ragbag

Making

Over the weekend I pieced together the central part of the log cabin quilt I am making for my grandson H. These are colours he chose and although they’re not necessarily ones I would normally use– the orange in particular! — I love him enough to honour his request. What I love about log cabin blocks is how they are built, like actual structures, and then how you can achieve different effects by placement: the way I’ve arranged these makes a sort of god’s eye, doesn’t it? (If you remember that particular craft, wrapping coloured yarn or string around two sticks or drinking straws to make a diamond-shaped ikon, the standard project of Brownie groups and pre-schools. I have two or three hanging in my house.) Today I hope to finish piecing the top of this quilt, cutting and sewing a deep border at the top and bottom, and a narrower border on each side. Not sure yet whether I’ll use the deep blue (in real life, it’s sort of marine blue) at the outer edge of the cabin blocks or maybe a darker navy blue. I have both. I’ll lay the cabin blocks on top of each and see which I like best.

Reading

I’m still reading Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, in and around other books (Bog Queen by Anna North, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Still by Joanna Cockerline, among others). What I love about Becoming Human is the way the essays all circle the Upper Paleolithic in different ways, some of the writers taking a structuralist approach, some more taken with the process of making art, the materiality of it. I am too much a beginner to have an opinion yet but I remember standing with our guide by the two horses at Ribeira de Piscos, wondering at the why of the sites chosen to make the images. Why this rock, why not that one? Are they portals, I wondered. And the guide said quietly, Maybe the portals are the rocks that are not incised with images.

Appreciating

The way it felt to wake last Monday morning to find a message in my inbox from the associate publisher at Thornapple Press, providing this link to the first review of my forthcoming book. The thing that had felt abstract was suddenly real:

https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/the-art-of-looking-back-by-theresa-kishkan

Eating

Last Thursday, after a long day of errands, we continued on as we drove home, past our driveway, on and on to the Backeddy Pub in Egmont. The pub closes for January and part of February and we’ve missed its fire, its tacos, its chowder. We were the only table when we arrived though a few others came later.

Here’s John at our table by the fire. We were enjoying a drink and before we knew it, our dinner arrived: seafood risotto (sockeye salmon, scallops, mussels, saffron rice), chowder, a salad of bright greens, tangles of carrot ribbons, beet ribbons, and roasted golden beets, with quinoa and dried cranberries strewn over the top. And driving back that night, we saw the waxing crescent moon with the old moon in her arms. I thought of the folk bands of my young womanhood, Steeleye Span (with the glorious Maddy Prior) and Fairport Convention, how we sang those songs driving to mountains or (once) California, and I remembered “Sir Patrick Spens”:

A saw the new muin late yestreen
Wi the auld muin in her airm
And gif we gang tae sea, maister,
A fear we’ll cam tae hairm

Loving

The hummingbirds, the chestnut-backed chickadees, a raven on the Malaspina trail yesterday wheeling around in mid-air when I called to it, Thock, Thock, the robins back, the sound of red-winged blackbirds when I go for mail, the sound of coyotes the other night right below our bedroom, not yipping but trying a few bars of an old love song, and this morning driving home from the pool, the bobcat that raced across the highway in front of us, hopping over the abutment so that we saw the underside of its tail.

Hoping

On the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war it thought it would win within weeks, I am hoping for a durable peace. When I travelled to Ukraine in 2019, I thought it would be just the first trip of many. So many nights I’ve dreamed of the Carpathian mountains, the fields, shorn wool drying on bushes and fences after being washed in rivers, the beautiful churches, the faces of my distant family as they arrived at the door with gifts.