Author: theresakishkan

At 2 a.m., I was awake, thinking about the novel I am working on. When I began it a few years ago (it has been put aside several times while I got caught up in other writing), I wanted to write about a small fishing community and its legacy of stories, marine engines, and remnant old growth forests. I wanted to see this as a painter might and so the main character is a painter. Many of the scenes are based on her attempts to put down on canvas what she sees and imagines. She doesn’t have a method to explore the layers she sees in the community so she works out various strategies–seams in the canvas, with one thing layered behind another, revealed by opening tiny zippers and other closures. I didn’t know when I began that part of the narrative would shift to Ukraine but it has and I’ve just finished that section. At 2 a.m., I was awake, excited about some idea I had for making a material connection between the two places: Easthope, the fishing village; and Yalynakivtsi, the Ukrainian village. I kept turning over, twitching, and finally I got up and came downstairs to try to piece together my ideas.

This is what I love best: writing that fills my imagination, overflows into my daily life, so that I am walking around with the world of the novel or essay swirling in my heart and mind. This morning I came downstairs, made coffee and a warm fire (it’s raining!), fed the cat, and then came in to see if what I’d written in the dark made sense. And I think it does. It’s led me to a couple more things I want to write today in and around packing for a few weeks in France. We leave tomorrow. Luckily I will have a notebook and a handful of pens and I hope I will come home with the makings of another section.

And because it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I’m also thinking about food. Last week I was bringing my main character to a small Ukrainian village where members of her family are waiting with a meal. It’s late September and they are still using their summer kitchen with its ancient pich. Here’s a postcard from the village.

postcard from a Yalynakivtsi summer kitchen

borshch with pampushky, drizzled with garlic oil, smetana spooned over top; holubtsi, bright with tomato sauce; tangy sourdough rye loaves; varenyky, cheese-filled, potato-filled, mushroom-filled, thick smetana to dip them in; a round of banush flavoured with pork fat and sheep’s milk cheese; ducks roasted in the pich, stuffed with garlic; kutia for dessert, snippings of dried apricots and peaches; and cherry-filled varenyky, this time with sweetened cream. Poppyseed cake, topped with plums in a sweet glaze. Glasses of uzvar, dark and smoky.

Note: this was first posted 3 years ago.

It was after my second sleep that I woke from the dream. After waking at 4 in panic to realize I hadn’t closed the greenhouse door last evening–yesterday morning I went out for kindling and smelled a bear, maybe the same one that came two nights earlier to tear apart one of the compost boxes; and most mornings there’s evidence of deer–in panic, I went out in the dark in my nightdress to make my bare-footed way to close it up. (I don’t think anything found it because a bushy tomato plant was still filling part of the threshold.) So after the second sleep, the brief one, when I woke in tears because of the dream. Everyone was here, all the children, their parents, and it was today, the day I’m making a feast for friends we haven’t seen for months. But in the dream I was making the meal for them. Two were racing out to the mossy area they called The Field, still in their pyjamas, and I told them to go in and put on warmer clothes if they were going to roll around on the ground. I was looking for something. Firewood maybe. And I came up on to the deck, standing for a minute in the quiet to plan pancakes for breakfast, when Friday came up behind me. Friday was the dog John had when we met in 1979, an English sheepdog X, and she became the dog of our children’s early childhoods. She died when Angelica was an infant. I have always regretted the way her death was a little too perfunctory. A year earlier a vet had given her vitamin shots and told us it would give her a good year. It did. And then everything seemed to go at once but mostly her bladder. She was on a course of antibiotics. Then another. Then her entire backend collapsed. It was a loss of proprioception, the vet said. She no longer knew where her limbs were in space. Every morning I’d come downstairs with a baby over my shoulder, two small boys needing breakfast, John getting ready to drive down the Coast to work (he was teaching in those years), and the kitchen would be flooded in pee. Before anything else, the floor had to be washed. Before the fire, before coffee, before breakfast. One morning, John just said, Boys, say goodbye to Friday, because we knew this day was coming but didn’t expect its arrival. So suddenly, so soon. There were tears. Goodbyes. She was carried out to the car. For the next year, Brendan, who was 3, said he could hear her barking underground. So she came up behind me in the dream, joyous to be home, a chain attached to her collar and wrapped around her back legs, but still she had found her way to us, through the woods, her curly hair tangled with sticks and bramble. Can I tell you my dream, I said to John, and afterwards he said, You want the dead back. I do. It’s true. I want them all back. The parents, the friends, the dogs, the cats. I want them all here for the turkey I will be roasting this afternoon, dense with dried-fruit stuffing, the caramelized brussels sprouts, the salad of garden tomatoes and basil, the vanilla and maple ice cream I made last night to have with Amy’s dessert. I want them all home. John brought me strong coffee to drink in my bed and I opened Double Shadow, by Carl Phillips, and wept again as I read these lines:

                                      I keep meaning to stop,
to wait for you.

Coffee in my green cup, face damp, the scent of the fire either coming in the open window or else drifting up the stairs. I want them all back.

It’s been a season of bears. Looking out to see one swinging in the high branches of the crabapple tree, watching another (or maybe the same one?) walking up from the old orchard and slowly circling the garden, seeing a mother and a cub* amble across the grass just beyond my study window, chasing two cubs off the upper deck where they’d been sent by their mother to check for grapes (all picked). In late November or early December, there will be coho in the creeks draining into Sakinaw Lake, and soon, maybe even now, there will be pink salmon a little further afield, in Anderson Creek. We don’t usually see bears after the salmon have finished. They don’t reliably hibernate but they do sleep for long periods. The other day we went down to a favourite chanterelle site and I have to say I kept thinking about bears as I saw areas dug away under trees, places we’ve found pine mushrooms in the past. Oh, and the chanterelles? So abundant this year. We came home with a shopping bag full.

On Sunday I swam in the lake and realized I couldn’t feel my toes. Time to shift, I thought, and so this week I’ve been swimming in the local pool. I’m glad to be able to do it but already I miss the quiet mornings, the kingfishers, the fish jumping for flies. I miss the living quality of the water, even if it got too cold for me to continue comfortably. Over the winter I’ll take the occasional plunge in the lake, just to maintain our relationship. I love the way it closes over my shoulders when I first glide out, love its buoyancy, its clarity.

After a long period of not being able to think my way back in the novel I’d put aside, I found a way to proceed with the material I was exploring, the characters who’d emerged out of it, and also a way (I hope) to create a trajectory for the two separate locations of the novel. Every day this week I’ve been writing, writing, and yesterday, when I closed my computer to drive down to Sechelt on errands, my main character was in a car with a newly-found cousin, driving south-east out of Lviv towards Chernivtsi. This is 2015 and so there’s no danger of missiles or drones and they are talking about food. What will happen next? I have no idea — and that fills me with excitement.

In less than 2 weeks, John and I will fly to France for a few weeks of exploration. We will mostly be in the Dordogne and I’ve been looking at maps, planning routes. Last night I dreamed we were about to enter the Font-de-Gaume cave in Les Eyzies but somehow we got sidetracked somewhere else. Luckily I’ve booked tickets for the cave and with any luck I’ll be able to go on with the dream. When I was 19, I wrote a poem about one of the Dordogne caves and reading now reminds me that it’s a dream that has always been part of my consciousness.

We have come
hearing of Paleolithic animals
hearing of underground galleries/

An electric rain holds fifteen people,
goes down into the caves each day…

The electric train is at Rouffignac and luckily we’re going there too. I understand there’s one cave bear image in this cave and scratch marks from the bears who lived here earlier than 15,000 years ago. A little bow to those bears from the ones who amble by my window, waiting for salmon.

*John took this photograph. The mum was just in the woods beyond.

Note: this was written 6 years ago. The jacket is still being worn.

________________________________

Maybe it’s the light, the grey light, and the sound of rain on the metal roof. Maybe it’s the time of year, the maples turning, the scent of elk in the air, and the last of the apples turned into pies. But there are ghosts everywhere. Looking out my window just now, I saw…my father? in the woodshed. No. It’s my husband, sorting out kindling.

As he was heading out earlier, we were talking about how time seems to be moving backwards for us. We hear our parents, their sayings—our mothers and their habitual frugalities, our fathers and how their notions of the world were shaped (inevitably) by their experiences of the war. So we laughed and then John came back into the kitchen, laughing. “I’m still wearing his jacket,” he said.

My dad loved Pioneer rainwear. I don’t know if it’s even available any longer. But he always had a green jacket, replaced perhaps once in his life. And when he bought the one new one I remember him buying, he passed along his old one to John. My father hasn’t worn the jacket since at least the early 1990s (and he’s been dead since 2009) but it still smells like him. More than him, it smells like my life with him, as a child camping, or walking some evenings with the family dog.

So the jacket reminds me. The air reminds me. The scent of elk. Apples with wrinkled skins on the counter. The way the rain sounds its own soft music until you don’t hear it anymore but it’s in your blood, your heart.

And I’ve been here before, I thought, my father’s old jacket taking me back as surely as anything can. In the mid-1990s, I wrote about his jacket, published in Red Laredo Boots, my first collection of essays. So I found my copy of the book and yes, here’s the passage:

The fire is warm, soup is simmering, and all the old ghosts are waiting in the grey light. Listen, listen, rain on the roof, the return of the Steller’s jays, the rustle of the jacket as my husband returns it to its hook.

For some months I’d put my novel-in-progress aside. Too many things were on my mind and settling (imaginatively) back into a small coastal village just wasn’t possible. Throughout September, I worked a little on it, in it, each day. But I wasn’t sure how and why I might proceed. But yesterday afternoon the power went out unexpectedly and when it still hadn’t come back on in time for dinner, we went out for Mexican food. Maybe it was the bright lights, maybe it was the delicious Ixtapa ceviche, but somehow I was leaning across the table and telling John that I’d found a way to organize what was beginning to feel like too much material without a clear direction. Earlier in the day, in search of information about Doriston, a tiny hamlet that is, in a way, the presiding muse of this novel, I’d found an article online, part of my friend Andrew Scott’s BC Postal History Newsletter. This article repeated some of the information from Andrew’s 2005 Doriston article in the Georgia Straight but it also included more stuff about the short-lived Doriston Post Office. And in the way that an unexpected thing lights the flame that is inspiration, I spent the rest of the afternoon, or at least until the power went out, sketching a scene that allowed me to see my novel in a new and different way.

Somehow I was leaning across the table and telling John that I was going to organize the sections of the novel–the Easthope one and the Lviv one–as a series of postcards. In a way this is what I’ve already been doing but I’ve been nervous about also finding a more conventional way to connect the scenes, the moments, the sketches. Maybe I don’t need to though. Maybe the postcards themselves will make a coherence that is accumulative rather than simply narrative. I’m going to try anyway. The clues have been there all along. The cabin that my characters live in is on the Doriston Highway–if you’ve walked the Skookumchuck trail, you’ve been on the Doriston Highway–and some historical events concerning Doriston have inspired a series of paintings one of the characters is working on. So Postcards from Doriston, Postcards from Lviv. Today I feel the old excitement.

Note: the image at the top is from British Columbia Postal History Newsletter, Volume 28 Number 3, edited by Andrew Scott. Andrew isn’t well so I haven’t asked him for permission to use the image but I feel sure he wouldn’t mind. We have shared our fascination with Doriston many times.

Yesterday we picked the last of the grapes. Not the table grapes growing over the west-facing deck — we picked those last week, ahead of the raccoons who’ve come since, scrambling over the roof and trellis, a whole family in search of grapes. The ones in the basket are wine grapes, from vines planted more than 30 years ago, Chardonnay and Marechal Foch. I don’t think we ever thought we’d make wine but the garden centre had these varietals and we thought their leaves would keep the south side of the house cool in summer. And they do. Tree frogs love the green leaves and of course raccoons and bears love the fruit. The other morning I stood at a north-facing window at 7 a.m. and saw the big bear who’s been up and down the trails lately, well, I saw him in the crabapple tree, swaying near the top as he feasted on the scabby crabs. I didn’t want him in the grapes.

I juiced about 6 pounds of grapes and I made a batch of wine grape jelly flavoured with port and rosemary. It’s delicious. I like it best with mature cheddar on good bread. It truly distills the flavour of late summer and it seems appropriate to preserve that flavour on the first day of fall.

Mostly today I am thinking about a dream I had early this morning. I’d been awake for hours in the night, coming down to my desk for an hour or so, and then returning to bed. What kept me from sleep was a series of regrets. The usual ones. Not having been a better daughter, a better mother to my children. So my mind was filled with these difficult feelings and when I fell back to sleep, I dreamed I knew I had to tell my mother, who was somehow still alive, about her parents. She was given up at birth and placed in what she called a foster home but the 1931 census lists her as a “boarder”. She was 5 years old. And I’ve learned this was because her biological mother paid for her to be lodged in that household. There are lots of reasons for that particular house though I can’t prove any of my suspicions. But what I do know are the names of her biological parents and some things about them, My mother never knew these things. She knew nothing about them, apart from the fact that she carried both their surnames until she went to school and then one, her mother’s, dropped away and she was known by her father’s name. Her parents continued in their lives. Her father married, had two sons, and a successful life. I’ve been corresponding with one of his family members and will meet her one of these days. Her mother is a different story. She was a widow, with 4 children. She had expectations of the father and those didn’t transpire. She did go on to remarry. And I guess she–they, because the father contributed too–kept my mother in the home where she’d gone as a newborn. Her mother died in 1949 of cervical cancer. (This was the year before my mum met my dad.)

My mother knew none of these things. No one ever tried to find her–she had 3 half-sisters and 3 half-brothers. Many people knew about her, and some didn’t. I was kind of persistent because I wanted to know the hidden history of her origins and now I know but she’s been dead for 14 years next month. I dreamed she was still alive and I was trying to figure out how and what to tell her. Would it change anything, I wondered in the dream? Would it make her sad? I’ve been sad on her behalf. Sad as I pulled grapes off the stems, juiced them in a big stockpot, strained the juice, boiled it with sugar, port, and rosemary.

Here’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember.
And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts …
There’s fennel for you, and columbines.
There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.
We may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays.
– Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.
There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets,
But they withered all when my father died.

No pansies or columbine right now, but fennel, yes, and rosemary, and a little clump of rue among the weeds. As I stirred the jelly, I listened to Gillian Welch sing “Orphan Girl”, a song that made me cry as the jelly boiled, and I thought, we are both orphan girls, on either side of Continue reading “orphan girl” →