summer notes

–During my swim this morning, I could have sworn I smelled pancakes cooking. Maybe someone in one of the far cabins was cooking an outdoor breakfast? I was taken back to my childhood summers, our family camping trips to Salt Spring Island or Englishman River or any number of sites between here and my father’s family in Edmonton. When I’d wake early in our blue tent, my brothers and I in our sleeping bags on deflated air mattresses, our mother still deeply asleep, our father out in the little skiff he’d made himself, fishing, I’d listen for birds, for the creak of my father’s oars as he came to shore with a string of bass or trout. He’d gut them and then dredge them in cornmeal before frying them in bacon fat to have with the buckwheat pancakes he’d cook on the big old griddle set over both burners on the Coleman stove. A coffee pot was balanced on a flat rock by the fire, steaming. This morning I swam, smelling pancakes, dreaming of those years, and when I opened my eyes, I was far beyond my usual place in the water.

–Yesterday I made pancakes and we ate them with blueberries, strawberries, and maple syrup. Last night we ate bowls of blackberries sweetened with a spoon of maple sugar, and a drizzle of cream overtop. The visiting grandchildren are fiends for blackberries and we just picked more. There was fresh bear scat on the trail.

–Granddaughter K. wanted to make curtains for her new room and she liked the rose madder cotton I dyed last summer so on this visit, we tied ramie with hemp string and worked out the mordant ratios, the dye weight, and we spent two days creating the cloth that is drying on our clothesline now. The two panels on the left will be the curtains themselves and the two on the right are lengths of unbleached cotton we free-dyed in the vat after the tied ramie had simmered for an hour and we’ll use them for lining. The same dye vat, the same cotton, but the results are quite different. K. said this morning, All we need to do is sew them now! Ah, yes.

–Under the clothesline is the stack of logs H. brought up from the area where John is splitting big rounds of fir. These are lengths of branches I cut in January with my small birthday chainsaw.

–Today marks two months since my new book, The Art of Looking Back, was officially published. So how wonderful it was to see this starred review at the Quill and Quire! I read it in my bed, drinking the cup of coffee John sent up with H., and I thought how rare it is to read such a thoughtful and insightful consideration of one’s work:

Kishkan’s beautifully rendered story explores power dynamics, personal responsibility, the relationship between artist and model, bodily autonomy, betrayal, and redemption. This story is many things: a reclaiming of identity, the setting straight of a historical record, a handbook for girls becoming women, a grace note – but most of all, it is a provocative and thoughtful work of art.

–When the parents of these grandchildren texted from the Okanagan, where they are spending a few days on their own, with a photograph of a laden nectarine tree and a question: Is there anything you’d like us to bring? I could only respond, Nectarines! If there are enough, I am thinking they would make an excellent galette, with blackberries, and some of that maple sugar to sweeten them. A dollop of whipped cream?