so swift time flies

So quickly the summer passes. Just last week, wasn’t it, I was tying up roses, planting out the tiny tomato plants. I was thinking ahead. Some family members would arrive in July, some in August. And now, it’s past mid-August. The curtains my granddaughter and I made over a week in late July, using 10 feet of ramie which we twisted and tied with hemp string, and then dyed with rose madder, and 10 feet of unbleached cotton which we soaked in the dye vat for lining, her measuring, me sewing: those curtains are now hung in an Edmonton bedroom. The French picture books I was going to read with E. are still piled on the living room table, though we are working our way through Les Trois Freres, and maybe, just maybe, my French is improving. A. is outside, constructing a golf course on our mossy area, and I’ve just cleaned the juicer after making two quarts of apple juice to freeze for winter. (I think if I make two quarts a day for the next twenty years, I’ll be able to make a dent in the 100 pounds of apples in the back room, picked just in time to beat the bears to the harvest. I’ll make pies for the freezer too once I have more time.)

I was thinking ahead when I woke this morning. Or maybe I was in the past, thinking my way to this summer. I always intend to accomplish more: well-weeded garden, shelves lined with preserves. (I did make 27 jars of blackberry jam two days ago and a dozen disks of pesto — I freeze it in silicon muffin cups, then unmold them and put them in ziplock bags.) I always intend. But every morning the swim. Every evening the stars.

My curtains are rough white linen and they filter moonlight. Some
evenings I still walk out in my cotton nightdress to pluck slugs from
the lettuces, watch for deer who bring their fawns to eat rose canes
escaping the fence. How many generations of deer, how many of bears
lying in wait for the apples to ripen as they turn over stones on the
path for the abundance of ants? Four, or seven, or thirty-two. And even
the dogs, long dead, are racing in circles around the garden fence.
One of them loved blackberries, one ate salal from the bushes along
the driveway. In the dense woods a varied thrush adjusts its pitch,
another answers from the understory. The robin nest is filled again
with soft blue eggs. The weasel has yet to appear by the window,
though the curtains are now open, the roses are blooming.

We’ve eaten spot prawns and prime rib, a leg of lamb barbecued with branches of rosemary, lots of Grandma’s focaccia, blackberry ice cream, a nectarine and blueberry galette, and tonight there’ll be figs from the Brown Turkey tree waiting to be wrapped in prosciutto and grilled, sockeye salmon for tacos, and pastry chilling for a blackberry and apple galette. At the lake each morning, the boys throw sticks for the caretaker’s dog Izzy, and yesterday one of the young mergansers was swimming alone.

As I swam this morning, I was making a life list of water, the bodies I swam in, the ones I yearned for as I drove by in a car or on a train: Ruby Lake, the Thompson River, Nicola Lake, the Pacific Ocean, a pool in a courtyard in Porto, the little curve of the Côa River (one I yearned for) where Ribeira de Piscos idled into it last November and where the guide said he could not advise swimming in it (I was wearing my bathing suit under my jeans), the Sovytsia River by my grandfather’s village in western Ukraine, the Englishman River I waded in as a child and wondering about falling into as a troubled young woman, the bright water of the Vézère River in France, the Madawaska River we swam in after E.’s birth, then later. I was thinking ahead to other rivers, other possibilities, and knowing that one day these very days will be memory. Boys throwing sticks to Izzy, unwrapping lengths of madder-dyed fabric on the grass in sunlight, my husband bringing in a bowl of figs from our tree. The grass is growing tall behind the garden and the tomatoes are ripening each day. One day these very days will be memory.

Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Note: the first quoted passage is from my essay, “Love Song”, published first in Mother Tongue Publishing’s anthology, The Summer Book, and then in my book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays. The passage of poetry is from Louise Gluck’s “Nostos”.