my days there were numbered

Early yesterday morning, at 2:07, I woke in the Surf Motel and went out in my white cotton nightdress to sit on a chair on the tiny balcony overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I was looking at the lights across the Strait, the lights of Port Angeles and another area west, was it Clallam Bay or Sekiu? I was thinking of the whale we’d seen earlier beyond Holland Point when I heard a voice, maybe my own, or maybe not, saying, “My days there were numbered.” I sat in the dark, no lights in the room behind me, though Ogden Point was bright, and those lights across the Strait were a soft smudge in the bicker of seabirds even that late, that early, and I wondered what the words meant.

The past tense. Past simple? Continuous? Perfect? Perfect continuous? In the darkness, I thought of the otters we’d seen the day before, or was it the day before that? We saw 5 of them swimming near the breakwater and then 3 came ashore, an adult and two juveniles. They rubbed their faces and shoulders against the logs, one of them shat, they played for a bit and then moved cautiously up the bank just below the cafe. Were they the same otters we’d seen on Friday, swimming and just bobbing on the rocks beyond the Surf Motel, the ones that are exposed at low tide?

More than 60 years ago I was a child living in the house in the photograph above. My days there were numbered. I went to grades one and two at Sir James Douglas Elementary, some days walking along May Street to Moss Street, taking care to cross the roads. Some days I walked over Moss Rocks and down a little street to Fairfield Road. That was the route I liked best, scrambling up the rocks under the oaks, stopping on spring days to look at the shooting stars (Dodecatheon meadia) and blue camas, the fawn lilies with their upturned faces. There were days, numbered days, when I rode my bike to Beacon Hill Park, and further, once to Thunderbird Park where Mungo Martin was at work. I remember the curls of cedar falling from his adze or knife. His days were numbered. I would have been 6 or 7, our time in the beloved house nearly over.

In those years, I thought of time as I rode my bike along the quiet lanes in the Ross Bay Cemetery, reading the numbers on the stones. 1799-1887. 1842-1921. The saddest ones were for the children, some of them only alive for a matter of days. The monumental works at the top of our street had a yard filled with stones, blue and white marble, grey and red granite. We were allowed to watch the men working on the inscriptions, carving names and dates, polishing, their overalls heavy with dust.

My days there were numbered. We drove out Old West Saanich Road to Oldfield Road, and along Keating to Brentwood Bay. We passed the churches I’ve always loved, the farms, some of them surrounded by townhouses, shops of curated clothing, pumpkins. Count the days. There were 5 if I count the one I arrived on, the one that saw us driving up Island to catch a ferry home. On the last afternoon, before driving to Estevan village for Thai food, before packing as much as I could so we could get away early, though not as early as 2:07 when I sat on the little balcony looking at the lights of Port Angeles and maybe Clallam Bay, I asked my husband to park by Moss Rocks, just in front of the house where the Guraks lived. I only began the story about the birthday party when I was 6, the one where the Gurak boys’ Hungarian grandmother said, Now we will eat the candles, and I was so frightened by her accent that I began to chew mine obediently, when John said, I know that story, go and collect the acorns. I walked along May Street, crossing the road by the monumental works, and found 16 acorns to plant this week. My days here are numbered. I count all of them, the odd ones, the even ones, the prime ones, the irrational (“All real numbers which can’t be expressed as a fraction whose numerator and denominator are integers, i.e. all real numbers which aren’t rational.”), the complex. I have so much to say about the lights, the tiny lizards skittering across the rocks as I bent to pick up acorns, the poise of the blue herons standing on kelp by the breakwater, how the sky opened and opened and opened over the Strait, and the whale slipped away out of sight beyond Holland Point. But by 3 a.m., it was too cold to sit in the dark, waiting for everything to add up. I left the window open for the sea air when I came back to bed.