Doing: Yesterday it rained on and off all day. The house smelled of apples from the buckets and bags in the utility room. So I made 3 pies for the freezer (with plans to make more today) and a crumble for us to enjoy after dinner. And honestly, is there anything nicer than warm crumble with a scoop of ice cream, in this case Kawartha Dairy’s wonderful Tragically Chip? Yesterday there wasn’t.
Making: I’ve been piecing together a quilt, horizontal strips, and yesterday (after the pies), I sewed sashing to the strips after working out the simple arithmetic of how to make the best use of the indigo-dyed sheets I’d put aside for this quilt. I have a big one for the backing and I had some of the first one left, the one I’d used for the strips, and what I had wasn’t ideal for the sashing — the lengths were short and it meant a fair bit of cobbling together. But it really doesn’t matter. My quilts are very much a reflection of my limited sewing skills and if I need to measure 3 times, cut once, then re-measure, and cut again, so be it. I hung the completed top on the clothesline between showers and I love how the indigo-dyed strips and sashing actually echo the sky on a bright day. Looking at it, I have the uncanny sense of swimming under the clouds and also within them, as I do on the days when the clouds are reflected in the lake’s surface.
Listening: I have been listening to as many recordings of Paco de Lucia (my favourite guitarist) playing the Concierto de Aranjuez. I don’t know, there’s something so deeply yearning about the adagio, and when Paco played it, he would allow a tiny moment for the heart to catch up with the music, and I am listening, my own heart caught in the strings, the oboe, the pauses, the hesitations. This morning, swimming, I was watching the moon in the western sky, a whole note hung in the bars of high contrails, and yes, it was almost exactly that.
Thinking: About words, how sometimes a word will enter your imagination, and take you to unexpected places. On my desk, Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things, open to “Squarings”, and these lines:
Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.
And I held the word “river” in my own mind, I hold it now, remembering my father packing the car for a camping trip and telling us we would see the Sturgeon River, where his school friend had once dived from a bridge, and never came up, and how it became a haunting, a story I’ve remembered ever since, the boy with pale skin sinking, caught in reeds, mud, the unforgiving bed of the river, and the boys on the bridge waiting.
