balance

bal·ance

/ˈbaləns/

noun

noun: balance; plural noun: balances

1. 1.

   an even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady.

   “she lost her balance before falling”

Sometimes balance is difficult. Sometimes you don’t think much about it, you go along day by day and you don’t have the sense that you are about to fall. And then you do. Last week, newly back from Edmonton, I was sick. The grandchildren had coughs and I brought one home. It wasn’t that thing we are all fearful of (I know it wasn’t, because I tested a couple of times) but it wasn’t pleasant. Every bone and muscle ached, I had trouble sleeping, my sinuses were swollen. And because I was sick, the world felt very dark. It is dark these days–wars, bombings, homelessness, political drama everywhere you look, a family situation that is not exactly dire but it’s troubling, an editor ghosting me. I huddled under the covers and felt helpless. Hopeless. I wondered about the future. It didn’t seem to include writing, because why bother? Maybe it didn’t include me–us–at all. The world burning, drowning, blowing itself up. I thought of that line in Hamlet:

O Gertrude, Gertrude, When sorrows come, they come not single spies But in battalions.

She lost her balance before falling. But did she fall? Did I? Maybe in a metaphorical way. When I swam, gasping a little because my lungs were congested, I wondered what would happen if I simply didn’t try to float. Because sometimes balance is difficult.

And then, and then. On Monday I was invited to a lunch hosted by a bookclub who’d been reading my books. They’d read Winter Wren last year and some of them went on to read the others. I drove out to the most beautiful house overlooking Agamemnon Channel where members of the club were waiting. I knew a couple of them but others were new to me. The woman whose house it was had decorated a long table with boughs and salal, sea lion vertebrae tucked in like small pieces of ivory sculpture. She said she’d been inspired by the whale vertebrae in Winter Wren. There was sparkling wine and lovely food, all of it inspired by Winter Wren: the beans made by Andy and brought to Grace in one of his pots, newly out of the kiln. A pie decorated with fish and ducks, like the one Grace made for the dance at the Shirley Hall. Smoked salmon, soft cheese with herbs (like the one Andy makes and offers to Grace before they go through the door to his bed). And the most astonishing thing? A tray of cookies, nine of them, painted to look like the view from Grace’s window.

Each frame of the nine-paned window: a different view. What would a composition of nine frames be called? Three, a triptych; two, a diptych. And nine? She thought of Grunewald’s magnificent altarpiece in Colmar, a polyptych, two large paintings and seven smaller ones.

The music was Bach, the light beautiful, and every moment was like a blessing. When I drove home, I could hardly believe the whole few hours had happened.

This week has not been without its sorrows. The woman who owned the bookstore in Sechelt died suddenly, a woman my own age (or just a couple of years younger), a generous supporter of writers and culture on the Coast, the smiling face behind the booktable at the Festival of the Written Arts in August, and every book launch I can remember. How precious a life is, and how ephemeral. A few weeks ago I was talking to her about Christmas ideas and now she’s gone. I’ve known her since about 1987.

2.

a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.

“try to keep a balance between work and relaxation”

How do we know the correct proportions? I’m the same writer this week that I was last week but last week I couldn’t imagine continuing. And then a group of women asked questions, commented, read aloud their favourite passages, and I realized that I’d lost perspective, that this too mattered. Matters.

In Winter Wren, Grace asks an elderly man in care, the man who once owned the house she lives in (the one at the top of this post), if there’s something she can bring him, and he requests the view at dusk. It leads her to some painting, a new way of seeing, and helps her to feel properly located in place, in time. It’s worth remembering: that what we need is often right in front of us.

There was the winter sun tumbling down into the sea, pale gold as it set. The sky a dove grey suffused with rose. There was a boat hidden by waves and sky, so clouded by weather, that the viewer could barely make it out, a boat in a Turner sea. A blunt-tailed wren under Oregon grape, the berries on the plants desiccated, the wren disappearing into earth, it seemed, or a duff riddled with tiny insects. In its beak, something that could be a spider. Between its feet, a forest of fruiting moss, seen as though at close range.