“Would a bird build its nest…” (Gaston Bachelard)

Yesterday I swam in the lake, my first real lake swim of the year. I’ve gone in just for a quick dip several times and I did the same in Bute Inlet a few weeks ago, completely alive in its glacial water, but yesterday was my first sustained swim in water other than the pool where I try to go 5 mornings a week. When we drove down to the little beach area, the temperature was 8 degrees. The light in the maples on the trail was beautiful. The water was a little warmer than 8 but not much. Still, it felt good to walk into the lake and push out into its green depths. I could hear a loon but couldn’t see one. Last year, on May 31, a merganser swam along the edge of the shore with 17 new babies, all of them darting around in the shallow water, one after another, the mother carrying one on her back. Maybe it was just that morning that the merganser had led her young ones out of their nest in a tree cavity near the shore, down, down, one at a time, and into the water. But the only bird I saw yesterday was a raven circling high and croaking, maybe also hopeful for baby mergansers.

When we came back from the swim, it was warmer. We had coffee on our upper deck, among the flowering daylilies. I love the early yellow ones best, their colour and sweetness welcome in May. Bees entered their long throats as we talked. We talked about Granada, where we spent a few days in mid-March. I surprised myself by saying, I wish we’d never come home. A few things have happened in recent weeks that have required that I reassess the legacy of our years here, with our children, and after; a home is a shelter, a nest, a place of nourishment, or it should be. You think that and then you discover you have been wrong. Or have you? How do we know? I wish we’d never come home, I said, because my home no longer feels the same.

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

A nest in a tree, lined with grasses, wood shavings, the downy feathers plucked from her own breast. In this house that we built, digging holes for the footings, mixing concrete in a deep red wheelbarrow, framing walls and window openings, making stairs, hanging doors, there is such quiet. Sometimes the cat waits outside my study door for his breakfast. Sometimes a raven comes for the mice the cat leaves by the sunroom door, a shadow of wings falling across my window. What is confidence in the world, I wonder. In the meantime, the yellow daylilies invite the bees, dog roses by the bedroom are beginning to open. It will have to be enough. For now.

Note: The quoted passage is from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.