Watching: Every morning, I watch the jays while I drink my coffee. They are endlessly entertaining. There’s a pecking order — the one with white eyebrows is top jay — and they are pretty ruthless in protecting their seeds from the other birds. Yesterday, on a whim, I put the Steller’s jay bud vase Angie gave me out on the wooden platform where I strew their seeds. I wanted to see how they’d respond. You can see for yourself! The two brave enough to even come near wouldn’t hop onto the feeder itself but looked nervously at the vase. The vase, with its little bouquet of marigolds, stared back.
Reading: Some weeks the library shelves don’t offer up much that I’m interested in reading. Is it my imagination or are there more dragons, women with straining bodices, smoke rising from burning castles on book covers than, say, five years ago? Or ten? But last week I found a small memoir, Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, which I loved reading over two nights, trying to ration the pages so I could stay within the narrative of finding a rundown cottage in Ranikhet, at the foot of the mountains, and building a life there, surrounded by gardens and dogs. A little gift to read as darkness settles and the nights cool. (And if you’re wondering if I mean Arundhati Roy and have misspelled her name, the answer is no, but I did once read a novel by Anuradha, thinking it was Arundhati. Two different writers, not related to one another…)
Enjoying: The moment where one bold jay made eye contact with the vase.
Listening: For geese heading south. I heard them last week but couldn’t locate their skein in the sky.
Wearing: Well, not quite yet, but last week I found a beautiful handknit Icelandic sweater at a consignment shop in Sechelt, creamy wool with a yoke patterned in deep rose and clear blue. I’ve knit one sweater in my life, using Icelandic Lopi yarn, watched over by the Graces of the seed store at the Butchart Gardens where I worked for 3 years as a university student — full time in summers and weekends in the off-season. The women were almost all knitters and they helped me figure out the simple instructions, putting their hands over mine as I did the difficult parts, and praising the final results in a way a YouTube would never rise to. That sweater was blue, the same blue in the yoke of this new one, and the same kind of yarn, or maybe even the same threads, allotted by the Fates all those years ago.
Remembering: The other night John was watching something on television downstairs and I was upstairs reading Called by the Hills when a song drifted up the staircase like a ghost from the past.
Don’t sing love songs; you’ll wake my mother
She’s sleeping here, right by my side
And in her right hand, a silver dagger
She says that I can’t be your bride.
Like a ghost from the past, Joan Baez singing that song when I was in my late teens, her voice as high and pure as silver, dropping almost an octave for the second half of the third line, and everything in that drop: every sorrow of my teen years.
Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife
For I’ve been warned and I’ve decided
To sleep alone all of my life.
I was upstairs reading and I was listening and yes, I confess, I even wept.
Anticipating: Tomorrow will be our 47th wedding anniversary and I’ll make a special dinner of duck legs and polenta. Some years we’ve been here, some years away (two years ago in Paris; sixteen years ago in Vienna), but we always eat a celebratory meal and toast our time together.
Finishing: I’m not actually anywhere near finishing the current quilt-in-progress but I am already thinking ahead to the next one, something to showcase last year’s dye work.
