Month: March 2025

… it’s a beautiful morning on English Bay.

This morning, at the pool, John said, Soon you’ll be swimming in the lake! Another month? And my heart beat a little more quickly. I’ve been thinking of those lake swims lately, the water like silk over the shoulders, the company of dragonflies, birds, cutthroat trout. Early yesterday I was sorting out some files on my computer and saw an essay I haven’t yet been able to publish. One journal felt it was too long, another “not engaged enough with its subject”, etc. It began as a meditation on the kingfishers I see on many summer mornings and then it gathered a few other things into its basket of meaning. Here’s a section:

10,000 years ago, or 8,000 years, or more, or less, swimmers plunged into a river or a lake in a valley now long become desert. Their bodies arched, as mine arches when I swim each morning in Ruby Lake. Someone painted them onto rock, the joy of their swim beautifully captured, someone who watched them carefully, maybe lovingly. One of them is diving or plunging, another drifts. They are buoyant in red granite, swimming over time in a river no longer in existence. Rainfall patterns changed (it hasn’t rained here significantly for 4 months), people migrated south (California is burning, flooding), vegetation changed due to shifts in solar insolaration, and what was once a verdant swimming hole became a barren desert, what’s now the Egyptian Sahara, near the Libyan border. I am buoyant in green water in a forest where the iconic trees, Western Red Cedars, are dying. (We are dying, Egypt, dying.) The swimmers at Wadi Sura stroke through time to where I am trying to write about the deep joy of my own swim, when I am in the water, looking up the sky, listening to loons, the soft swoop of swallows as they feed on mayflies or mosquitoes, the joy of the swim, and the sadness I feel at the changing climate of our planet.

During his desert explorations in 1933, the Hungarian cartographer László Almásy found the cave of the swimmers, in the company of cartographers. His association with the cave is commemorated in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient. In his own bookⁱ about the Sahara, Almásy proposes a theory of climatic shift in the desert, from temperate to xeric; his ideas were not supported by his editor. And yet. Yet. The swimmers in the cave at Wadi Sura move through time, from the water of their genesis to the sere sandstone of today’s Gilf Kebir plateau, one of the driest places on the planet.

On the mornings when smoke haze softens the distant mountains, deadens the air, makes breathing more difficult, when the temperatures break records day after day so that I am already looking ahead to winter, I think of those swimmers in their beautiful moment, intact on a cave wall, the source of water, a river, a lake, long gone. On the news, water levels historically low in the South Thompson River, Cowichan River, Sooke River, Similkameen, Nicola, Coldwater. July, 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet. I remember driving up a dry roadbed to the McAbee site in what’s one of the driest areas in British Columbia, dry, dry, tiny junipers and sage on the hill, rattlesnakes in the rock mounds, and seeing the evidence of lush forests, deep water, taxa including chordata —Eohiodon rosei, the mooneye fish, eosalmo or fossil trout (related to Eosalmo driftwoodensii, the tiny proto-salmon)–, arthropoda (true flies, earwigs, wasps, bees, mayflies, dragonflies, moths), plantae (ferns, horsetails, rhododendrons, willows, ginkgo, pines and dawn redwoods, oaks and grapevines), and realizing that our time (their time) happens in a blink of an eye, though hurricanes rage, wildfires turn a landscape to smoke and ash, and the earth would be fortunate if we left our only mark in stone.

Note: the images are from the Cave of Swimmers at Wadi Sura. I found them online, unattributed.

Listening: I’m listening for the first Swainson’s thrushes, the ones I hear every spring just to the south of my bedroom window, the ones I’ve only seen once, by chance, on the moss, russet-backed, speckled breast, but their song is a mnemonic for spring, for spring mornings, sometimes entwined with the salmonberry song of the robins, the rougher western tanager, the single long whistle of the varied thrush.

Sipping: the other night at bedtime I asked for a small measure of Islay malt and I sipped it while re-reading Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, a book I remembered for its fascinating portrayal of a marriage, an obsession, a painter-model relationship, a family. And yes, Reader, it was just as good the second time around.

Reading: see above. And also several library books about natural dyes, a couple of long articles on parietal art from the Gravettian culture (still musing about formal study), and too much news.

Thinking: while I’ve been swimming for the past couple of weeks, 5 mornings a week, I’ve been thinking about how the world has become such a chaotic place, beyond how I remember it to be. Is this because of the immediacy of our news sources, the omnipresence of social media, or is it because the norms of behaviour have changed, maybe irrevocably? Political discourse, for example. Our expectations of world leaders, that they behave in a civil manner towards others, that they treat their citizens and their peers with courtesy: is what we see now the new normal? Another example of why I’m glad we don’t live forever. I couldn’t bear it.

Remembering: I wonder if the obverse side of remembering is anticipation because I am looking forward to swimming in the lake again, of leaving my towels on one of the picnic tables, remembering how it feels to be stepping out of my flip-flops, and entering the clear water, pushing out from the green shallows into deep dark water. I want that sense of communion, clouds overhead, or the sun coming up over Mount Hallowell, the loons calling, trout rising for mayflies, dragonflies hovering so close I can see the fretwork of their wings, the long stitches of swallows.

Wishing: that I took some of the paths that veered off the main one that brought me here, to 70, followed them, learned their own topographies, maybe returning, maybe not.

Eating: last night I made a salad we ate several times at Cafe Boulenc, in Oaxaca, using croutons of sourdough bread baked with a drizzle of olive oil, chopped tomatoes, fresh basil (from the greenhouse), thin tangles of red onion, green olives, a handful of arugula, tossed in a bowl with more olive oil and a splash of red wine vinegar. Flaky salt and a few grindings of pepper. We had it with saffron and dried chanterelle risotto.

Finishing: I wish I could say I am finishing the pink and purple quilt I am making for my granddaughter, based on a bar graph she sent to me to let me know what colours she wanted (and Please, she said, no crazy designs), I wish I could say I was nearly finished. But I’m not. Not yet.

Watching: I’ve been watching for salmonberry blossoms as we drive back from the pool and this morning there were so many! I’ve been watching for bears and last week I saw my first one of the season. I’ve been watching for rufous hummingbirds but none yet, or at least not here.

Wearing: baggy jeans, a big red turtleneck I bought at the thrift store about 8 years ago (handknit by someone, not me), Chanel 19.

Loving: the chickadees gathered in the wisteria this morning, calling for seeds.

Hoping: the same old hopes and dreams.

Enjoying: pricking out the tomato seedlings into bigger pots and easing their roots into soil. Planting salad greens in big tubs in the greenhouse to move up to the deck in a few weeks.

Appreciating: the foresight of the person who came out one night about two weeks ago and hung a Canadian flag at the top of the Sakinaw hill and the fact that no one has vandalized it.

Note: this was written five years ago. Do you remember our lives then, as COVID-19 spread around the globe and no one knew quite what to expect?

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Sheltering in place is easier when the sun is shining. We spent the fine days outside, working in the garden, burning the piles of old branches and raked cones, etc. It wasn’t until the evening that I’d feel the spiral of anxiety taking me to its centre. What if, what if, what if.

And now it’s raining. I am working on a memoir with John, or at least I’m writing my part and he’s writing his; later we’ll figure out how to seam them together. There are a number of ways we could do it and we’ll have to decide later what we want to do, how we want the perspectives to work together, to diverge, to return, to echo. But sometimes I feel too distracted to work with ideas and memories. I want to do hand work.

In the meantime, there’s quilting. My friend A. helped me with the text design for my little chapbook made in honour of my 65th birthday. We were doing this back and forth, as she lives in the Netherlands. She was so helpful and so responsive that I asked her what colours she would choose for a textile. This is what she replied:

Colours…are you asking what I think you’re asking? Regardless, I’m a fan of deep reds (not burgundy, but redder, earthier) and what W. refers to as ‘non-colour’ greens. Olive, forest, greens that blend in. Dark blues too. Is that boring?

No, not boring at all. (And yes, I was asking what she thought I was asking.) Not boring, but a challenge. I have a trunk with fabric collected over the years, some of it remnants from other projects and some of it scraps hoarded for the right quilt. For years I made blue and yellow quilts and if I’m honest, those are still the colours I love best. And stars. I made several Variable Star quilts and then decided to do something else. So I made a plan and began to cut and (I’m not joking) the blocks turned into Variable Stars. It was as though my hands were guided in a direction I had no control over.

I’ve been thinking about what kind of design would work best for this quilt of non-colour greens and blues. And that red, not burgundy. I always have lots of blue but did I have the right blue? I hope so. I found a stash of scraps from Maiwa on Granville Island. I’d gone to buy indigo powder for a dyeing project and there was a bin of linen with bags alongside and a sign saying you could fill a bag for $10. A big bag, good quality linen, with several shades of what I’m hoping is non-colour green.

So writing a book about building a house and wondering what kind of quilt to make. Then it came to me. A log-cabin quilt. I’ve made three and I love the process of building the blocks, log-strip by log strip. It’s a pattern that is generally associated with post-Civil War American quilt-making but some textile scholars believe that the inspiration reaches back to the ancient Egyptians. When tombs were opened in the early 19th century, archaeologists were surprised to find mummified animals, companions to the dead, wrapped in intricately woven or pieced strips of linen. There are several ways of arranging the strips in log-cabin quilts so that resulting pattern might be a Barn Raising, Sunshine and Shadows, Courthouse Steps, or Straight Furrows. I made mine into what I think of as Gods Eyes, mostly because my skills are so careless that my blocks never come together nicely.  Here’s a section from a quilt I made 20 years ago for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary; it’s now on my bed.

The red square in the centre of each block represents the hearth at the heart of the cabin, though there are versions with yellow squares for lighted windows, and black squares on quilts used as coded guides on the Underground Railroad. I’m using little scraps of duppioni silk for A’s quilt. More than 40 years ago I attended a quilt show at Kilkenny Castle in Ireland and saw beautiful examples of patchwork made with the most luxurious fabrics. But I lost my heart to the rough log cabin quilts, worked by poor women, made from flour sacks and remnants of work clothing. They were lopsided, with loose stitches and mismatched strips echoing examples their makers had seen in the big houses where they might have taken a chicken to sell or scrubbed floors for a few pence.

You build log by log, strip by strip. In the book you are writing, you remember nailing plywood for subfloors to joists set on beams. When the plywood was nailed down, when the walls were lifted and tied together at the corners, when the rafters were set on the top-plates of the walls, and then the strapping nailed on to the rafters and the shakes nailed on, course by course, when the cedar siding was nailed onto the exterior, you had a house that eventually became a home. One by one I’ll make these blocks, trying to keep the courses straight and true, a way to work my way through these days of rain and isolation. I’ll use earthy red for the sashing and maybe fasten each square with two-eyed shell buttons for vision. Fire at the heart, sturdy walls, from my home to hers.

Second note: and here the quilt is, finished, in my friend’s home in the Netherlands.

On the table, a moon snail, its centre point the anchor of the spiral that turns, turns. The year is turning. In the early hours of yesterday, spring arrived, though later in the day, it rained, the wind raged in our woods, and when we ate lunch at the ocean-front restaurant with our friend, the sky-scape was dark and dramatic. But in the greenhouse, the daffodils bloom, a few purple anemones among them.

(Turn, turn.)

Near the library, a Ribes sanguineum, its drooping flower clusters about to open. Ours will be a few days later. This is the moment when the Rufous hummingbirds return. The overwintering Anna’s, larger, accustomed to this territory, won’t want to share the feeders. A flash of bright pink as the male Anna’s darts in, and soon the cinnamon Rufous males with their bright red throats will challenge them.

(Turn, turn.)

Yesterday, in the shop where I’ve bought clothing for decades, I was trying on a summer dress and had to sit down, cover my eyes with my hands, weeping on the wooden bench. It was Van Morrison, singing “Into the Mystic”:

When that fog horn blows
You know I will be coming home
Yeah, when that fog horn whistle blows
I gotta hear it
I don’t have to fear it

We had been talking about death that morning, my friend and I. She’d shared a dream about a graveyard, in which she told someone she was only reading the past. I understood it. She is losing her sight. Some nights I lie in bed and hear the foghorn somewhere beyond Agamemnon Channel and I wonder what it means. In a dream I would understand. The dress I was trying on was black.

(Turn, turn.)

The years are spirals, taking us into the mystic. My friend talked at length about DNA and I thought of how the molecules form spiral staircases. I thought of water spiralling down a drain. Weather patterns (the storm clouds over Trail Bay as we sat in the warm room watching), galaxies, the spirals already present, in theory, in the sunflower seeds I haven’t yet planted, the stitched patterns in the quilts I have made for 40 years.

(Turn, turn.)

We were born before the wind, he sang in the shop as I smoothed a black dress over my shoulders and wondered.

1. My friend said this length of linen, ecru, wrapped with hemp string, dyed with indigo, reminds her of the inner layer of abalone. Yesterday I took the fabric out of a trunk to look at it and wonder. Wonder, as in: what will I do with 5 meters of linen rippled and marbled as abalone, or water holding the light. I have no idea.

2. Swimming this morning, I thought of the linen, thought of shells, abalone shells, the pores of their outer edges. The one found on a wild beach, the one hanging from a string on the deck.

3. First thing, before the swim, before any kind of thinking, a link arrived for an essay: https://www.thetemzreview.com/kishkan.html Reading it, I am surprised to find string, swimming, a shell, watery light.

On the shelf in my bedroom, the tiny oyster shell I sometimes wear on my ankle in summer, a strand of 3-ply thread holding it in place. The shell and I both long for warm weather, the wild water of the lake I love.

4. What will I do with 5 meters? I wish I could hang the linen from the crown of a Douglas fir and let it flutter in the wind. Maybe curtains. Maybe a summer tent, light coming through the ripples of indigo.

5. In the kitchen, a big jar of shells, tiny lights on copper wire strung through them. Shells from Mexico, Tofino, Oyster Bay, Sechelt. Thick rope to hang the jar from a hook outside.

6. In the small hours I got up to pee and returning to my bed, I saw that moonlight had settled on my pillow, waiting for me. If I’d drawn the curtains before going to sleep, it never would have found me.

In Oaxaca a few weeks ago, we spent a morning at the museum holding the Pre-Columbian (or Pre-Hispanic; I’m not sure which term is more accurate) collection of Rubino Tamayo, a Zapotec painter from Oaxaca. Each gallery was wondrous. I spent a few minutes looking at this deity of death from Veracruz, the hands held as though advising an alert and measured response. I’ve read a little about Mesoamerican attitudes to death, concentrating on the belief that life and death exist as a duality, reflecting cycles of drought and rain, dormancy and growth, darkness and light. In the time we are living, it’s worth remembering that things pass, regeneration is possible, and that some nights when you are unable to sleep, you look out at a full moon holding the earth’s shadow.

In the museum that morning, I remembered a book I’d read more than 30 years ago, Evan Connell’s The Connoisseur, recommended to me by the late Charles Lillard. We’d been talking about objects, how sometimes one will capture your heart and imagination, and when I read The Connoisseur, I understood why he’d thought I’d enjoy it. An insurance executive finds a small Jaina figure–he calls it the Magistrate–in a shop in Taos. He doesn’t know why he’s attracted to it but he buys it for $30, assured by the shop owner that it’s authentic. This object leads to an obsession with Pre-Columbian figures and the reader follows him as he tries to learn more, to justify his obsession, and, well, I won’t give away the ending. I won’t give away the ending because John and I are reading the book now, out loud to each other, by our fire, and some days when we are just having a cup of coffee, one of us will ask, Want to read just a few more pages? And those few turn to more. It’s not a novel of action or even really of plot, unless you call the development of an unexpected obsession to be a plot. I have to say I do. Each encounter between the protagonist and someone he’s consulting about authenticity enthralls me. While I’m reading, or listening to John read, I’m thinking about the figures in Museo Rufino Tamayo, the ones shaped in clay, baked, painted, and how they have their own immortality in cases painted blue or pink or violet.

The other day I was outside and I walked up to the copper beech tree we planted in memory of my parents. Around its base the daffodils I planted with my granddaughter 7 years ago are coming up; some are even in bud. Two layers of family and memory and the anticipation of a third because I want some of my ashes to be strewn around the tree’s base where I sprinkled a little of my parents’ remains.

We were the torch that split the lightning bolt
and the dream our grandparents told.

What remembers us? The tree remembers something of my parents, nourished by ash and bone. The daffodils? Maybe the day K. dug little holes with a trowel and inserted the bulbs root-side down, scraping soil over them with a garden fork. We patted them in place. It was raining. I don’t imagine she remembers that day but I do. I remember my parents sitting outside, talking quietly, as I did chores around them. I remember seeing them long after they’d died, even catching their scent as I climbed the stairs to the upper deck where the chairs they left us were waiting for John and me to stop our work for coffee.

When I looked again out the dark window the other night, the moon had left the earth’s shadow behind. It was deep red in a black sky, something to be remembered by a woman sitting at her desk in the small hours, thinking about dualities, a room of figures behind glass, gazing out, pensive or startled or balancing in place.

Now we are ashes
beneath the kettle of the world.

Note: the lines of poetry are Natalia Toledo’s. I was lucky enough to see her show at the Museo Textil di Oaxaca in February.

Note: this was 4 years ago, beginning the work of making a greenhouse.

I haven’t thought a lot about the word “mythos” lately. Why would I? We are living through a time that we have a word for, “pandemic”, but what it’s doing to our sense of safety, of community, of connection to those we love, well, that will have to be figured out in some meaningful way.

But yesterday and today we were working (slowly) on the greenhouse we are making, late in our lives, with the hope that we will be able to overwinter some of the tender plants that currently fill the pretty sunroom we built 30 years ago off our bedroom and where we will be able to extend the already generous growing season here on the west coast. In a way it’s too late. But in another way it’s a project we can work at and hang onto the scrap of hope that I feel when I think of it completed on the little rise of moss behind our house. For most of the first year of this pandemic, I’ve been able to sustain a sense of optimism about how the virus will be contained, understood, and that we will all be vaccinated, given new courage to enter the world that’s been beyond us for months, the world where we eat with people, embrace our friends and family members, travel to see places and people, visit the houses of those we are connected to. During the period of intense activity devoted to John’s recovery from bilateral hip replacement surgery and the injury sustained during that process, I didn’t have time to think too deeply about the future because the present took every ounce of energy I had. Now it seems impossible to me that I actually felt energetic because I’ve lost that source of optimism that nourished the daily work. Maybe I haven’t truly lost it but it’s very hard to locate these days.

But mythos? As I was getting bolts and washers ready for John to secure into the metal base of the greenhouse to fasten it to the wood frame we constructed, I saw the instructions for the kit we are using. We ordered our greenhouse from Palram and the one that suited us best was the Mythos. I’d forgotten it was called that. It’s simple, a 6 foot by 10 foot structure, with twin walls, UV protected. We made a floor of concrete pavers set into sand and there’s a border on two sides which we’ll cobble with beach stones. So it’s the Mythos, rising from the base, slowly, because we’re no longer young, and just maybe I felt a little rush of hope as John put in the first bolt and we held a measuring tape to both diagonals to make sure the structure will be square.

μῦθος, mythos: A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group. A tale, story, or narrative, usually verbally transmitted, or otherwise recorded into the written form from an alleged secondary source.

Our story is an old one. We wanted to make a home for ourselves. We raised our children. We wrote our books. We grew apples and kale and small French fingerling potatoes, their creamy flesh veined with pink. We had three dogs, now none. 30 years ago, even 20, when there was still time for it to make a difference, we’d have built a greenhouse ourselves, with wood and old windows. Maybe mixed cement in the red wheelbarrow you can see in the top photograph–it was used for mixing all the concrete for the footings of our house– and made a solid foundation. Now we are following the instructions to build a Mythos from a kit, opening the little bags of bolts and attachments, squaring the corners because we know how to do that.

I have three olive trees in pots waiting for the greenhouse to be ready. One of them is an Arbequina I bought last year and two are unknowns, tags lost on the half-price table where I found them in a local store. Symbols of peace and friendship, sacred to Athena, they are long-lived, even mythic. Remember George Seferis’s beautiful “Mythistorema”?

The olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers

the rocks with the wisdom of our fathers

and our brother’s blood alive on the earth

were a vital joy, a rich pattern

for the souls who knew their prayer.

Let them be that. Let them grow as we age, let them ask us to say a prayer for the millions dead, widowed, orphaned, and let the Mythos shelter them on cold winter nights. Let the bolts we are sinking hold, let the moss repair itself, let the tree frogs find the olive trees, the snakes discover the warm of sunlight on concrete pavers, and let us all feel the beginnings of hope again.

When I was growing up, my mum made our bread. We were a family of 6 and lunches were always sandwiches so she made, what, about 10 loaves a week. She had big metal bowl for the dough and BakeRite Tinware pans for the loaves. (I have some of the latter still. I use them for banana bread or pound cake.) I loved coming home from school on a bread day to a house smelling of those loaves. They’d be lined up on the counter, cooling, and I don’t think she ever let us have slices as an after-school snack. That would have upset her system, her accounting.

Did I ever tell her how much I appreciated her bread? I don’t think I did. To be honest, I didn’t appreciate it. Not then. Our lunch sandwiches were door-stoppers, the slices uneven, and I remember I wished we could have Wonder Bread like the other kids. Neat packages of cheese or egg salad or tuna. Once I was invited to go with a friend and her parents on their boat for a weekend, maybe this was grade 6, and my mum sent me with a loaf of bread and a jar of homemade jam. I was embarrassed by this gift, or at least I was until my friend’s parents went into raptures about how good the bread was, how good the jam. We sat on some logs on the shore of Tent Island where we were anchored overnight and we, though mostly they, ate the whole loaf. It wasn’t lunch or dinner. They couldn’t eat those slices fast enough. Did I tell my mum? Probably not.

When my children were young, I baked most of our bread. I was home most of the time, when I wasn’t doing the errands related to family life, so bread-making fit into the rhythm of that life. I used different methods. Sometimes I made yeast bread, setting it in the morning, letting it rise, then baking it in the afternoon. I was happy to cut slices for afternoon snacks (though it seems this is not what was remembered of those years). Sometimes I made cinnamon buns too, with the same dough. When I bought Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, I often made a biga, or starter, using yeast, flour, and water, letting it sit, then incorporating it into dough that produced gorgeous rustic loaves. Later, the wonderful Bev Shaw, who owned Talewind Books in Sechelt, and who died far too soon, gave me some of her sourdough starter and I made sourdough bread. I made it for years but then I forgot to freeze it when we went away for 5 weeks one winter and the starter died. I could have asked Bev for more and I know she would have gladly given it but I’d stopped baking bread regularly. My children had all left home and it was somehow just easier to buy bread.

During the pandemic, I began to bake it again. It gave a comforting kind of structure to the long lonely days. And honestly, is there anything more comforting than a slice of warm bread spread with butter? I can’t think of one. I wasn’t making sourdough exactly but something more like the famous Jim Lahey loaves, using a tiny bit of yeast and a long overnight rise, with no kneading. Those loaves were a kind of magic and magic was what we needed.

In January I decided to make sourdough starter again. I thought our kitchen must be teeming with wild yeast and it would be simple and I was right. My starter took 6 or 7 days. I didn’t weigh the flour and water, I didn’t use a thermometer or any of the fancy equipment required in many of the recipes. I used unbleached white flour and some dark rye. Tap water (we have a well and our water is delicious). It did what it was supposed to do and now I have a quart jar of the most beautiful starter. I call her Artemis.

When we went to Oaxaca for a little more than 2 weeks, she survived just fine. I’ve used her for chocolate cake (it was so good), our weekly pizza dough, and a weekly loaf of bread. The photograph at the top of the page is this week’s. I thought, cutting into it for a trial slice, that bread doesn’t have to be any better than this. Sometimes I put pumpkin seeds in. Once I made it with rosemary and walnuts. I use rye flour, unbleached white, whole wheat. Sometimes I put flax seeds in. Some mornings I come downstairs to the most wonderful smell of toasting sourdough and I think, Why haven’t I been doing this all along? Why did I ever buy bread? Well, there were reasons. And now there’s no reason not to bake bread. I wish I’d known when I was a child what I know now, about the work that goes into bread, the love, the intention, and I wish I’d thanked my mother. I wish I told her that I was glad to open my lunchbox and find her sandwiches inside, wrapped in waxed paper, a few homemade cookies wrapped separately, an apple, and I wish I’d hugged her for her reliable and practical love.