my desktop, a copy of Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, Volume 4 of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It’s overwhelming in both its detail and its clarity. The statistical information is shattering. One example: the percentage of enrolment from 1891-1909 who died at two institutions, Old Sun’s Boarding School and Peigan Anglican School: 47.4 and 49.2 respectively. I was thinking about that in the night, listening to the noise of summer, and wondering how our country can ever reconcile goodness with this terrible legacy.
The other morning when we drove out, I saw a sign on the bottom of our driveway, put there by the Ministry of Transportation and Highways, to alert people to herbicide spraying along the gravel shoulders. The target? Orange hawkweed. It’s a pretty wildflower, introduced to North America somehow, called fox-and-cubs in Europe where it’s a native plant. We’ve lived here for 40 years and it’s always been part of the roadside flora. I notice these plants and I notice their pollinators — bees, butterflies, etc. I contacted the Ministry of Transportation to register my objection and had the usual round of back and forth, some of it on Twitter, and it’s like talking to logs. Glyphosate, I said? Really? It’s implicated in so many cancers, significantly non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and blood-related cancers. That’s for humans. What about songbirds, what about butterflies, what about the snakes who lie in the sunny gravel on summer mornings? Oh we have to control it, was the response. A species that can take people to space and back, can decode the human genome, develop safe vaccines within a year for a deadly virus, compose symphonies, is still committed to toxic herbicides on our public highways. I think of Inversnaid, written in 1881 by Gerard Manley Hopkins after a visit to the poem’s namesake village on the shores of Loch Lomond.
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
I’m looking out now to sun on a cascara and arbutus and blue sky without a cloud in it. A chicken is roasting, dusted with herbes de Provence, and some new potatoes in a separate pan, for salad. Yesterday I made the mistake of waiting until late afternoon to begin preparations for dinner: chiles rellenos, for which the peppers had to be broiled and skinned, filled with chorizo and cheese, battered and baked with sauce from the freezer. By the time they were ready, I was too hot to be hungry. Tonight dinner will come from the fridge.
John was awake in the night too and at one point I said to him, “I’m scared.” Not of the dark, not because of the relative isolation of our house where gunshot is unexpected to say the least, but of the future. Mine, his, the planet’s. We’ve talked about climate change for decades now and as New Mexico, Idaho, Arizona, and California burn, as the rivers and lakes dry up, as we face the consequences of our species’ ability to grow at an unsustainable rate, to consume, to refuse to adjust our expectations, I don’t look forward to what the future brings or takes away. What would the world be? I wonder if it’s too late to imagine.
It’s been years since I’ve gone for a swim in moonlight but last night should have been the night. If I’d gone, if I’d gathered towels, put on my bathing suit, or not, I’d have walked under these trees to the shore of the lake. And looking up, this is where the moon would have shown its fullness, crossing the great sky in the early days of summer.
2.
Waking last night, looking out to the Strawberry Moon, I remembered the years when John taught in North Vancouver in May and June, and I’d read until the small hours in bed on my own. I remembered the books I read, Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg, The Age of Innocence, Tillie Olsen’s Silences, I remembered listening to loons, to owls, and I remembered the night when the news was full of stabbings and murders and how I took a carving knife up to bed, handy on the next pillow, and how when I woke next morning, looking for my keys to drive children to preschool, I discovered they were still in the door.
3.
Watching a family of five loons cross the lake this morning, hearing them warble and cry, then not seeing them and realizing they all dived at the same moment, as one, watching the sun through the trees where I imagined moonlight, I thought of time passing, how it was only last week (was it?) that the loons were small enough to ride their mother’s back, that we were all here, swimming between the wild spirea and ninebark, that everything changes, disappears in one form to return in another, and I thought of this poem, by Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield:
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
It was not actually raining when we went down for our swim this morning but there was fine mist. The air wasn’t warm though the water, not yet at its summer temperature, felt the same as it’s felt since we first started swimming three weeks ago. Once I’m fully submerged, I forget it’s chilly and do my strokes beyond the ropes delineating the beach area. I’m out of bounds but not really too far out in the lake beyond the shore.
I’ve been thinking about liminal space lately. Maybe we all are. Liminal, from the Latin root limen, meaning threshhold. From my anthropology courses in the last century, I remember that it was a term used for the middle part of a rite of passage, when you have left one stage to transition to another, which you have not quite attained. It’s a space of uncertainty. As we negotiate the new routes and pathways that might allow us to travel safely in our daily lives, so much of what we have known and done is left behind. Or our relationship to our old lives and lifeways has shifted. In the night I lie awake, wondering if I’m prepared for the future, do I have the right guides, have I paid attention to the signs, do I know the dangers and can I meet them with courage and with love? I don’t know yet. The footing feels uncertain, the boundaries unclear.
I recently read Hua Hsu’s profile of Maxine Hong Kingston in the New Yorker and I was struck at several points by Kingston’s apprehension of ghost lives, the ones that are sort of adjacent to our own. As part of a delegation of writers visiting southern China in the 1980s, she travelled with Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko:
One day, they were on a boat going down the Li River, and Morrison saw a young woman doing laundry along the shore. Morrison waved to her and said, “Goodbye, Maxine.” She gets it, Kingston thought. If immigration hadn’t brought her to the U.S., “that could have been me,” she said. “Were you my possible other life?”
When I was in Ukraine last September with my husband and daughter, we were at a celebration in the Carpathian Mountains where we feasted, sang, laughed, and danced. My daughter leaned to me at the table at one point and said, “That woman looks so much like you.” I looked and did she? I think she did. I recognized myself in her. After a prolonged and lively dance, I sought her out and with the help of another woman who spoke some English I told her what my daughter had said. We touched each other’s face and held each other’s hands. My sister, she said, laughing. So much of that trip was me looking at houses high up mountain slopes or else beyond the fields by the road as we drove to my grandfather’s village, not imagining myself into them, but occupying that space in a way that I can’t explain. I was not the woman in the van but out of my body, up in the soft grass, looking down, a faraway look in my eyes.
In “The River Door”, the long essay I am just finishing, I realize how this sense I have of being between lives has influenced the way I am structuring the piece. There are three strands of narrative. One of them I’ve justified to the left margin of the page. Another to the right. But there’s also one that hovers between the two perspectives—I could call them early and late, or historical and contrived, imagined, or now and then—and I’ve centered those passages. They’re brief, lyrical, and when I think about them now, I realize they’re thresholds. Step forward, step back, stand for a moment in the space between what you know and what you don’t, the living and the dead (because it’s an essay in part about the Spanish flu), the past and the present.
“They need help desperately at Drumheller,” she said. “The flu seems to have taken a particularly virulent form among the miners. They even believe it’s the Black Death of Medieval Europe all over again. There’s no hospital but the town council has taken over the new school to house the sick.”
Where were they living when the flu arrived? I see them, mid-river, a wagon of their belongings, paused. Paused between homes, between what they’d known and what was to come, the moment a hinge on the river door.
When I read the profile of Maxine Hong Kingston, I kept thinking, Yes, this is so familiar. Leslie Marmon Silko remembered visiting an old storytellers’ hall in southern China and how she realized that Kingston’s work is “storytelling at its highest level, where webs of narrative conjure the ghosts that stand up and reveal all.” I need this kind of storytelling now, to guide me through this liminal space where I no longer feel safe earth under my feet. I am waving goodbye to the woman in the Carpathian Mountains, telling myself hello.
For some reason I’ve never known what day of the week I was born. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. But I’ve been thinking about Mother Goose rhymes lately, maybe because somewhere, not immediately known (one of the hazards of living in a house with teetering bookshelves in every room), I have an edition of the Annotated Mother Goose, given to me as a school prize in grade 12, for my “work in English Literature”. Not my writing (though I did have a poem published in an anthology that year) but because I somehow found the subject that called to me and let me excel that year. I remember writing a term paper on Paradise Lost and loving the process of textual analysis. Who knew?
Anyway, I always loved this rhyme.
Monday’s bairn is fair of face, Tuesday’s bairn is full of grace, Wednesday’s bairn is full of woe, Thursday’s bairn has far to go, Friday’s bairn is loving and giving, Saturday’s bairn works hard for its living; But the bairn that is born on the Sabbath day Is bonny, and blithe, and good and gay.
I suspected I wasn’t a Monday bairn. And definitely not a Tuesday either. By googling my birthdate, I discovered I was born on a Thursday, the bairn who has far to go. What does that mean? A little sleuthing leads me to sites that suggest Thursday’s child will accomplish something significant in life. I sort of remember reading Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child when I was around 10. Because I took ballet lessons that year, I was given her Ballet Shoes as a gift and even though I never became a dancer (reserved for Tuesday’s children?), I loved reading about children who did. I’ll never forget waking early one morning to the rich scent of leather and finding a pair of supple pink ballet shoes on my pillow, put there by my mum to make a difficult situation easier. (It had to do with catching a skin disease from my seatmate in grade 5, a boy who was repeatedly sent home to bathe. The treatment for the disease necessitated me standing naked in the family bathtub while my mother used a paintbrush to apply the medication to my entire skin surface.) Thursday’s Child was about a foundling who became a member of a travelling theatre troupe after running away from a bleak orphanage.
My sons were born on Mondays, my daughter on a Friday (the 13th). Speaking as a mother, I do think my sons are fair of face, as is their sister, and yes, the Friday child is loving. I’m relieved they weren’t born on Wednesday. I see just now that my husband was also born on a Friday and yup, he fits the profile.
Yesterday I was deadheading roses on the upper deck and I saw a whole little cluster of ladybugs. I think they were eating aphids which is just what we want. And is there a bug more dear, more pretty? The red backs, the polka dots? I said the little rhyme I remembered from Mother Goose,
Ladybird, ladybird, Fly away home, Your house is on fire And your children all gone; All except one And that’s little Ann, And she has crept under The warming pan.
They didn’t budge but continued to huddle together on the leaves of the Lark Ascending, on the leaves of the American Pillar later when I looked. I was born on a Thursday, I have far to go, all the way to Gibsons later this morning, and I hope the ladybugs will keep my house safe from fire, safe from sorrow, and all the children who’ve gone away will come again.
Somehow it seemed like a good idea. The day was a little misty but it wasn’t raining late afternoon and I read in the local paper that Joe Stanton was back at the Backeddy Pub in Egmont. On March 14, 2020, we went to there for supper, to hear Joe, and realized driving home that it was probably the last time we’d eat a meal out until, well, when? Until now. (There was actually a dinner out, on a deck, last summer, when our infection numbers were low. But then we were isolating ourselves before John’s fall surgery, and after, and by then it had become habit.) Driving the Egmont Road felt kind of exciting. You can see in the photograph John took that the tables are well-spaced and there’s always a breeze off Jervis Inlet where the mountains on the other side were wreathed in cloud. But as Joe sang the opening bars of “Here Comes the Sun”, it had the desired effect!
Here comes the sun do, do, do Here comes the sun And I say it’s all right
The sun came out, not wildly bright, but lovely, and the Lake Breeze Pinot Blanc was cold and delicious. I had the excellent steelhead tacos. John ordered the pork belly. And when we saw Nancy and Ian Mackay at a table around the corner, we invited them to join us. “Had your shot?” “First one. Second one in a few weeks.” We weren’t six feet apart but no one hugged or shook hands. We talked for ages—our children all went to the Pender Harbour schools together and Ian and I served on a health board together for years; he was also my go-to person when I had a commercial fishing question. But the years pass and we almost never see them any more. So how nice it was to sit near the water, sharing news—grandchildren, the upcoming halibut season, dogs. And while we talked, Joe sang the old sweet songs. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell (“A Case of You”, one of my favourites ever), Leonard Cohen.
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here
Coming home I forget to stop to photograph the white waterlilies on North Lake. Now it’s 3:24 and I can’t sleep, filled with hope that maybe life is not returning to normal exactly but that it’s taking a new form that just might be lovely. Sea breezes, fish tacos, conversation with old friends, and the sun coming out at exactly the right moment. One pundit on the CBC the other day cautioned against too much optimism, saying that the Delta variant poses a whole lot of questions, and we should all be very careful because we might just be about to step on a rake. I’ll probably feel that way tomorrow, wait, later today, but for now, in a dark house with the prospect of sun in the morning, listening to Joe’s own song, “Light Rain with a Dark Roast“, I’m happy enough. For now.
Fresh roses, some honeysuckle, a cup of very strong coffee, and a croissant warm from the oven, with the rose petal jelly I made earlier in the week, and the air still cool, though as I was finishing, the sun was just coming over the mountain.
2.
A yellow-throat is singing just beyond the deck, a black-headed grosbeak farther away.
3.
As I ate the last mouthful of croissant, a single loon called from Sakinaw Lake, a long sad song, and I folded the linen napkin bought 20 years ago at a second-hand store in Hedley.
Yesterday John took this photograph at the lake while I was still swimming (imagine me off to the left). The weather these days is very unsettled but if it’s not actually stormy in the morning, we head down for a swim, because who knows what the rest of the day will allow. Who knows.
This morning we swam in very light rain. A family of loons was crossing the lake in the distance. At one point, after John was finished and I was still swimming, he tried to call to me because the loons had taken flight and landed just under the cedar you can see at the right of the photograph. I didn’t hear him because I was doing the backstroke and probably the reason I didn’t see the loons then was because I also had my eyes closed. I was thinking as I pushed myself backwards from the right of the photograph to the left. Thinking about Lviv, a city I’ve spent a few days in, and which has somehow become a locus in what I’m currently writing. I’m not calling it a novel, not yet; but I suspect that’s what it will be. Somehow a handful of pages, a few thousand words, characters who aren’t really themselves yet, and a lot of riddles to solve, well, it doesn’t deserve to be called a novel just yet. But Lviv is real, beautiful, and the character who lives there will convince the other character to come.
Which station for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase, when express trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September or in March.
Lviv–in Polish, Lwów, in German, Lemberg, in Russian, Lvov–has seen a lot of history in its 8 centuries. I’m reading as much as I can. We stayed in the historic centre when we were there and so much of what we saw spoke to that history. We stayed on Serbska Street, we explored the Armenian Cathedral, begun in 1363, we saw many plaques commemorating Jewish synagogues including the Golden Rose Synagogue built in the late 16th century and destroyed by the Nazis, and other significant buildings destroyed or repurposed for grain storage during the Soviet period. I’m surprised to recognize that my new writing is finding a place for itself in Lviv but maybe I shouldn’t be. I felt that particular shimmer as I walked through Lviv, the same shimmer I felt in the Nicola Valley when I realized I needed to write about it, in Walhachin, in Ireland, in Prague. It’s as though a curtain parts and I see a glimpse of something, a kind of light, that I need to understand. Writing helps me to do that.
So while the loons were flying over to where I was swimming and a little bit of light was catching the cedars, I didn’t see a thing because my eyes were closed and I was thinking about Lviv. I was peering through the iron gate into the courtyard of the Armenian Cathedral, waiting to hear the bells.
and now in a hurry just pack, always, each day, and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all it exists, quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere.
Note: the lines of poetry are from Adam Zagajewski’s wonderful “To Go To Lvov”, translated by Renata Gorczynski.
The other day, during a run of damp weather, I read a note online by the poet Marita Dachsel in which she said she was making rose petal jelly. What an idea. I’ve made many jellies over the years, sweet and savoury, and sometimes added lavender to them–I remember the rosemary jelly with lavender as being delicious with roast lamb; and a little lavender added to blackberries, for jam, is lovely. But rose petals caught my imagination. A damp day, too wet to work outside, and my writing stalled for a couple of reasons: why not gather petals and make some jelly?
Abraham Darby, Munstead Wood, Lady of Shalott, the Lark Ascending, the unnamed moss roses given me decades ago by Mrs Tyner who came to the Coast in the 1940s with her husband Jim, from New Westminster, in an open boat, towing their worldly possessions behind them in a canoe, Madame Alfred Carriere, an anonymous apricot climber that is going crazy beside the garden gate. Picking them with bare feet meant that I came in damp too but oh, the scent, particularly those moss roses, a sport of Rosa x centifolia, first noted in floras in 1720.
Run away with me, won’t you? Run away with me, won’t you? Run away with me, won’t you? It don’t matter where we go.
While I was cutting the roses, I was singing. In the wild and tangled place that is my garden right now, after almost two weeks of rain, I was singing Oh Susannah’s “Tangled and Wild” and in those moments, I did feel like running away. It’s been a stressful time, with the possibility of a telecommunications tower looming (literally) on our horizon (though it seems that the company is stepping back from this location), and I was thinking as I sang that I didn’t want anything to change. The project, if it goes ahead, will “necessitate” 60 trees being taken out across the highway. Old maples the elk lie under on winter mornings, the big Douglas firs, some cedars.
We could live in the mountains Or we could live on the plains Or in a place far too beautiful Too beautiful to name
We live in the shadow of a mountain range and yes, some days it is truly too beautiful to name. Like the roses, the ones I brought into the house in my arms, pulling off petals until I had enough for jelly. I briefly heated them with water, let them infuse, strained them, added sugar, the juice and zest of a Meyer lemon from my own little tree, and brought the mixture to a boil. I added some liquid pectin and after a minute, I took the pot off the heat. It made six jars of jelly, the whole kitchen luscious with the fragrance. It took a couple of days for the jelly to set, a soft set, but I am already thinking of how delicious it will be in the little crevices of a warm croissant. I am thinking of it between plain cake layers with whipped cream. I labelled it this morning and now it will wait in the pantry for the right occasion. Run away with me, won’t you? It don’t matter where we go.
Or a place far too beautiful to name, a garden so wild and tangled that walking in it is like walking in heaven. Abraham Darby, Munstead Wood, Lady of Shalott, the Lark Ascending, the unnamed moss roses given me decades ago by Mrs Tyner. Madame Alfred Carrière, as soft and pink as a baby’s shoulders, an anonymous apricot climber that is going crazy beside the garden gate.
Note: I’m reposting this from January 3, 2021. We’ve been swimming in the lake most mornings for nearly 3 weeks now, ever since the pool closed in late May. And those swims have been in cool water but when we’d come out, the sand was warm and we’d come home to drink coffee in sunlight on our deck. The last week has been chilly, drizzly with rain. It’s felt to me like the lake felt in January, though I’m able to swim for longer than I did then! This morning, maybe half a km. After a few strokes, I can’t really feel my hands and feet but I have enough body fat that I’m buoyant! I am very grateful for the water though. Grateful for the joy I feel when I am in it, moving my arms forward, kicking, under the grey sky.
____________________
Four years ago I began to swim regularly at the local pool. In the autumn of 2016 I had some health issues. After being diagnosed in early September of that year with double pneumonia, my doctor wasn’t happy with the xrays and ordered a CAT scan. The scan showed a pulmonary embolism but also some nodes that resulted in a series of tests and consultations and eventually a PET scan because it was suspected I had metastatic lung cancer. Long story short: I didn’t. What did I have? No one knew. I eventually saw a hematologist and he too was a little puzzled. But again, long story short: I’m fine. During the period of uncertainty I think John was more anxious that I was. I was in a state of transparency, or at least that’s how I think of it. I kept being visited by the dead. I felt them around me, their hands on my shoulders, and although it was unsettling at first, it became very comforting. I’d come downstairs in the night to work at my desk and I knew I wasn’t alone. Meanwhile John would be awake upstairs worrying. In November of 2016, I sent him to the pool one morning. Swim, I told him. You need to do something to take you out of yourself for a bit. I wish you’d come too, he’d say, and I was reluctant. Years ago we swam at the pool. Years ago I swam in the lake most summer days with my family. But then things changed. More people were around in both places, I was older, I was less willing to take off my clothes and cavort in a bathing suit. Or not cavort, but you know.
Anyway, we were always walking. Almost every day we’d go up the mountain or around a series of trails in the woods beyond our woods, until we came out on a road, either the one that came down the hill to Sakinaw Lake or else the one that passed the marsh by the creek between Ruby and Sakinaw Lakes, the marsh where we saw kingfishers and turtles and once, in winter, a single swan.
That fall of the mysterious illness, I had trouble walking any distance. My doctor thought it might be an inflammatory response to the pneumonia. My right knee was swollen and it hurt to move too much. But I wasn’t going to swim. Because a bathing suit? Among others?
And then one morning in early January, 2017, I decided I needed to swim. I was drawn to water. I found my old black tank-suit. I joined John at the pool, finding a rhythm to take me up the 20 meters and back again. Back and forth. It wasn’t hard and it felt wonderful. If we went early-ish, there weren’t many people there. A guy who swam laps quite ferociously and who has become a friend (because when someone mentions modernism at the end of your swim, of course you’re going to want to talk to him some more). One or two others whom I knew in other ways years ago and who I know now as morning swimmers.
Because I was so accustomed to my slow kilometer (20 meters x 50 lengths) 3 times a week, I decided to return to the lake again too once the water warmed up in late May. It seemed silly to swim in a pool when I could be in a lake I’ve lived near for 40 years. A lake where we went most summer days when our children were young, where we had a favourite island for boat picnics, where my father fished when he visited us, sometimes bringing back cutthroat trout for a late breakfast. I’d gotten out of the habit of swimming there regularly, in part because the little wild area where we’d always gone had become a more organized park, with sand brought in for a beach, two picnic tables, a toilet, an area kept safe from boats with rope and buoys—and that brought more people, of course. I don’t like change.
Four summers ago I developed a new habit of lake-swimming. John and I went at 8:30, before other people were around. We mostly had the water to ourselves and I could swim the perimeter of the roped-off area for 25 minutes, sometimes watched by a kingfisher or ravens wondering if we’d brought food, sometimes a loon off-shore, swimming in quiet circles, and sometimes in the company of trout who’d jump out of the water for the various generations of flies.
This past year, the lake was a salvation. The pool closed in March when we were officially declared to be in a pandemic. We missed our pool swims. As early as we could bear to enter the cold water, we were going down for a morning swim. As the water warmed up, into June, we were swimming longer. Every morning during the summer. Our Ottawa family came to stay for 2 weeks in July, when air travel was possible (that brief window), and it was lovely to have our grandsons join us most mornings. They went again later in the day too. Angelica and her beau came for a few days from Victoria and one day we all swam at Trail Bay, the day when Angie and Karna were flying home. When we met our Edmonton family at Lac LeJeune in August, we swam in that lake, and in Nicola Lake (twice), and in the Thompson River. My memories of family and summer are sun-spangled, damp with lake water, tangy with salt.
In water I sometimes think I do my best work. I stretch out my arms, I take in the sunlight, the rain, the sound of mergansers muttering over by the logs, the far-off revving of a boat engine, I think about difficulties I am having with writing (I once took apart an essay and put it together in a much better way, all while doing the backstroke), I reconstruct the past so it’s perfectly intact and coherent and present. This is the summer when we put Forrest in a plastic baby bathtub to keep him cool, this is the summer when the wild mint grew around the hardhack, right where the sand now slides into water, the summer of the wasp stings, the summer of Angelica diving over and over until she was perfect, of Brendan wearing his bike cap backwards and hoping to catch a turtle in an old ice-cream bucket. When I am swimming, everything is happening again, and still.
The pool opened in early fall and although it’s different now, you have to book a time and make sure you’re out of the water at the end of your 45 minutes, your mask on as you enter the change room, and leave it, it’s swimming. For John, after a surgery gone sideways, it’s an opportunity to exercise and feel buoyant again. I do my slow kilometer with revisions in mind as I anticipate a new collection of essays tentatively in the works for publication. And I’ve added a twice-weekly winter lake swim to my swimming schedule, a time when I feel completely alive in water both familiar and strange. One morning the ferns on the trail down to the lake were silver with frost and I couldn’t feel my feet as I did a brief few strokes within the roped perimeter.
After that fall and early winter when I waited for specialists to read my xrays and look serious as they traced the nodes with a cursor, when I wore the hospital gowns that never covered enough of me, when I entered the dark space of the machines that made visual the changes in my body, I sometimes forgot who I was. I was a lung with dark mysteries, blood that carried dangerous cargo, legs that longed for mountain trails. I found myself in water, strong and purposeful, swimming the lengths, beyond the rope, ravens vigilant in the cedars, and everything possible again.
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