This morning, sweet peas in a pottery vase in the shape of a Steller Jay’s head, a gift from my daughter last week in Victoria. Last week, Victoria, Duncan. This week, Vancouver. Publishing my most recent book, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, has led me on a merry dance across waters, across the years. A disturbance of memory, a phrase from Freud (and the title of an essay that engaged me in conversation with Freud on the subject of the Acropolis and fathers), has been one way I’ve been thinking about this book. You remember the past and then you realize how much has been left out, altered, repressed, forgotten. The jays are off nesting higher up the mountain and we hardly ever see them. But in a few weeks, they’ll come to the deck again for seeds, teaching the young how to yell at the sliding doors until I see them.
This morning, sweet peas, their scent as we drank our coffee after a long and contemplative swim while crows and ravens bickered, then went silent as a vulture glided in to settle on a branch above the beach. I fed the tomatoes with comfrey tea, deadheaded a few roses, watered the pots. Below a young buck paused in his morning walk to look up at me. New antlers, I called down to him. Nice! His tail twitched. Bumblebees rose from the scented geraniums, their legs golden with pollen.
Last night, just back from Vancouver, John went down for a swim while I stayed back to make supper. (I don’t like to swim later in the day because there are too many people at the little beach.) I had burrata, fresh basil in the garden, some candied steelhead. Half a loaf of sourdough to make into bruschetta. Three big leaves of lettuce from the salad bed on the upper deck completely covered the big platter. We had a glass of Portuguese rosé at the table on the deck (well, I had two glasses) and marvelled again at how the vines had completely thatched the pergola over the deck so that summer dinners could be eaten in dappled light. Hummingbirds darted in and out among the hanging epiphyllums and the capiz shells moved a little in the breeze.
