Sunday morning

I took my coffee out onto the deck this morning to smell the honeysuckle, listening to some large animal in the bush below the old orchard. I haven’t seen the bears yet this year, the sow who comes with her young, the star-chested male who sometimes climbs the deck to look through the sliding doors:

Last night I dreamed of high school. Maybe this was because there was a couple sitting at a picnic table when I came out of the lake yesterday and when we said hello to them, they seemed to want to talk a little. They were from Vienna. They were heading to Victoria to visit their daughter who was spending a year as an exchange student at a high school there. Which one, I asked. And it was the one I went to, Claremont. It was where two or three teachers recognized something in me that no one else had noticed, a writing ability, and also maybe a scholarly ability. They were the ones who encouraged me to go to university — I think my parents only hoped I would find a job; the notion of post-secondary education was beyond their understanding — and they were the ones who helped me fill out scholarship applications. One of them took our English literature class to UVic to take out books on his library card — he was finishing an M.A. degree at that time — and I remember browsing the card catalogues with such excitement. That excitement never went away over the next 4 years.

In my dream last night I was trying to gather everything I would need from my locker and things kept surfacing: old books, a paper I’d forgotten to turn in, old running shoes (I was on the cross-country team for a few months), It felt like an impossible task. When I woke to put the cat out, I was relieved I didn’t have to think about high school any more. I dream a version of this every few months but mostly it’s in the form of a math dream. I am trying to find the classroom, I haven’t kept up with the homework, there’s an exam and I know I’m not ready, or it’s the end of the term and I haven’t gone to class even once, even though I told myself I’d never miss even a single one. Ah, the old anxieties.

The large animal was moving away into the deep woods. The orchid cactuses haven’t stopped blooming since we put them out a month ago, their brilliant orange-red flowers drawing hummingbirds and bees and the beautiful swallowtails, pollinating with their long legs and tongues. So many years since I walked down Haliburton Road, along Elk Lake Drive, and through an orchard now built over with houses. I don’t have to take the math exam. I can stand on the deck and listen for birds, pinch off the finished daylily flowers, look at the wall above the planter given us 4 decades ago by an elderly woman who was impressed we’d built our own house. I’m impressed too, a girl who can’t do complex equations and a boy who was more interested in theatre than drafting.

Now their older counterparts live here, listening to the news, finishing their coffee before heading outside to take up shovels and rakes. There’s always work to do, though lakes and bears remain.

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower’s splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
–Du Fu, translated by Mark Alexander