hanging up my hat

I’m sitting at my desk watching the snow fall. The world out there is soft and clean–and cold. It’s not usual for us to have such cold weather in January. Often there’s snow, yes, but the past week has also been very cold. John rigged up a special system to keep the hummingbird feeder from freezing, because otherwise we were bringing it in every twenty minutes to thaw it out.

This morning we didn’t drive out for a swim because the pool is closed. So are the schools. I don’t know what the highway is like but maybe I’ll walk down later to see. In snow you can see the trails of every other animal we share our woods with. Sometimes a coyote pair will meander up the driveway, their footprints adjacent, then crossing, and you imagine them having the long discussions we have when we walk, one of us moving ahead to make a point. In a month we’ll hear them mating.

We didn’t drive out for a swim. John cleared the stairs and I prepared boeuf bourguignon for the slow cooker. The whole house smells of rich beef stewing in red wine, garlic, onions, and a bouquet of thyme, savoury, and bay leaves cut from frozen plants on the deck. Varied thrushes are searching the ground in the woodshed, hoping for insects. I brushed snow off the chopping block and spread black sunflower seeds for them.

A slightly serendipitous thing happened this Christmas. I was in the shop in Sechelt that showcases local crafts and a man came in with a piece of wood, sweet-smelling cedar (I could tell from the other side of the small store), and handed it to the woman who owns the shop. I just finished it, he told her, and she thanked him, asking him what kind of wood. Cedar, he said, from my own property. When I came up to pay for what I was buying, I saw the piece on the counter: a sanded length of cedar with 3 beach stones fastened to it so it could be used as a rack: for hats, for towels, for coats. I thought it was beautiful. On Christmas morning, I opened one strangely shaped package from John and it was the rack. I hadn’t mentioned it to him but he saw it in the shop and knew I’d love it. And I do. I didn’t know for a bit where I wanted it to be fastened. We don’t need a rack for kitchen towels because we have a nice wrought iron made by the blacksmith on Garden Bay Road, two iron halibut for fastening it to a wall or, in our case, the maple worktable. But one morning, looking for my hat, which I often take off and misplace, I thought, Oh, it should go on the front door for our hats, tuques in winter, straw ones in summer. So now it’s there and every time I open the door to go out, I see it with its runnels from whatever tunnelled through it, probably the western cedar borer.

I’m glad to have a place to hang up my hat, both literally and figuratively. For a host of reasons, I’ve been feeling that my publishing days are probably over. This doesn’t mean I won’t continue to write what I need to write. But the climate–soft snow, cold air–doesn’t feel welcoming any longer. I’m too much of one thing and not enough of any of the others. I’m philosophical about this. To a point. But it feels right. Things might change and if they do, I hope I will be open to what happens. But right now, the prospect of sending out queries, trying new publishers, because none of the ones I’ve published books with has been willing to stay with me (and there’s a lesson of sorts there, I guess, which I’m not sure I understand), well, anyway, that prospect is not one I’m willing to engage right now. My writing life has been interesting in many ways and disappointing in others. I have had wonderful experiences. I have a shelf of my books to remind me that I’ve done some of the work I hoped to do. There’s not much else I wish I’d done with the past 4 1/2 decades, apart from maybe being a little more marketable.

In the south, the grey snowy sky is showing a little bit of pink. Time to sit by the fire with the quilt I’ve just finished piecing together, bright squares of cottons reminding me of French markets and summer afternoons. My hat is hanging on a beach stone by the front door.