the summer light

Posted on by theresakishkan

galette

No rain in weeks, the grass is dry, huckleberries shrivelled on their stems. The summer light is deceptively lovely. Golden when the sun comes over the mountain in the morning, shimmering as I swim from cedar to cedar in the lake each day, the lilies filled with it as they open one by one. John’s cousin and his wife are with us for a few days, the ones we stayed with in Baja in January. We talk, we eat, yesterday we went to Francis Point where a few of us swam, including Zoey the dog, and Peter kayaked away from us and back. Last night two barred owls called back and forth in the woods. This morning, coyotes yipped, the same ones who greeted the ambulance racing up the Coast on Friday morning with a perfect four-part harmony. All winter we dream of summer. All winter, swimming in the pool, up and down my lane, I dream of my morning swims in the lake, its greeny depths, a loon warbling across the water.

The summer chimes and turns its blue
Dragon-flying eyes to see…
 
This morning, there was a blue dragonfly skimming the water’s surface for mosquitoes as I swam. I wished for a moment for a compound eye. To see in multiple directions at once! To see colours unimagined by me with my aging eyes with their damaged retinas and haze of cataracts!
 
No rain in weeks, huckleberries shrivelled on their stems. We swim, we eat rhubarb and raspberry galette on the deck in the evening, we talk about the past (some shared childhood memories, some suppositions about parents who were siblings, and their parents, and theirs), and the summer light falls over the hump of Texada Island in the west.
 
Note: two lines of poetry from W.S. Graham’s “To Sheila Lanyon, on the Flyleaf of a Book”
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Published by theresakishkan

I'm a writer living in paradise.

2 thoughts on “the summer light”

  1. Sounds like the best of times.
    We watch as the sunset illuminates Texada with its warm glow, not imagining who is watching from the other side. So now, we will watch with a different knowing.

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