polish

I was dusting the sideboard and polishing the oak, wiping grime off the silver candelabra (the one found in a junk store in Falkland) and I thought how I’d been doing the same with my novel, Easthope, all weekend. I’d been arranging shells on a windowsill, laying out bits of wood with lichen on them for the main character who was thinking about colour. I was moving some passages around, the ones that were supposed to link sections, and when I read them again, I realized they hadn’t done their job but that they might do it elsewhere. I thought how crowded the sideboard has become with little plates from Portugal (bottom shelf, left hand side), our faux-Murano wineglasses (bottom shelf, right hand side), the platters from our mothers, the tiny bowls from Granada and Porto, the Moorcroft bowl from Angie, the shelf with objects I sometimes rearrange: (left to right) a basket from Wikwemikong, made of birch bark, sweetgrass, and quills; a pine-needle basket made by Hattie Olsen; a pot made by John Reeve; a pot made by someone on Salt Spring Island; a bentwood cedar box with abalone inset made by Shain Jackson; a little rainpot from Acoma, made by Emil Chino; and a Japanese porcelain bowl. The shells on the shelf in the novel are named too: Lewis’s moonsnail, northern abalone, wide lacuna, purple olive, keyhole limpet, blue-line chiton, horse mussel, silvery topsnail, Pacific littleneck, butter clam, smooth cockle, Carpenter’s false limpet…The lichens too. I am dusting and polishing and finding the right names to use in the right places: dust lichens, pencil script, cladonia scales, peppered moon, lettuce lung, pimpled kidney, freckled pelt, dusky fork moss, broom moss, curly thatch moss.