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.
...Theresa Kishkan 
I’ve seen two versions of that last Van Morrison lyric, both lovely and suggestive:
“We were born before the wind”; and “We were borne before the wind”; take your pick.
Back, ceaselessly into the past…
He changes things endlessly, and always in interesting ways! (Thinking of his version of Raglan Road, which isn’t necessarily Kavanagh’s poem!) But yes, ceaselessly into the past is right, Michael — Travelling like a stranger in the night, all along the ancient highway.