After a long hot spell, cooler weather has come. Yesterday and Sunday, brief rain showers. The lake is still warm and somehow my swims are more energizing. This morning, the islands were lit in the most beautiful way, hills behind dark still — the darkest one is part of this peninsula and the green one beyond is Nelson Island, across Agamemnon Channel. Decades ago, we often went to this island–we called it White Pine, for the little grove on its high shoulder. In winter, we’d make a fire in a ring of stones and roast hot dogs or marshmallows, carrying the smoke back in our clothing. In summer, we’d take picnics in the wicker fishing basket an elderly neighbour of John’s mother passed along to us, stressing she wanted it used. It held a lot: calzones I’d make the morning of the picnic, fruit, bags of chips, bottles of cider, tins of San Pellegrino lemonade. I had a bamboo mat I’d spread out on the low slope on the left side of the island, spread it out over dry golden grass, and I’d lie in the sun with a book and cold cider. Or at least this is the way I remember those days. So much now feels as though I imagined it.
Such strange illumination
The Possible’s slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.
How do we know? How do we ever know what happened, truly? Did I imagine the years of my life thus far and am I living a dream? Last night I got up, driven from my bed by a small fierce mosquito. At my desk, I thought of the weeks to come, the years, and the ones already gone. I could hear the cat hunting on the upper deck (he gives a particular yowl when he’s caught a mouse), and I could see the moon, just past full, caught in the firs like a burnished lamp. I sat, and thought, and tried to do some work. But my focus was elsewhere.
In the morning light, the islands are transfigured, the distance between them and the shore foreshortened. I could swim out to sit on the golden grass, alone. Or simply stroke back and forth, from my grove of cedars growing from their nurse log to the other end of the beach where trout are surfacing for insects. Maybe none of it matters.
Last night I went quietly upstairs, not wanting to wake John, but when I reached the bed, he said, There’s moonlight on your pillow.
And there was.
...Theresa Kishkan 