turn

This morning, the water was quite cool; the sky, grey. Emails come from nearby friends, with photos of grizzlies, a sow and three cubs, below their house, feeding on oysters and clams at low tide. Most days we see a black bear sow and her two cubs arrive for the crabapples in our tall tree beyond the garden. Driving back from the lake an hour ago, a young coyote watched us from the side of the road above the marsh. John thought it was the same one who’d ambled up the trail to where he was standing by the copper beech tree. When the pup saw him, it stopped briefly before turning around and trotting away. Some days I think we will be that old couple knitted into their house by vines, the decks and garden taken over by wild animals. I can think of worse ways to end our days.

We went to Vancouver on Wednesday, pivoting at the ferry from our plan to take our car and shop for special things on our way home the next day when we learned there would be a one-ferry wait for car traffic. (We hadn’t made a reservation because it was mid-week in September. How the times have turned.) Turning around in the line-up, we parked our car instead in the lot and I quickly put some stuff in my shopping basket — toiletries, a change of clothes — so we could go as foot passengers. The plan had been to see the Odyssey at a matinee showing and we did that, using buses and Uber. In a way I wish I hadn’t seen it. So many disappointing things — the bad dialogue, most of the acting, the absence of key elements that have always been my touchstones when reading the poem: the entirety of book 11, with its moving and complex interactions between Odysseus and the dead (“But my heart/longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.”), Nausikaa at the river with her laundry, dreaming of a bridegroom, and of course the marriage bed built around a living olive tree.

So now we turn to autumn, waiting like bears for the salmon, for the geese to sound their wild cries across the sky. Our woodshed is nearly full, thanks to John’s hard work, and our pantry shelves are lined with jams and jellies. Every other year I’ve been working on a book — a novel, a collection of essays, a memoir– but I think those days are over. When I wake in the night, there’s no longer any urgency to find my way downstairs in the dark to my desk, to open a file and enter a world I’d lost myself in for decades. I have other plans in the works, a turn in the road, a bend in the river. What waits, unknown?