Month: August 2021

1.

Two 7 year olds in purple crocs, the heat not yet intense, the dark eggplants reminding me that we will make Greek food in a couple of days, the sound of water as they dipped their scoops and soaked each plant.

2.

He made cocktails, Aperol spritzes that reminded me of walking to dinner across the Campo Santa Margherita in Venice, students holding glasses of it in the cool evening, and the one we called Summer Roses for the pretty colour layered in the beaded glasses. Holding my drink, I remembered boiling the rose petals for the syrup, imagining him in the kitchen, mixing Empress gin and soda, adding some of the syrup, and all of us clinking glasses before going out to the deck to sit under the grapevine.

3.

When she sang “Tecumseh Valley“, I always thought of the road from Bridesville to Rock Creek, not the highway, but the crescent that we drove on a quiet morning, surprising a young bobcat on the shoulder, listening to yellow-headed blackbirds, pausing to take a photograph of the ranch I have dreamed of so many times, and how I played her music on every other road we drove on, and how she will live forever in the beauty of those roads.

The name she gave was Caroline
Daughter of a miner
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
The sunshine walked beside her

1.

Last night after all the children were put to bed, 4 of them tucked under light sheets, some of us went down for a late swim. Two other young women at the lake, their phone set to Dylan, his shaggy voice singing “Don’t think twice, it’s all right” as we entered the cool water. The sunset duck-egg blue and peach, grey, a child’s fingernail of moon on the horizon. We were shoulder-deep in the lake, talking, laughing, darkness pushing away the blue, the peach, though the moon shone like a tiny golden light. Don’t think twice.

2.

Two hours after midnight, John and I quietly went out to the deck off our bedroom to watch for the Perseids. Nothing in the north, though the Milky Way spilled down the sky, Cassiopeia bright on her starry throne. And then, one, two, three, meteors in their splendid last moment, enough to wish on, though we didn’t. And the cat Winter, delighted to find us out in his element, wound himself around our legs. When we came back to bed, John said, I feel sort of sad, and I knew what he meant. I felt it too. The house full of people we love, the brevity of it all, the table laid with the best plates and silver, a chocolate cake, the late swim, the old barbeque wheeled out from the woodshed, children at every turn, young ones and grown ones. Out in the night, stars falling, unseen by us, and the cat wondering where we’d gone.

3.

Colour the little wall maps of the universe you are making. The sapphire colour for the spheres of the world. It would be useful not just to look at it, but to reflect on it in the soul. Deep inside your house you might set up a little room and mark it with these figures and colours. (Ficino, from Three Books on Life

This morning the sky was still overcast when we went down for our swim. Yesterday it rained. Last night there was thunder. We’re promised another heat wave but looking at the slugs on the path on the way down to the water, I wondered if they knew. The surface of the lake was mysterious with mist. But oh, in the distance, the island we call White Pine was shining in a single shaft of sunlight.

I thought of Muriel Blanchet at that moment. A few weeks ago, in the Egmont Museum, I saw the 50th anniversary edition of her The Curve of Time, a book I’ve loved forever. It’s the book I buy and lend and then buy again. The friend I was with, a retired English professor, had never read it so I bought the copy on the shelf and put it into his hands. I think you will enjoy this, I said, and maybe you’ll return it because I don’t think I have a copy in my house right now. It’s one of the books that truly belongs on a coastal bookshelf. The title refers in an oblique way to the philosopher J.W. Dunne’s theory about time’s relativity, about serial time, and dream cognition. In The Curve of Time, Blanchet and her children cruise B.C.’s wild and beautiful coastlines, where time is endlessly cyclical and layered. They are in the moment as far as it’s possible to be and the moment goes on forever. Blanchet’s title was inspired by Dunne and the playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, who thought that time was best represented as a curve. She wrote:

“If you stand off to one side of this curve, your eye wanders from one to the other without any distinction.”

This morning I was about to enter the water when I stopped and thought about the island I was seeing in its sunlit moment. An island we have picnicked on, winter and summer, for more than 30 years. An island I might swim to one day, to meet the family we were when our black dog rode the prow of our little boat like a figurehead, the old fishing basket packed with our supper. Coming up from the water, I will pause for a moment to watch us on our towels on the island’s rise, soft with dry grass, the scent of yarrow in the air, and the white pines strong on their bluff. They haven’t fallen, not yet, not in the storm that took them down 20 years ago, and our fire ring is still at the top of the bluff in their shade.

On a site devoted to visualizations of datasets, I found this lovely definition of time and its curving nature:

Time curves are based on the metaphor of folding a timeline visualization into itself so as to bring similar time points close to each other.

I think of Muriel Blanchet, or Capi as she was known, with her 5 children, on their boat the Caprice in 1926, sailing the coast, caught in the curve of time as it flowed and turned and caught the light, refracting it, holding it, forever and never, and how her narrative is the one I am drawn to now, as a peach and blackberry pie bakes (the ongoing pies of summer, themselves a form of encapsulated time), islands waiting for me, for all of us.

As far as the eye could see, islands, big and little, crowded all round us—each with its wooded slopes rising to a peak covered with wind blown firs; each edged with twisted juniper, scrub-oak and mosses, and each ready to answer immediately to any name we thought the chart might like it to have.”

1.

We’d gone to Egmont for an afternoon outing. At the Thrift Shop–Serve Yourself, Pay by Donation–Forrest found Eric Newby’s The Big Red Train Ride, well read, and a nice edition of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary–a faint breeze moved the clothing on the racks and you could smell the sea. We remembered the events at the Community Hall — the Christmas craft fairs, the seafood suppers, several weddings, a funeral, the dances we called hippie stomps for the wild music. The little boys raced around the old Egmont school field (school long gone but a simple slide, some swings, mowed grass and a soccer net, the tiny basketball court where Brendan once played 3 on 3 at Egmont Daze and was rewarded with hotdogs, a ribbon), one of them climbed the big rock on the right side of the image with such diligence you’d have thought it was Everest, the air was clear, the sky blue. There was a well-pruned apple tree, laden with fruit. A view of mountains on the other side of Jervis Inlet. No one wanted to leave. A woman with a can of beer wandered up from the Government Dock with her children, perhaps 2 and 6, the boy in his blue lifejacket looking around, kicking the grass with a sandaled foot, saying, There’s nothing here. Just swings.

2.

Today in the library, each boy chose a video for the next week. Their dad already brought home an armload of books last week, to supplement the two bookcases of children’s books still here, 25 years later. On our way to check them out, E. excitedly rushed to the shelves of book club sets. Look, huckleberries, he shrieked. And I looked. How likely was it that of all the books in the library, it was my Euclid’s Orchard he’d spot, with its cover image not of huckleberries but crapapples, bright and red on a leafless tree?

3.

Walking up from the lake last evening, I turned to urge E. to catch up with me. He was flushed with the day’s sun, his bucket and shovel dangling from one hand, the other touching the huckleberry bushes as he passed them. And what was that? Singing. A sweet dreamy voice, singing his own bedtime song.

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing
Onward, the sailors cry!
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.

At the pub on Thursday after a swim at Francis Point, I pulled a little Dover book of insect mazes out of my bag for my grandson to work on while we waited for our food. What’s a maze, he wondered, and we told him it was a kind of labyrinth. His dad had already asked if I still had the book of Greek myths he’d enjoyed as a child because he wanted to read to Arthur about the minotaur (a question had been asked…). So we talked a little about mazes and then he took my pen and helped each insect find its destination or prey in the book. By the time we’d finished our meal, he’d finished the book.

The next morning, he wanted to make his own maze. At Francis Point we’d gathered lots of shells to take home for the wind-chime we’re going to make tomorrow. We have driftwood, the shells from the swimming scallops we ate last Sunday (soaked in cleaner after to get rid of the smell!), and I thought we could use some more shells — clam and oyster. They were in my basket. What about the shells, I suggested. And over the next hour, he created his maze. Every time I looked out the window, he was finding his way up and down the paths the shells made on the patio stones.

What is about shells? A maze? You walk and you meet a dead end. (Try explaining that concept to a 5 year old using his pen to help a beetle find water in a little book.) You try again. What you do is not necessarily the thoughtful meditative process provided by a labyrinth. Labyrinth has in its etymological roots the double-headed axe of Minoan culture, symbol of the Mother Goddess. The Cretan labyrinth was built to contain the Minotaur, half man, half bull, the result of King Minos’s wife Pasiphae’s passion for a bull. The Minotaur fed on human flesh and could not be allowed to roam free. The hero Theseus, aided by Ariadne and her gift of red thread, found his way to the heart of the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur.

I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is

I think of the spirals I stitch into my quilts as symbols of the labyrinth. I sew, I think, I attempt what Carl Jung described as a reconciliation between my inner world and the external world. What’s paradoxical is that I begin as a way of dealing with stress, at the centre of the spiral, the heart of the labyrinth, securing my place with a knot and then following the path of the thread outward. It feels intensely meditative to me. In the past 19 months, sewing my spirals has been a curious solace. I wasn’t sure what I hoped for but something, something called.

the rule is, put your right hand out
lay it on the wall, and follow

My grandson stood on the patio, trying one way, then another. Watching him, I was watching myself in the darkness, feeling my way down the stairs in winter, the quilts waiting in their basket for my thread, the red thread, the white, the empty space waiting to be filled.

Note: the lines of poetry are Kenyatta Rogers’, from his poem “Labyrinth:.