- Listening: the house so quiet, just the fire snapping, listening, listening, the winter wren in the woodshed when I went out earlier for logs, the song so sweet in the cold morning, and now Iris Dement’s beautiful recording of Anna Akhmatova’s poems:
You led me into the trackless woods,
My falling stars, my dark endeavour
2. Sipping: on my desk, a mug of dark French roast coffee, an endless pleasure.
3. Reading: the other night I finished Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, a collection of stories set mostly in Massachusetts, each one leading so naturally to the next, as music leads you through its structure, and I thought, this book could be a film, and then I discovered that the title story (so original and heartstoppingly beautiful) is indeed about to be a film, in post-production now as I write.
4. Thinking: oh thinking, thinking about how years pass without us noticing, how we–or at least how I–have so many regrets and no time to dream back, to lie on blue cloth on summer grass, to begin again.
5. Remembering: I have been remembering the nights in the tent, a new baby wrapped in blankets between us, talking about the work ahead, sorting a sling of north species studs, framing the walls of what would be our kitchen, our living room, the rooms where our lives would unfold, remembering how one night we heard a cougar screaming and how our English sheepdog X, Friday, tried to dig her way under the tent.
6. Wishing: I wish we could do it all again.
7. Eating: last night, the best simple supper: eggs scrambled with smoked steelhead, buttermilk biscuits hot from the oven with butter, a salad of radish sprouts, tomatoes, fresh basil. A glass of wine.
8. Finishing: I have pieced together an abstract bar graph quilt, using strips of various pink solids and prints, to be backed with soft pink flannel with an organic cotton batting inside.
9. Watching: the light return, the days growing a little longer each week.
10. Wearing: blue, blue, blue. Linen, cotton, warm scarves, the most beautiful gift socks sent to me by a friend who knit them in a lighthouse off the coast of Vancouver Island. (Thank you, Lolly!)
11. Loving: the light, the warmth of the fire, the white frost over the moss I see from my window, the song Iris Dement is singing this very minute.
Oh, how good the snapping and the crackle
Of the frost that daily grows more keen!
Laden with its dazzling icy roses,
The white-flaming bush is forced to lean.
Hoping: that somehow the world will survive.
Enjoying: the prospect of flying to Oaxaca next week.
Appreciating: how the light returns after a particularly dark time, little by little (see 9), and how clear the stars and planets are on the cold nights. We are stardust, maybe 97%, and this is our moment.
...Theresa Kishkan 