Author: theresakishkan

Yesterday we visited the extraordinary site at Monte Alban, a place shimmering with power. From there we drove to Teolitlan Del Valle to meet Oscar Perez and his family. Oscar greeted us in Zapotec with a little glass of mezcal. I was in heaven as he showed us the process of his work with wool, from fleeces, which he carded and spun into yarn, then immersed in dyes made with rock lichens, calendula, cochineal–he had cactus paddles with the parasitic bugs on them and he crushed a bug in my palm to release its brilliant red, a colour that can be changed by the addition of lemon, soda; on my palm, a Zapotec tattoo–, indigo leaves, pomegranates, pecan shells. Oh the colours! In a courtyard, the dye vats.

How could we ever choose one of the beautiful carpets woven on one of the 3 looms in his studio? But we did, compromising (because of course I wanted blue while John loved the colourful ones). Peter took this photo of us with our carpet and its maker.

It was warm and all the way to Hierve el Agua I was thinking about a swim. It’s a place with waterfalls petrified in space over time, with mineral pools on the edge of a cliff overlooking the most breathtaking valley.

After a long swim, we walked back to Carlos, who’d made our day possible, and returned to Oaxaca as the sky darkened and lights of distant villages glittered.

PS–Peter took this photograph as we were driving away from Hierve el Agua.

I am thinking of women, the ones in the street selling baskets and embroidered shirts, and the ones in Teolitlan, where we are going tomorrow, and how fibre connects us across time and place. This wall of string and rope, and everything that came after.

drinking coffee in my bed before climbing the stairs to the rooftop for breakfast. Each day I swim in the little pool while pigeons whirl and Jorge wonders if there’s something he can bring me. Water with a slice of lime? A towel? Last night we sat opposite the corner John photographed in the courtyard of a restaurant called Catedral and I had the best meal of my life, in excellent company, while overhead a silver moon hung like a prop from a perfect play about evenings in Oaxaca and a man played sweet guitar music.

tree ferns, epiphytes, the scent of cypress, cactii of every kind, known, unknown

music, a frequent whistles, a little bird in the flowering cactus

1. Listening: yesterday, while the quiet snow fell, I listened to Bob Dylan for old time’s sake, Blonde on Blonde, and remembered hearing “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for the first time, walking through a residence hall at UVic in 1974 to pick up something from a classmate. I remember I stopped in my tracks and just listened. I’ve done that ever since, including yesterday, in the kitchen, when that song came on. I stopped, turned to look out at the snow, and listened to the entire cut.

Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate, or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

(You should wait.)

2.Sipping: is it counter-intuitive to drink white wine when the snow falls? Is it only nostalgia that had us sipping limoncello as we read in bed the other night, remembering the tiny glasses of essence of lemons from Sicily that our server brought us on the 2 nights, or 3, that we ate at Romano in Sarlat in November?

3. Reading: I finished Jean McNeil’s Ice Diaries: an Antarctic Memoir two nights ago, a chilly read (in some ways because the author feels very chilly) but also evocative, with some very lovely writing, though I felt that the strands of the narrative never quite came together.

4. Remembering: the summer swims in Ruby Lake, green water, a merganser swimming right along the edge of the shore with 17 tiny chicks as light as air. And how I’d wake in the night, excited at the prospect of a swim as soon as the sun came up.

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims

5. Eating: because of the snow and because of a third of a bottle of sour milk I wanted to use up, I made pancakes this morning to have with blueberries and maple syrup. I have a cast-iron griddle given to me by an elderly woman 35 years ago and it must be 100 years old now. When it heats across two burners of the stove and when I add a little oil to its serviceable surface, it smells like summer mornings, my entire family here, some sleeping, a few children drawing or building with Lego or reading on one of the couches, wrapped in a quilt, and I stood by the stove and closed my eyes.

6. Wishing: see 5.

7. Finishing: yesterday I spent some time tracking down a few references for the long essay that will be a book in the middle of next year. Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images, Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”.

With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace
And your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace
And your basement clothes and your hollow face
Who among them did think he could outguess you?

8. Watching: the snow fall.

9. Wearing: the long plaid flannel nightdress John gave to me for my birthday, perfect for mornings like this, when I feel like the grandmother in When I Was Young in the Mountains, the one who fries okra and makes Johnny cakes and takes her granddaughter to the outhouse in the middle of the night.

10. Loving: how the fire sounds first thing in the morning as the cedar kindling (the old roof-shakes, split into sticks) catches. That crack. Then the heat.

11. Hoping: that the snow doesn’t impede our travels on Wednesday as we head down the Coast to the ferry, then the airport. Then Oaxaca.

12. Enjoying: my second cup of coffee, here at my desk, my small lamp shining.

13: Appreciating: that the power is still on, though it flickered 3 times as I made pancake batter. That I have a home, that I can sit with a long essay about to become a book, that I can follow the progress of my younger self through some difficulty and pain, and that I can recognize her in the mirror each morning, older, maybe not wiser, but somehow intact, though part of her life imploded, and she lives among the clutter of nearly half a century, and that each morning she watches me come down the stairs to the kitchen, flowers in her hair.

And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross and your voice like chimes

Note: this was first posted on February 1, 2018. Tulips are a bit later this year.

February has always felt like a hinge to me, a time when the first early bulbs might come into flower, when I’ve noted the first salmonberry blossoms in sheltered areas, when the sky, late afternoon, will have something of spring in it. A certain kind of light, a clarity. This morning is foggy and grey but when I went out to fill the bird-feeder, I could smell the soil. Time to fill little seed trays and plant some peas and early salad greens.

My mum used to say that she didn’t like a winter to pass without having something to show for it. She crocheted and knit, badly. Is it mean to say this? We have her lopsided baby blankets still and I love them for their odd shapes and their history. I like putting them on the crib in the room our grandchildren sleep in. And John still wears the sweater of Cowichan wool she made for him in the early 1980s, along with one for Forrest.

John’s sweater had the sleeves up near his elbows so my mum cheerfully made them longer (and lopsided). The shoulders are beginning to unravel and I might try to fix it, though my knitting skills are pretty rudimentary. Still he loves his old sweater, he says, pulling it on to cut firewood or prune the roses.

And who am I to talk about lopsided or careless? My freehand quilting is both. But I love to do it. I’m almost finished the indigo wholecloth quilt, stitching spirals and anchoring them with shell buttons. A winter’s work. A wholecloth quilt is often an opportunity for a quilter to showcase her (or his) fine stitching but not mine. I’m resigned to the fact that I will never make those little perfect mice-tracks across a length of fabric but I do love the meditative possibilities of sitting by the fire and allowing my hands to guide thread into a spiral, a quiet labyrinth of red stitches holding the layers together. And look! Going into the kitchen a few minutes ago to pour a cup of coffee, there it was, waiting for me. (The morning light makes the colour look lighter than it actually is. Think new jeans, not stonewashed or faded.)

The shortest month, maybe the most promising in some ways. There were mosquitoes the other day and the sound of frogs. And tulips coming up in the raised beds in the vegetable garden, protected from the deer. I have enough red thread to finish my quilt and seeds to plant.

Winter garden,
the moon thinned to a thread,
insects singing.

—Matsuo Basho

In late October we were in France, in the southwest, looking at animals in caves. In some ways I waited my whole life thus far to see these wondrous places, these horses, bison, reindeer, herds of aurox. I’d read a lot about the caves and since coming home I’ve read a lot more, enough to realize how much I don’t know. Is it too late for me to return to university to do paleoanthropology, I wondered to John yesterday. And he said, It depends on how serious you are about doing it.

How serious am I? I don’t know. I read and I yearn for more opportunities to enter those spaces, to study how the early artists used the contours of the cave walls to give their creations such vitality, such palpable life. I want to know more about the pigments, their textures while wet, the differences in ochres sourced from different places. In one of the books I’ve been reading, there are detailed descriptions of how the contemporary craftspeople replicated the galleries at Lascaux once it was determined that the original images could not survive the constant exposure to crowds, the growth of algae, molds, and calcite veil that threatened the climatic and biological equilibrium inside the cave. We visited Lascaux 1V, which was a wonderful experience, though I’d actually booked tickets for us to go to Lascaux 11 (long story…), and I’d like to go back so we can go there as well as to Bernifal and some of the other sites in the Vézère valley in particular.

At Lascaux 1V, I bought two of my grandsons a simple craft, slabs of limestone with the outline of animals replicated in the centre’s galleries and tiny packets of pigments to be mixed with water for painting the animals. When I got home in mid-November, I ordered them books about the discovery of the Lascaux cave in 1940 by 4 boys and their dog out treasure-hunting in the hills above Montignac. I hoped they’d find the story as exciting as I did, boys in the woods with German planes flying overhead, finding a world so ancient and beautiful in the midst of war. Maybe I should have bought myself a little kit so I could sit at our table and dab red and yellow ochre and black manganese on stone to make horses and bison and a delicate reindeer licking the muzzle of its mate.

One of the books I’ve been reading is Genevieve von Petzinger’s The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols. In it, she details the 32 signs that appear over and over again in caves and shelters during a 30,000 year time span of the Ice Age across Europe. It’s deeply fascinating work. But maybe my favourite moment in the book is towards the end when she is in the Côa Valley in northeastern Portugal and after a scramble up a hill to an outcropping on a ridge where she is shown a slab of rock with a meander incised into it, pairs of double lines running above one another and then converging into a single pair of parallel lines. From her position on the hill, she can see a brook joining the Côa River below; later the Côa converges with the Douro River. It’s hard not to see the meander as a geographic marker. This is a site perhaps 25,000 years old.

I am hoping we can return to France, Spain, and Portugal next fall (at the earliest; next spring if we can’t manage the fall) to explore some of the sites von Petzinger describes and some of the sites in the Vézère valley, ones we couldn’t get to because our rental car arrangement fell through. (Next time I’ll be more careful.) In an ideal world, I would have found my way to these places years ago, I’d have worked out the feelings that they evoke in me, the dreams that I wake from in tears because I can’t believe I’m not there now, dreams where I am entering Font-de-Gaume through the beautiful opening into its limestone depths, entering to stand among the horses, the bison, the black aurox, where I know so much more than I did in late October, where the windows of the car are open and the scent of pine, chestnut, dry grass comes to me as a palimpsest, an invitation.

Is it too late for me, I asked. And maybe I am as serious about this as I’ve ever been. I just didn’t know.

Note: the photographs are John’s, taken at Lascaux 1V.

1. Listening: the house so quiet, just the fire snapping, listening, listening, the winter wren in the woodshed when I went out earlier for logs, the song so sweet in the cold morning, and now Iris Dement’s beautiful recording of Anna Akhmatova’s poems:
   

You led me into the trackless woods,
My falling stars, my dark endeavour

2. Sipping: on my desk, a mug of dark French roast coffee, an endless pleasure.

3. Reading: the other night I finished Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, a collection of stories set mostly in Massachusetts, each one leading so naturally to the next, as music leads you through its structure, and I thought, this book could be a film, and then I discovered that the title story (so original and heartstoppingly beautiful) is indeed about to be a film, in post-production now as I write.

4. Thinking: oh thinking, thinking about how years pass without us noticing, how we–or at least how I–have so many regrets and no time to dream back, to lie on blue cloth on summer grass, to begin again.

5. Remembering: I have been remembering the nights in the tent, a new baby wrapped in blankets between us, talking about the work ahead, sorting a sling of north species studs, framing the walls of what would be our kitchen, our living room, the rooms where our lives would unfold, remembering how one night we heard a cougar screaming and how our English sheepdog X, Friday, tried to dig her way under the tent.

6. Wishing: I wish we could do it all again.

7. Eating: last night, the best simple supper: eggs scrambled with smoked steelhead, buttermilk biscuits hot from the oven with butter, a salad of radish sprouts, tomatoes, fresh basil. A glass of wine.

8. Finishing: I have pieced together an abstract bar graph quilt, using strips of various pink solids and prints, to be backed with soft pink flannel with an organic cotton batting inside.

9. Watching: the light return, the days growing a little longer each week.

10. Wearing: blue, blue, blue. Linen, cotton, warm scarves, the most beautiful gift socks sent to me by a friend who knit them in a lighthouse off the coast of Vancouver Island. (Thank you, Lolly!)
11. Loving: the light, the warmth of the fire, the white frost over the moss I see from my window, the song Iris Dement is singing this very minute.

Oh, how good the snapping and the crackle
Of the frost that daily grows more keen!
Laden with its dazzling icy roses,
The white-flaming bush is forced to lean.

Hoping: that somehow the world will survive.

Enjoying: the prospect of flying to Oaxaca next week.

Appreciating: how the light returns after a particularly dark time, little by little (see 9), and how clear the stars and planets are on the cold nights. We are stardust, maybe 97%, and this is our moment.

1.

Driving to the pool for my morning swim, I followed the moon, pale and slender as a baby’s fingernail clipping. (42 years ago this morning, my younger son was born.)

2.

Who came in the night to make the workshop window beautiful?

3.

In pots by the greenhouse door, the crocuses are sending up their leaves.

4.

As I was sending one email yesterday, another arrived. Yes, they would love to publish my book! When I woke in the night, stars in every window, I thought of the work ahead, with pleasure. I thought of the young woman on every page of the book and made room for her in my heart again.