“you might catch a glimpse of the future too: driftwood windchimes turning in the air, a garden latch, a woodshed, a tiny dead saw-whet owl on a stack of dry fir.”

This is the earliest spring equinox in 128 years. Yesterday I pruned the greenhouse olives and when I opened the door, the temperature was 24 inside. (Probably 16 outside.) It felt like early May, bees flying by in their purposeful way, the air clean and warm. Inspired by the shapely olive trees in Spain, I tried to give mine a little more form. And because I hate waste, I made 10 cuttings of the pruned branches, dipped them in rooting hormone, and put them into soil. What happens, happens.

While I worked outside, I thought about something I want to make. In London, we went to Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textile Art at the Barbican Centre. I wrote about this briefly the day after and I remember I mentioned that I was inspired to do something I’ve thought about for years but had no visual or actual language for, not the whole experience of it. I was inspired by Tau Lewis’s The Coral Reef Preservation Society for a whole lot of reasons — the upcycling of denim, the embedded objects in the work — but it was really a tiny moment in the piece that has led me into the planning process for a project, half-textile, half-writing.

In the lower middle of this stunning work, just above a clump of coral, you can see the upended pocket from a pair of jeans. Well, the outer part of the pocket has been removed so you can see the contrast between the faded jeans and the brighter inner part of the pocket. When I looked at the textile, which is huge, my eye was immediately drawn to this small portal. I remember tears came to my eyes. But why? It was because I was remembering the months we lived in a blue tent here on the 8.39 acres we’d bought the year before, in 1980. We had the idea we’d build a small cabin where we’d spend time away from the city. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized we wanted to live here. We couldn’t afford to have someone build us a house so we decided to do it ourselves. And on the Easter weekend of 1981, with our two-week old baby and his diapers, his little sweaters and sleepers, a big tin bowl for both salad and bathing the baby, we came to our property and set up our tent on a plywood platform, stretched an orange tarp over it to keep us dry, and began the work of building a house. I’ve written about this in the context of essays and so on. But in the textile work I am planning, I’ll use tents made from old jeans pockets and fill them with emblems of the house-building years, the child-raising years, the years that have gathered themselves into baskets of saved blue fabrics, canning jars, scribbled notes about garden plans and recipes for desserts using the first rhubarb,

the apples from the orchard we lovingly tended and then abandoned (if you are interested in this particular subject, I wrote about it in the title essay of my book, Euclid’s Orchard and Other Essays), the storms, the windchimes, the dogs who barked at the elk and who are buried in the woods, the owls. I’m so excited to begin this. First things first: finding enough old jeans for their pockets and the usable portions of their legs. A trip to the Egmont Thrift Shop is in order.

I’ve had a strange year, re: my so-called literary life. I wrote something I thought was worth publishing and have encountered only silence when I’ve queried publishers. Oh, well, I thought: I guess I’ve aged out. Maybe I have. In a culture where identity is increasingly in the forefront, mine has felt irrelevant. But in Granada last week, John and I gave a presentation of our work to a room of students and faculty and the reception was so gratifying. Afterwards instructors came to tell me they’d like to include my books on course reading lists and one man cried and I realized that my quiet writing has a relevance to those who are willing to listen. And even if it doesn’t, I need to do it. Last night I was up for awhile, thinking about arrangements of pockets, of portals, of tent flaps open and closed, and what you might see if you untie the little strings holding them in place. You might see a sleeping baby in a yellow sleeper with a blue tuque on his soft head, you might see workclothes piled in a corner, a bag of worn cloth diapers, a woman dazed with miracles and worry, and if I can do this properly, you might catch a glimpse of the future too: driftwood windchimes turning in the air, a garden latch, a woodshed, a tiny dead saw-whet owl on a stack of dry fir.