This evening, after a long day doing garden work — repotting herbs, making cuttings of the scented geraniums (rose, lemon, orange, a resiny one whose name I’ve forgotten but it smells of rose and deep woods, peppermint)–planting lilies in pots, topping up the overwintered pots with fish compost and alfalfa pellets, anyway, after that, we drove out to Egmont to have supper at the Backeddy Pub. Joe Stanton was playing guitar and singing the old sweet songs. I went out on the deck to take a quick photograph of the boat I’ve loved for so long now, the one with the beautiful wooden cabin, maybe in its last stage of restoration. Ruby, who works in the Backeddy and has the loveliest smile, came out to talk for a few minutes. She told me she’d been out in a boat with her boyfriend and an octopus had come up in their prawn trap. Its eyes, she said, were almost human. Have you seen “My Octopus Teacher”, I asked, and no, she hasn’t, but she said she’s going to look for it now. We talked about The Curve of Time, which she hasn’t yet read but is going to search out. I told her I’ve bought copies at the Egmont Museum so she won’t have to look far. Think of that boat when you read it, I suggested. And as we talked, an otter loped along the dock, disappearing behind the boat I always think of as mine.
Today, after I’d come in from the garden, I sat at my desk and read through my novel, Easthope, set in a community very like Egmont, which is now making the rounds. Some days I think it’s too quiet to find a readership. Other days, like today, I am glad I wrote it, glad I gathered the strands of history and memory together to make something.
As they approached the rapids at the entrance to the inlet, Tessa was looking back. Looking back, she saw the wake closing behind them as they slowed, one wave overlapping the other like a seam. And she felt the excitement again: a seam containing the hidden histories of the inlet, Capi Blanchett with her children on the Caprice, one child trailing a hand in the water; Mac Macdonald’s first sighting of the inlet aboard his uncle’s schooner; even the beautiful young couple sitting on their wooden boat, a naked child at their feet.
Tonight I had steelhead tacos and John had chowder. We shared a salad and although I thought we’d share the white chocolate cheesecake with caramel and pistachios for dessert, it turned out I ate most of it. A glass (or two) of Grey Monk Pinot Gris, the boat just below us, seals at play in the shallows. The boat that I always think of as mine, looking towards the open water, ready.
...Theresa Kishkan 