Thinking: This morning, swimming in cloud and cool water, I was thinking about the deaths last week of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard, both of them writers I began to read in high school. I remember a teacher telling me in grade 11 that I would love Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and he was right, I did, and I re-read it every few years. I had no idea you could write a book about observing and praising the things you found in wild places. And Wendell Berry’s poems came to me around the same time, their simplicity deceptive, because they weren’t simple at all but carefully constructed, holding important ideas and they held as well so much goodness in them, templates for a ethical and generous world. When John and I met in 1979, there were many things we disagreed about — writing, books — but Wendell Berry was central to our reading and we realized that what we shared more than we thought. We just had different vocabularies, poetics.
The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way.
–Wendell Berry, from “The Summer’s End”
Eating: We had an apple cake, made with windfalls, and it was delicious. The deep sweetness of apples turning under their skins to memory. And the bears are eating the last of the crabapples, ruining the tree in their urgency to reach every hanging fruit. When I stand at the upstairs window, looking out at the driveway, I see them once or twice a day, the huge mother and her two cubs. The cubs climb and the mother keeps watch below, fixing her eyes on me in the window. We know each other. She is the same bear who came last year to the door while I was quilting, looking in briefly, the tell-tale star on her chest. And she’s come before, years ago, sitting under the tree, sated with crabapples. In the old stories we might be friends, we might gather berries together, share news of our children, but in this story I know better.
Making: a mound of sand, a rhubarb leaf, cement mixed in the old wheelbarrow, the one we used to mix and pour the footings for our house, and two days of waiting for the cement to set. Yesterday we brought the birdbath to its place on a cedar stump near the steps leading to the front door. Stones for the smaller birds to stand on, an oyster shell, and clean water. They haven’t come yet.
Cooking: pappardelle with pesto last night, the salad we loved in Oaxaca at Cafe Boulenc (tomatoes, green olives, cucumber, red onion, parsley, cubes of sourdough bread toasted in olive oil), lamb burgers with garlicky yogourt and salad topped with slices of feta, fish tacos, black beans with the small fierce peppers from the greenhouse. Apple cake.
Working (on): the long horizontal panels of sky and water and myself swimming, organized as a quilt (this time: another time I arranged them as an essay). Stitching, I am finding a way into the next season, my needle meandering as a river meanders, pulling the blue threads of water, bringing the months of morning swims together, from mid-April until probably the week after next.
Loving: the morning visits from the Steller’s jays, thought I have to say I didn’t expect them to be quite as insistent as they’ve become, emboldened by the years of seeds. But to turn to their calls and whistles (and anyone who says you can’t have sustained relationships with birds, with reciprocal communication, is simply wrong), to see them in the blue they wear so casually, the blue I try for in my dye sessions, is to be both privileged and inspired. (This one is throwing a side-eye just after a squawk, while another, which you can see, is softly whistling.)
Listening: Over and over, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “There in myrtle shades reclined“, one of Dejanira’s arias from Handel’s HÉRCULES, a piece that forever reminds me of driving the road from Lillooet through Pavilion on our way to a Cariboo wedding, windows open, the cd volume turned right up, me singing along with my feet on the dashboard.
There in myrtle shades reclin'd,
By streams that through Elysium wind,
In sweetest union we shall prove
Eternity of bliss and love.
