swirl

There were plum blossoms on the car when we went out this morning, and 3 deer in the parking area of the BnB where we are staying on Rockland Avenue. The sky was huge over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and as we drove towards the breakwater, we saw a film crew set up by the Surf Motel, our favourite place to stay in Victoria. (They close for a couple of months each winter…) Everything was charged with the magic of Victoria in February, the month we met in 1979: the plum blossom, daffodils in yellow swaths below Beacon Hill, people sitting at outdoor tables drinking coffee in the sunlight. We did that too, yesterday, after my event (with Kim Spencer, Bill Gaston, and Jesse Winter) at the Western Book Reps Association Book Fair, when my publisher Eve Rickert handed me 1 of 2 early copies of my new book, The Art of Looking Back. Paperback ARCs had been printed for the book reps and booksellers at the event but somehow she’d been able to have 2 copies of the book rushed from the printer and oh, it is everything I hoped for, and more. The cover has a canvas texture, perfect for the detail of portrait reproduced on it. I hadn’t expected the endsheet as I opened the book, a collage of the archive that inspired me to write this book: at the centre, the drawing the painter sent me shortly after we met in 1978 and which should have sent me running in the opposite direction; samples of the huge stack of letters he sent me over nearly 20 years; and other moments I used in the book to help me look back.

Plum blossoms on the car this morning, the scent of the sea as we walked the breakwater, the swirl of kelp below me when I stopped to look at a sea lion in the green water:

The kelp felt like the tangle of feelings I’ve had over the past 2 days–elation, a kind of far-sightedness as we walked in the Garry oak wood below Government House, hearing sea lions barking on the Trial Islands, seeing the new leaves of camas in the grass below the oaks, and even the memory of myself as a Brownie visiting Government House 65 years ago, LG George Pearkes hosting our pack for tea and asking us about knots. Yes, we sat out in sunlight too, at Ottavio Bakery in Oak Bay, my new book at hand, plum blossom on the Avenue, and although most people were drinking coffee, I had a glass of rosé, the day a swirl. I was awake for a good part of the night, re-reading, though it felt like the first time, The Art of Looking Back. I was surprised to see the sun rise because the night, like the years, passed in a heartbeat.