Author: theresakishkan

Nearly two years ago, I told my Edmonton grandchildren I would make them each a quilt for the new house they would be moving to. I made one for my granddaughter first and it took most of a year. (I was busy with editing my book as well as other writing.) And then I began to think about Henry’s quilt. It was a bit of a puzzle, what I could do with the colours he sent in the form of a bar graph. I thought about them, tried to imagine them as a quilt. I’d already used the bar graph trope for his sister’s quilt (she also sent a more carefully constructed graph with her favourite pinks and purples):

I realized I could use a traditional block for Henry (and I sort of wished for a tiger beetle!) and decided that as Henry loved walking around our house and asking his grandfather questions about what it was like to build it when we were young and full of energy, a log-cabin quilt might be best. It took some time to find the colours I needed, his, as well as some blue to make the quilt pleasurable to work on — because the fabric store in Sechelt closed and Dressew in Vancouver (my other source) closed — but eventually I accumulated what I needed, including an organic cotton batting and soft blue flannel for the back. Here is the top I pieced together in the fall.

I know I’ve written about it before but I like to think about these projects in a narrative way: what was asked, how I responded, what it was like to select fabric, to think about design possibilities, and then to stitch. I am not very proficient at the piecing; everything is a bit cockeeyed. But what I love best is the actual quilting, by hand, with sashiko thread and big-eyed needles, using a wooden hoop to keep the surface taut. And this morning, as it rains outside, a much-needed rain, I am working on the final borders of this quilt for a young boy in Edmonton.

I think of all the women who’ve worked on quilts for luxury or out of necessity. For love. And how we sew ourselves into the work we do, we stitch our hope, and our wonder — that a young boy who was born yesterday, it seems, but who now claims that tiger beetles rule and who will settle this quilt on his narrow bed in a new room, will not know the hours of time it took to make.

I am interested in every tangle of thread and rope and every possibility of transformation. I am interested in the path of a single thread. I am not interested in the practical usefulness of my work.
–Magdalena Abakanowicz

I too am interested in the path of a single thread as it moves across the blue borders, in and around the cabins created with strips of cotton, the sashing between them, the thread that spirals, follows a path that becomes a river, a tendril, a long meandering trail through deep blue,, completing the journey. If it is also useful or practical, so be it.

Enjoying: how the morning swim is never the same. Today the air was cool and the water was too. Last week, during a heat wave, I realized the water was almost too warm, I was longing for the late April days when I couldn’t feel my toes. So this morning I swam, looking west at the islands, the hill beyond, an uncertain sky above, and enjoyed every stroke, a breeze ruffling the water’s surface. Just as we arrived at the lake, a woman, a man, and 2 dogs were walking back to their car. You will swim? the woman asked, and Yes, I replied. Every morning! There are 2 kinds of people, she said. The ones that won’t swim in cold water and the ones who will. I am the first kind, she said, and they are the second — pointing to the man and the dogs. Two kinds of people, dogs included.

Reading: I almost never watch television. I think I have the wrong metabolism. I can’t take tension, the anticipation of danger, the way the music will suggest horror or violence. But sometimes I do like reading a mystery and there’s no one better than Tana French for creating atmosphere, letting events unspool slowly but surely (and scarily), and for building suspense in an organic way, as naturally as bog cotton and spruce. Over the past 3 nights I read The Keeper, putting it down for short periods when the sense of threat felt too overwhelming, then returning, reading ten more pages, looking away through the dark windows.

Remembering: the loon swimming very near me yesterday, shadowing my strokes in the cool water, watching, close enough for me to see the intricate pattern of its collar.

Anticipating: when I’ve finished my garden chores this morning, I’m going to set up my summer dye studio. The table is folded away, the basins tucked under some shelves, the hotplate in its box inside. I have a basket of scoured cotton and linen and last week at the thrift shop, I found 9 beautiful monogrammed damask napkins, some of them with small stains, and I have a plan for them.

Appreciating: the letters and conversations about The Art of Looking Back. I loved seeing it on the Tyee’s summer reading list! And in the hands of my Czech friend, and my friend in the Netherlands.

Making: jam (rhubarb and ginger), banana bread, lamb tagine, excellent sourdough bread with Artemis, my trusty starter, pesto sauce with the beautiful summer basil, and every evening, salad with our gorgeous greens — deer’s tongue lettuce, kale, arugula, magenta spreen, mustard, huge leaves of Italian parsley.

Eating: raspberries, raspberries, and more raspberries. Yesterday I was picking them and for each one I dropped in the colander, one went in my mouth. For their first week, we say we are going out to pick raspberries. And then we say we are going out to pick the frigging raspberries. But in winter, when I take a bag of them out of the freezer, I will bless each one, frigging or not.

This morning, bear tracks in the sand by the water. And fresh poop where we turn off the highway to the parking lot by the lake. On the highway itself, dark tire tracks from the guys who were out a few nights ago, screeching their brakes and leaving long scribbles on the pavement, some of them quite beautiful. Painted on a rock up the highway, Yaarg, wenches, in red. And periodically, a heart will appear, with initials, sometimes pierced with an arrow. On a tree, a wag has carved Fuck You in the bark. At the end of Sakinaw Lake, pictographs in red pigment: crayfish, salmon, other sea creatures. Two horses pecked in schist at Ribeira de Piscos.

My own marks are made with words, typed, edited, then typeset, bound between covers, left as stories or essays or reminders to myself. Or they’re worked in thread, stitched through three layers of cotton, to hold the layers together, for warmth, and to hold my own time in place, my own place in time, as I sat the fire, quilt stretched in a wooden hoop, the needle following my thinking, turning, turning back on itself, making a spiral, a long curve of river, a meandering path, the way a bird moves in early light, and finishing with a tiny knot to anchor the line.

Can you tell me what happened to the blossom
Blackberry blossom when the summertime came?
The blackberry blossom, oh the last time I saw one
Was down in the bramble where I rambled in the spring

The days pass and some days I notice almost nothing new. I do the watering, lug tubs of soil around, hang out the laundry. The days are hot. This morning there’s a little smoke in the air, maybe from the fire near Lytton, blown over the mountains, or maybe from the one near Halfmoon Bay. The other day some miscreants near us managed to start a small fire near Ruby Lake, where we swim each morning. I heard helicopters, sirens, and by the time a friend called to tell us about the drama, the fire was out. The days pass.

This morning, the water was smooth as satin. No kingfishers — I love it when they skim over the water to land in the group of cedars I use for orientation when I’m swimming on my back — and the loon that shadowed my swim two mornings ago was nowhere to be seen. A few swallows dipping and swooping. I swam and then I hung in the water like a string for few minutes, marvelling at how a body only needs a little flutter of hands to keep from sinking. I closed my eyes. A boat at the other end of the lake. Crows. John was reading in his chair under the big fir, having finished his swim earlier than me. I was thinking of the day ahead, the watering, whether or not to haul a tomatillo out of the greenhouse that seems to have a virus on a few of its leaves. (Not flea beetles. Not thrips. And the plant is otherwise big and healthy, with lots of flowers.) What a luxury, to hang vertically in the water, thinking. The hardhack was coming into bloom, a small trout flipped out of the water near me, a silver comma in the morning. Pause. Think.

No one else at the beach. Such quiet. A car now and then on the highway up above me. I am a comma in my life right now, paused. Thinking. What comes next? A list, two clauses, a phrase? I thought of a song I’ve loved for years, Michelle Shocked’s “Blackberry Blossom”, and sure enough, when we walked to the car, there were swallowtails in the blackberries. drawn to the sweet flowers. In 6 weeks, we’ll be picking the fruit, making pies, jam, the simple ice-cream that Brendan loves. In the sweet flowers, the swallowtails. A crow in the maples. Time to start the watering.

The bramble was wild, I was torn by the briars
My love he wooed me as I lie there
With a flower in my hair and my cheeks all flushed
Was the blackberry blossom from the blackberry bush?

Note: this was written in June, 4 years ago.

____________________________

This is the indigo dye vat of a few years ago. I’m getting ready for another dye session, perhaps when my daughter visits in July. It’s a pull, a yearning. To prepare the materials, to mix the powders, to plunge tied bundles into the vat once, twice, four times. To unwrap and drape on the clothes line. A deeply satisfying thing, the creation of pattern on a plain surface, and then to stitch the finished cloth into something else, quilts mostly.

This weekend I read Sara Baume’s handiwork, a book about writing and making. Her particular handwork is the making of birds from plaster moulds. Photographs throughout the book show these elegant creations, painted and smooth. Accompanying the descriptions of working on them are meditations on bird migration, the importance of tools, the legacies of our parents and grandparents in our bodies and our daily work.

If my granddad was wood and my dad was iron, then what am I?

My father was a radar technician and a gunsmith. He had tools in his basement and he spent hours at his workbench, polishing the beautiful woods he used when he restored stocks or made new ones himself. I remember being about 10 years old and feeling drawn to his workbench, wanting desperately to make something myself. There were the chisels, the drillpress, the fragrant oils. My hands wanted to know how to hold them, how to smooth the wood and oil it and bring out its grain. My dad had the patience to take a radio apart and put it together again, to make a rowboat, to teach himself celestial navigation in his later years, but he didn’t have the patience to teach me how to use his tools. Did I ask? I don’t remember. But I remember watching him, wanting to know how things fit; I remember sitting on the basement stairs as he sharpened his chisels and knives, the sound of the whetstone, and the scent of the oil he used for honing. He wouldn’t have understood why I like indigo dye and the whole process of not knowing the results. That would have puzzled him. Sara’s dad was puzzled by her art school sculptures but he converted an old greenhouse into a studio for her. My dad was reluctant to share his typewriter, bought at Goodwill, and used to keep careful records of my older brother’s hockey team statistics.

Last night, reading handiwork, I heard loons down on Sakinaw Lake. It was a lonely sound but also self-contained and comforting. As I am self-contained, though lonely, when I dip my tied bundles into indigo dye on calm mornings. I felt that old compulsion: how could I make something to hold everything I knew, everything I loved, that would allow me to use my hands and follow their instinct, on paper, with cloth and thread. To include somehow the return of the tanagers, the first morning of birdsong, the high cry of snow geese flying south in autumn. The fish in Haskins Creek. The grace of swallows around me as I swim each morning. The kingfishers.

William Morris–artist, designer, writer, activist, socialist–agreed that hands know what they must do without instruction, that the objects shaped by their ancestor’s phalanxes and phalanges and metacarpals for thousands of years remain in the memory compartment of their tiny brains, in the same way as birds know which way to fly without being guided or following a plotted course, without a book that provides detailed drawings and plans with parts and kits to accompany it.

I put handiwork on the bed beside me last night and thought about how Sara Baume has written a book that isn’t one thing or another. It’s not a book of writing rules or etiquettes. You won’t learn how to shape a bird yourself using plaster and knives and paint. The photographs of birds held up, their beaks poignant, their paint glossy — what are they anyway? She doesn’t say.* This is a book about mysteries and an admirable attention to them. How a bird flies from islands off the Northumbrian coast to Antarctica, and back, adjusting its navigational compass to account for winds, and how somehow the act of making can echo that, pay homage to that.

The wonder and awe, the catharsis and reassurance–the guilty bliss– of a fresh small object placed into the world; some entirely unique, inimitable thing that didn’t exist just a couple of hours ago, and which I have brought into existence myself–alone and utterly. A trail of progress I can see; I can feel; I can place; I can move around in a shaft of light; I can hold aloft to the damaged planet.

Some days I think, Why bother? Why bother with writing books that get lost in the ebb and flow of the literary conversation, their voices a little quiet and timorous for these times? Or quilts, because honestly does anyone need another one in a world filled with stuff? But my hands need the work, my mind needs what happens when my hands find their way to loop and tie and dip and stitch. The way I find myself weeping when I see the cloth hanging on the clothesline, the books arriving in a courier’s van. See, you did this. It’s not quite what you meant to do (is it ever?) but you did this. On the cover of handiwork, a whole little flock of painted birds, ready to fly.

*Actually she does say. I didn’t see the note at the end of the book in which she lists the species. Not the pages so you sort of have to count and hope that you’ve actually found the hooded crow, the pied wagtail…

This is my dad — he looks to be around 4 years old — at his family home on the north side of the Red Deer River, near Michichi Creek. The house to the right burned some years later and I believe my grandparents rebuilt, though that house no longer exists. My dad was born in 1926. He would have been 100 years old this year. His childhood was so long ago, in the Badlands, his parents both recent immigrants to Canada, his mother from what’s now the Czech Republic, his father from western Ukraine. Who does the dog see, is someone arriving or leaving? My grandmother originally lived in the squatter settlement on the south bank of the river, with her first husband and their 9 children. His childhood was so long ago, in a time and place I can only imagine. And I do, I try to imagine what it was like to grow up with parents who barely spoke English, who were illiterate, or at least his father was; his mother went to school with my dad for a few years to learn to read and write. The children from her first marriage were grown, apart from Myrtle, who died as an infant, and the first child she had with my grandfather, Julia, was dead as well. If not then, when? The letters she wrote to my dad when he was a young sailor were simple and full of pleas for him to remember his prayers.

This is my dad, with the sister who died 3 years before his birth. It appears that Julia is somehow propped on the arm of the chair but I have the photographer’s notes for this image which I’m guessing my grandmother “commissioned”; he or she has clipped Julia from an earlier photograph and somehow superimposed her on a photo of my dad standing alone on the chair.

I think it’s not dramatic to say I’m haunted by my father’s childhood, full of burning houses and dead sisters and the scent of incense — my father was an altar boy in the church he was named for, St. Anthony’s in Drumheller. I am haunted by a childhood lived almost a hundred years ago, in a place so different from where he ended up, Victoria, B.C., estranged from one son, yet yearning for him when he died. I’ve written about him many times and he still a mystery to me. My own childhood was so long ago, more than 65 years since I was the age my father was in the photograph of him on his tricycle. In the wonderful album, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”, Utah Phillips tells stories while Ani DiFranco provides musical background, and I listened to it obsessively for about a year after it came out in 1996. There’s a lot of wisdom in the stories Phillips tells; there’s history and reminders of responsibility and our debt to our ancestors. My debt to my father is huge. In physical terms, I am built like him, stocky and strong, and I have his curiosity about books, about fish, and I think it was from him that my own restless need to know about history and story originated. We disagreed about a lot of things but on a day like today, Father’s Day, I’d love to sit him down on our deck, pour him a good measure of Lagavulin, and ask him questions. The past is still here, in my hands (his hands), my thinking (sometimes echoing his), and the rocks I have arranged on my windowsills, some with fossils, some from favourite rivers, older than the oldest songs I know, some of them songs my father also loved. Shenandoah, Old Man River, Amazing Grace.

I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can’t live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know,
and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.

Note: the lines are from “Bridges”, by Utah Phillips.

I grow a lot of roses. Not carefully, not with any plan, but because someone gives me a cutting or a cane or I see a plant in a garden centre that looks like it would be happy in our wild chaotic garden. And this time of year, the roses are blooming with such abandon. I was doing something else when I noticed the moss roses in the vegetable garden, particularly the lighter pink ones, the canes taking over one entire end. And why not? The bees love them. The story of the woman who left a few canes on the seat of my truck while I was in a meeting 35 years ago lives in them, though she is long dead. And the deeper pink ones, also from her, are full of bees this morning. There are also sprays of an unnamed climber and some richly scented “Reine des Violettes”, Queen of the Violets, smelling like the winds of heaven.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

I have several musical instruments but can’t play any of them well. I have a stack of books I am eager to read. I was so busy this morning, watering, gathering big buckets together to carry mulch up to the pots of tomatoes thriving on the upper deck, and then I stopped for the roses, their unassuming beauty. And why not? Everything else can wait. And will. As I arranged the stems in a jug of cool water, a few flowers fell apart in my hands, falling to the floor. I bent down and brushed up the petals happily. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Note: the lines are Rumi’s, from “A Great Wagon”, in Coleman Barks’ translation.

Some mornings I am quiet when we walk down to the water, last night’s dream still resonating. The one where the young man danced on a long beam, where we still had dogs, where I couldn’t find the cloth for our table. Something was about to happen and I could only wait.

I was quiet, looking up into the leafy maples, thinking about their vertical ecosystems, mostly unseen by those of us below — the epiphyte colonies established in their crown areas, lichens, mosses, ferns, and how they increase the nutrients available to the trees. I was thinking that dreams are a bit like this. Our waking lives are nourished by what we remember, and don’t, of the dramas that happen while we sleep.

When I pushed off into the water this morning, a single merganser fluttered a bit near the log beyond the beach area and swam away. A few weeks ago, 2 merganser chicks were swimming alone in the same area. They were too young to have left their mother for lives of their own but there was no adult duck in sight. Some years around this time, we’ve seen newly-hatched chicks, once 17 of the tiniest babies, like puffs of thistledown, some of them riding their mother’s back, all of them close to her as she swam along the shore, feeding. Later in the year, we saw a female merganser, maybe the same one, with 6 chicks, then 4. Ospreys patrol the lake, as do eagles. Ravens are often in the trees when we came for our morning swim. So anything could have picked off the babies until just a handful were left. But 2, without a mother in sight? And then this morning, a female in the same area, looking a little forlorn?

I was forlorn for the merganser’s sake, swimming and thinking about my dream, the bare table, the waiting. Some mornings the veil between this life and another feels very thin, gossamer, as light as the sun on my shoulders as I stepped from the water.