Month: December 2022

For more than a month, I’ve been burrowed in my study, reading old letters, looking at paintings and sketches, writing about a period in my life–well, several periods, because what went away came back; what I put aside found its way into my daily thinking–which I thought I had figured out. I thought I knew what kind of exchange had been made, what had been given and what was taken. I thought I knew the story. But it turns out I didn’t. Don’t. But am piecing it together like a complicated quilt.

The question I asked myself yesterday was: What do we owe the dead? Do we owe them privacy? Because no one is alone. Everyone has some connection to others. If I write the essay or memoir that I am working on, do I betray old friendships by using names or experiences that lead to names? Because no one is alone.

I thought I knew this story. It was something I referred to fairly often because there’s a visual record, in my house. A visual record which is me. And I had a ready story to go with it. There was some charm in it, some humour–and some scandal. But it turns out it’s much more complicated (a quilt of dark and light fragments, stitched to one another, some of them frayed, some of them durable). It was one thing to read a letter or two and take the words at face value. But it’s another thing, dark and a little harrowing, to read a stack of letters from beginning to end, many of them 15 or 20 pages, densely written, and to see the patterns, the light and the dark, and to follow their trajectories out into the world.

Many of the people who were involved in this story have died. Others are living. Some of them live with a version of the story I’m newly discovering in these letters. I live with a version too. I’d like to say it hasn’t affected my life and in many true and important ways, it hasn’t. But in other ways, I see (reading these letters) how I was shaped by this story.

This is writing I am committed to and will stay with and finish. I wake and I think about it. In the night, last night, awake, I was thinking about it. When I swam my slow kilometre this morning, I was focused on one particular letter. Maybe I hadn’t read it clearly before — and I have to confess when the letters arrived, decades ago, sometimes several a week, I read them quickly and put them away. I was busy. I had a life that was filled with my family, my own work, and although I had affection for the person who wrote the letters, I didn’t have time for the pages of professed love for me, the assurances that I was, well, what I was to him. And was I? It’s complicated. (I was, and I wasn’t.)

Do we owe the dead their privacy? Is it acceptable to write our own version of a story that could simply fade away without ever being examined because…well, why? Because every morning I make eye contact with my younger self and in some ways it’s her that wants me to know what happened. And what did happen? Nothing. Everything.

I am writing about a period in my life. From this great distance, there is affection, beauty, pain, guilt, shame. There. I’ve named them. And maybe writing, taking time to think deeply, to remember, to organize my feelings about the story, and then filing it all away, is all I need to do.

Note: I wrote this 6 years ago, full of the joy of editing Euclid’s Orchard (still available from Mother Tongue Publishing) and I was enroute to Vancouver to have dinner with my son, Brendan. Today I am full of, well, not joy but excitement and a kind of terror as I write something completely out of my comfort zone, and in an hour I’ll head to Vancouver to have dinner with Brendan again. (He’s in Vancouver for a week at a math conference, where I’m certain there will be counting by the vending machines.)

Late Middle English (as a plural noun denoting fragments of uneaten food): from Old Norse skrap scraps; related to skrapa to scrape. The verb dates from the late 19th century. — from Oxford online

Small detached piece of something, fragment, remnant, (pl.) odds and ends, useless remains… — from Concise Oxford 1973-74 (my copy bought for university)

I’m thinking about scraps and fragments and, yes, remnants. I just made a comforter for the crib we’ve recently bought for visiting grandbabies. We have a smaller portable crib which has been fine until now but babies grow and this crib has the added feature of converting to a toddler bed. Grandson Arthur will come for Christmas and I thought I’d use some scraps of quilt batting to make a crib-size comforter. And then I wanted to make a cosy cover for it. I had enough blue striped flannel for one side so I found a remnant of that pink print at the wonderful Dressew on Hastings Street in Vancouver the other day. And sewing, I thought of all the quilts I’d pieced together at the kitchen table, all the remnants and scraps that somehow became something larger than themselves. I don’t like waste. I have baskets and bins of little pieces of fabric and I love to find new functions, new meanings for them.

It’s the same with writing. I’ve been revising the essays that will form a collection called Euclid’s Orchard, to be published next September. One of the essays is called “Tokens” and it is a series of linked meditations about my mother, my attempts to find out about her biological parents (she was given up at birth), and also to find out who she was all the years she was my mother. And in the process of writing about her, she was there in the room — the bottle of My Sin perfume my father brought her as a gift in (I think) 1962, still 3/4 full; her Harris tweed coat nearby, her scent still in the satin lining. Her sayings, always a little off: “Let’s play it by air.” “He was mad as a hatter.” (This, to explain someone’s anger.) “By the same token.” (For anything.)

Winter is a good time for thinking about scraps, fragments. The Ptolemaic scrap of papyrus with three lines from Book 20 of the Odyssey that don’t exist in other versions of the poem. Unfinished music. Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems. The Archimedes palimpsest, which I remembered this morning: years ago I read about the cleaning of a 13th c. prayer book that contained (partly erased but recoverable by delicate conservation practices) two treatises by Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and physicist (and astronomer, inventor…) who lived from around 287 B.C. until around 212. There’s so much still hidden, so much to be discovered, often in fragments, like the lines of the Odyssey, to offer us moments of the world before us.

The other night, John and I had dinner with our son Brendan who was in Vancouver for some math work at UBC — conferring with a research partner and giving a seminar. We asked for news of our grandchildren and I loved hearing how Kelly, who is 2, refers to her Daddy’s work. She calls it “counting by the vending machines.” When she and her mum and brother visit her Dad at his job (mathematics professor at a big Canadian university), they meet up at the vending machines in the lobby. And math? Well, it’s a kind of counting.

Note: this was written two years ago. But it’s music I’d love to listen to this morning.

 

Now, the first of December was covered with snow

When I woke very early, there was still snow on the grass out the bathroom window, still a skimming on the piles of cedar rounds felled last week. Was there a moon? I didn’t see one through the billowing clouds against the mountain. In my warm bed I thought about the stars somewhere above my house, the coyotes in their den, the owls sweeping across the white bluffs. Last week a weasel came into the house, maybe via the cat’s little entrance in a window in the utility room, and instead of the clean tawny of a summer coat, it was turning white. This will be our winter.

The hummingbirds have found the feeder I hung for them two weeks ago. Normally I don’t put out feeders for them because all summer we have flowers and the Rufous, the Anna’s, feed in the fuchsias, the long throats of trumpet flowers, honeysuckle. We often went away in January or February and I didn’t want to encourage the Anna’s, who stay around all year, to rely on a feeder that might be empty for a month or so, maybe in the coldest part of the year. By late February, there are snowdrops and crocus, and the big mahonia and its clotted yellow blooms is a favourite of the hummingbirds. But now there are more Anna’s around and we’re here too so the feeder hangs in our dining area window. Yesterday, when I put warm sugar water out, one of them came immediately to feed, and then sat on the feeder to rest.

There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
Song that they sing of their home in the sky

After our swim this morning, I walked around outside for a few minutes, smelling the incense of fresh-cut cedar rounds in snow. Not much snow but enough to make my feet cold. (Confession: I was wearing flip-flops.)

Coming in, I sat for a few minutes by the fire to warm up. Two quilts to finish, black beans to cook for dinner, the ongoing thinking and writing of what I thought was an essay but now see spiralling into a book-length meditation on desire, agency, and difficult legacy, and other tasks that fill a day (and sometimes hours in the night too). The rounds of cedar will need to be split in place and brought to the woodshed in our old red wheelbarrow. There are winter wrens in the stacked fir, Steller’s jays in the trees near the windows.

Goodnight, you moonlight ladies
Rockabye, sweet baby James
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
Won’t you let me go down in my dreams?

Tonight I’ll look for the moon. First Quarter, Waxing Crescent, best seen in the western sky. Listen. You can hear the snow crunching underfoot, the crackle of the logs in the woodstove, the beautiful cello accompaniment to a song that was part of my teen years. Goodnight, you moonlight ladies. And everyone else too.