(There’s something to learn.)

It was only last week that the days were hot and we didn’t need a comforter at night, just the top sheet and a light quilt. But this morning it was 10 degrees Celsius when I stepped into the lake. After 20 minutes I was ready to come out but I talked myself into staying a bit longer. You will miss this so much over the winter, I said quietly, as an osprey flew overhead and the summer’s two remaining mergansers approached and then also flew. Soon we’ll hear the geese flying south, the great gabble of their skeins as they pass on our side of the mountain. And as I type, a doe and her fawn are passing my window, the doe golden brown and the fawn grey, with just the shadow of its spots left.

I love the fall but somehow each season carries new and ominous changes. It’s hard to forget the atmospheric river events of the fall of 2021. Or the heat dome of that same year’s summer. Or this summer’s wildfires, many of them still burning. I’ve been worrying about this and it keeps me awake at night, time I’m using to untangle my thinking about it. Our children and their children were here in overlapping groups for the month of August and I want them to thrive, to know the sweetness of a morning swim, the pleasure of reading outside in the shade of a huge cedar, the reliability of sunlight and rain. The reliability of apples, of blackberries ripe and full, of salmon fillets glistening on the grill.

As I swam this morning, I remembered the dream I had last week, the one I woke from and immediately wrote down on a scrap of paper by my bed, the one I wrote into the essay I just completed, or at least completed a first draft for, and am working on now, weaving in strands, snipping loose threads, finding a new colour to highlight the background.

After three days of smoke haze from fires in the Interior, sunsets flaming on the western horizon, I wake from a dream so vivid I try to return to it. There’s something to learn. We are on a road, driven forward by fire. We know it’s behind us and there’s no return. But we also know the road ends at a small hamlet on the ocean where the people aren’t friendly. We drive as far as a hill where we can see it below us, bright houses crowded near the water, and a few kingfishers on the rigging of the boats. There’s a gate across the road where it descends the hill. So we backtrack, then stop at a place where the road turns, turns, a shoulder of soft grass to sit on and wait. I walk along the ditches, filled with wildflowers, watercress, dippings of frogs as they see me coming, their eyes just visible. We could eat this, and this, and this, I say. We won’t go hungry. There’s chicory, dandelion, the peppery cress. But we know what’s behind us, what’s coming. (There’s something to learn.) Sit with me, my husband says. Let’s just be quiet while we can be. At 5 a.m., before my swim, before the sleeping children and their parents wake, I close my eyes again and try to return. Chicory, dandelion, the peppery cress. Out my window, the haze is settling on the house. Cedar trees are losing their fronds.