a year, sort of

I’ve been reading people’s accounts of the year we’re leaving and in my bed this morning, drinking my coffee, I looked at photos and wondered how I’d sum up mine. It won’t be clerical. I don’t keep spreadsheets of submissions and rejections. But I had a few wonderful adventures and some good things happened.

In February we almost didn’t go to Oaxaca. On the morning we were leaving, we woke to more snow than we’ve had had here on the west coast of Canada. Our (long) driveway was completely white and probably not navigable in our Honda Accord. A few phone calls confirmed that although the highway was open, just, the road we’d need to turn off to take our cat to the woman who would care for him was unplowed. But then a neighbour came up our driveway in his truck, chains on the tires, and with a tow-rope, he got us out of where we’d got stuck trying to back up. He pulled us all the way to the highway and no problem with the cat, he said; he’d come up to feed him until other friends could come and take him to the kennel. So when we arrived at last in Oaxaca, we were ready for the sunlight, the wild skies, the museums, each more beautiful than the last, the visit to Teotitlán del Valle to a weaver’s studio,

followed by a swim at a mineral pool at Hierve el Agua on the edge of a cliff:

While we were in Oaxaca, I had the pleasure of discussing and then signing a contract with Eve Rickert at Thornapple Press for a memoir. Eve was unfazed by my location — we were doing this virtually after all — because she was on a boat, waiting to land on the Galapagos Islands.

Easter took us to Edmonton to see our family there. There was a visit to Elk Island Park:

and many many cartwheels, all of which had to be rated. This was pretty much a ten.

In May my brothers and I gathered on the banks of the Thompson River for 3 nights to catch up on our lives and later in May we went to Gatineau to spend time with our family there.

In June, inspired by the weaver in Teotitlán del Valle, I decided to up my own dye work a little by making a seasonal studio on a partly covered back deck.

I did some indigo, which I’ve experimented with for decades, but also experimented with rose madder and marigold. Instead of relying on memory, I kept careful notes and next summer I look forward to using pomegranate and cochineal (there’s cochineal in the carpet we bought from Oscar Perez in Teotitlán del Valle and many other natural dyes as well; he showed us how he prepares them and I thought I’d love to just stay forever, gathering rock lichens, sage, and learning their mordants).

In July and August, two of our families came here, overlapping for a few days, and it was lovely to have them at the table on the deck for a festive dinner.

There was lots of swimming, badminton, quiet reading, archery, hikes, and a visit to the Backeddy Pub where the kids scrambled down on the rocks while we enjoyed conversations with old friends encountered there.

In late October we went to London for a few days of theatre and art galleries and lots of walking and then we flew to Porto, picking up a rental car to drive to the Coa Valley for a week of visits to rock art sites on the river.

I’ve been to Portugal before but never to a place with such unearthly beauty: high hills terraced with olives, almonds, and grapes, shepherds guiding their sheep along the river banks, the bells sounding in the air like birdsong, the Iberian magpies appearing in the olives, blue as the sky, and the rock panels alive with horses, ibex, aurochs, their horns still exuberant after 20,000 years. And after our week in Vila Nova de Foz Coa, we had a couple of days first in Porto, staying in the same suite we’d stayed in back in 2024

and where I swam in the outdoor pool which was almost too cold. Almost. And when we returned to London for just 2 nights before flying home, instead of our usual Bloomsbury hotel, we stayed in Kew. When I lived in Wimbledon in 1976, I used to take the bus to Kew Gardens sometimes on my day off and I realized I hadn’t been there in almost 50 years. It was lovely to walk through the gardens, the glass houses, to listen to magpies, parakeets, to wonder at some of the really ancient trees, and to buy a few seeds in the gift shop to take home.

Christmas arrived far sooner than I thought it would. Angie and Karna came from Victoria and it was quietly sweet. They had to return on Christmas day itself so we ate a festive meal on Christmas Eve.

Oh, and that memoir I mentioned? All through the year, I edited it (thank you, Andrea!), attended to the copy-edits (thank you, Heather!), worked out the details of images and how to use them (complicated! Thank you, Eve, Hazel, and the lawyer who understood copyright), opened the files to see what the cover and text possibilities could be (thank you, Jeff for layout and Naomi MacDougall for cover) and proofread several times, including queries which arrived on my phone in Vila Nova de Foz Coa and required a bit of squinting (thank you, Alison!). I look forward to the publication in May. (You can preorder here or at your own local bookstore.)

So, a year. Was it a good one? In many ways it was. I thought I’d be more productive somehow and I thought I’d accomplish more in the way of making things. The photographs remind me of what I’ve forgotten. The light in Oaxaca, the walk from our room to the textiles museum where I’d leave my bag in the little wood and rattan cubicle, tuck the key into my pocket, and spend an hour looking at stitches, the scent of the bison from the car window at Elk Island, the sound of my grandchildren’s voices out on the grass they call “the field”, how it felt to open a bound length of dyed linen to find lines like rivers or spider webs. I don’t keep regular journals, apart from when I travel, and looking at my notes also reminds me of something I once read, Annie DIllard on journals:

It’s terrific, having all these materials handy. It saves and makes available all these years of reading. Otherwise, I’d forget everything, and life wouldn’t accumulate but merely pass.
–from “How I Wrote the Moth Essay — And Why”

The photographs serve that function in a way. Everything is happening at once, not passing but accumulating.