posts

Note: this was 3 years ago. Last night I was asleep before 9 and woke to hear what I thought was gunshot and realized, No, it was midnight and someone was celebrating. If you’ve found me here, I send you best wishes for the year ahead.

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The god Janus gives his name to the month of January, a name meaning passage or doorway. Janus is usually pictured as a two-headed deity, with the gift of seeing two ways; he looks forward and behind, simultaneously. He is bearded and smooth-faced, old and young. On this first day of January, sitting at my desk, I look out at green woods, where animal trails lead away from the house and towards it. Last week a quartet of Roosevelt elk found their way to us, two cows, one lying down in moss while the other kept watch, and their two calves, half-grown, grazed on periwinkle and lichen.

The god of whom Ovid wrote,

Two-headed Janus, source of the silently gliding year,
The only god who is able to see behind him

I am thinking of that double seeing this morning, particularly the ability to see behind oneself, having spent a couple of days in Victoria, the city where I was a child. As we drove from the hotel where we stayed to Cattle Point for a walk among the oaks, I kept saying, Well, we’re approaching another Memory Lane, because the city is threaded with them, tangled with them. The road running past the funny old apartment, formerly a movie theatre, a place where I found myself as a writer. (A ground-floor suite, where once someone reached in my bathroom window while I was in the bath to borrow matches from a box on the sill.)

The roads in and around Clover Point where I rode a small blue bike, exploring the edges of the known world, and where I once ventured as far as Thunderbird Park where I watched Kwakwaka‘wakw master carver Mungo Martin working on something, I don’t remember what exactly, but I do remember curls of cedar falling from his hands and how he showed me the sharp adze he was using. (I think it was an adze.) The road leading off the highway to the beach where I swam my horse on hot summer mornings, leaving the saddle on a log at the high tide line. Sometimes I’d ride him bareback along the sand afterwards, to dry out, seaweed trailing from his fetlocks. A curve of Rockland Avenue where I first knocked on a door that opened to something I am still trying to puzzle my way through. On that particular Memory Lane, we slowed the car so I could see if the studio where I sat on a flowered cloth for hours was still there, and yes, it was, or at least its windows were, multi-paned and mysterious.

Later in the week, I will have a birthday. Not a significant one, unless they all are; but one that guides me into the last years of a decade. So much undone still, so much to finish.

Janus is often depicted with a key in his right hand. He could open any door, the one you dream of, the one you stepped through into a new life, and the one you watch for now, the door into the dark.

All I know is a door into the dark,
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring

              –Seamus Heaney

Last night someone was taking the old year into the new with fireworks, not exactly an anvil and hammer striking sparks, but loud bursts like gunshot in the night. It reminded me that Janus is also represents the middle ground between barbarism and peace. Oh, a god we need now, in a world torn apart and burning, to look back at our excesses and perhaps point to the possibilities of our better nature.

I dreamed she was coming back from the dead, coming to a room she’d lived in, a room I hadn’t known about. When I opened the door, I found a bed, not the one she’d slept in with my father for just short of 60 years, but a small bed, covers drawn up over the pillow. I heard giggling and realized my grandsons were under the blankets, hiding. They had been playing in the room and their lego, books, bows and arrows, and little trucks were strewn everywhere. You have to help me tidy up, I told them, as I looked around at the unfamiliar clothing, a painting on the wall, a bag of epsom salts, the plastic shredded with age. A threadbare dressing gown hung from a hook on the door. She was coming back from the dead and I wanted her room to be as she’d left it. Would I tell her what I’d found out about her parents, I wondered. She died in 2010, not knowing. She’d lived from infancy with a woman she called her foster mother. She had her biological father’s surname. After her death, much later, I sent off a DNA sample and waited, waited, for a couple of years as little pieces of her family puzzle fell into place. First her father, then her mother, details revealed in a letter found in a tin box two years ago by the woman who would have been her sister-in-law. Would I tell her? You can never go home, you are never the same person, you are older, you have gone out into the world, you can never go home, but can you come home? She was coming home, back from the dead. You have to help me tidy up, I told my grandsons. Get out from under the covers.

Note: this was posted 4 years ago. I was working on edits for my Blue Portugal & Other Essays and am kind of astonished that it was both so long ago and so recent, if that makes sense. A book I loved writing in so many ways, each essay different from the next. And now I am anticipating the publication of my memoir, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, a book I’d not even thought about when I was working on Blue Portugal. (I was hoping to work on a novel-in-progress, Easthope, and yes, I returned to it, finished it, but the future doesn’t look positive for it. So I’m glad to have written something else, something that took me far outside my comfort level, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever return.)

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This morning I swam–imagine me in the lane on the left; what you can’t see are the huge windows looking out to snow–and I thought about the upcoming year. What are you hoping for, I asked myself, stroking on my back, looking up at the slatted ceiling, the little flags. (When I woke in the night to pee, I saw a few bright stars glittering above the mountain and I asked myself the same question.) My immediate hope was that the pool stays open during these perilous times and that I can continue my slow kilometre, three mornings a week. And then I hoped for better guidance during this pandemic because there are things I think should happen–free N95 masks (two years into this, it seems to me that in a province with an active pulp and paper industry, there could have been more effort to manufacture masks for our population); better ventilation in our schools; better attention to the needs of vulnerable citizens. We’re told to be kind and yes, yes, we need to be kind. But we need to be smart too. What do we do about people who refuse to be vaccinated but who want to be part of the social fabric? I don’t know. But can we continue the way we are, with people willing to stand outside our hospitals and schools, harassing others?

So I swam and I tried to think my way into the new year. And as I swam, the music played. The lifeguards often ask what we’d like and I tell you that doing a slow kilometre to Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto is sublime. But so is swimming to bluegrass or the Supremes (you can’t hurry love) or Adele. This morning no one asked. Roy Orbison, some other stuff I didn’t recognize, but then when I heard the opening chords of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” I smiled to myself.

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be on your own, with no direction home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

I swam and listened and thought about the novel I’m finding my way back into after (mostly) finishing up the edits for Blue Portugal, thanks to the wonderful Kimmy Beach, who asks the right questions and knows all kinds of stuff, like diacritics for passages of Greek. I thought about what Blue Portugal might look like now that the designer can apply his magic to completed pages, with text that uses margins like poetry does, with gaps and spaces and passages running down the middle like rivers. how excited I am to see how it evolves, and how I am drawn back to Easthope, the working title for my novel. Easthope is really mostly Egmont (though there will be some differences in both geography and characters) and when the pandemic was first declared, we had just been out for supper to the pub on the edge of Jervis Inlet where we saw whales and where we’ve returned when times felt safer — summer, because we could eat on the deck with wind blowing viruses to kingdom come; and in the fall when one needed to show proof of vaccination to come into the pub. It was never crowded and the tables are set far apart, Twice we sat by a roaring fire and ate steelhead tacos with chowder, feeling both the strangeness of the times and also blessed, if that doesn’t sound too emotional.

You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud

Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

What are you hoping for, I asked during my last lap, and for a moment it was this, this, this. The water, Dylan, my husband in the next lane, daughter and her beau waiting at home, dough for cinnamon buns rising in the big bowl, our own fire warm as icicles form on our eaves, a novel to write, a book coming out in April with the most beautiful cover, everyone in my family healthy (so far), the world white and mysterious, All the irritations eased out as that kink in my shoulder eased out, the anxieties (for now), the last lap, the final strokes. I’ll do what I can, hope for what’s possible, wear the masks, stay clear of the wild-eyed people with the signs near Davis Bay, and remember the beauty of those whales as we sat by the window overlooking Jervis Inlet, my notebook at hand, the sound of a boat approaching the dock, tok-tok-tok, and cormorants fishing as though nothing else mattered.

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can’t refuse

This is not the jay feeding outside this morning. Or maybe it is, but there’s a skiff of snow and today’s jay is a little skittish; I couldn’t get a clear shot. But the jays have been coming most mornings during the fall and winter for more than 40 years. If this jay, photographed last year, isn’t the one this morning, it’s probably a relative. Some days there are as many as 6. I love it in early fall when the ones born in spring are learning how to feed on the posts. (I have a hanging feeder in winter but I can’t use it until the bears den late in November because otherwise they drag the feeder down and bust it to get at the seeds.) Their crests are untidy, the young, and they are nervous. They’re kind of wildly acrobatic. And honestly, is there a better blue in nature’s paintbox? This is the colour I dream of, try to find in my vats of indigo and woad, dipping linen and cotton, 6 times, 7, and letting it rest overnight, untying and unclamping the next morning to see how close I am to the dreamed colour. I think the best morning was this past September when I was patient enough to spend most of the day dipping and removing for the solution to oxidize, dipping and removing, and then again. The indigo process is counter-intuitive: it’s not the length of time you let the fabric soak but the balance of immersion and oxidization.

I’m thinking about words to guide me through the next year. Patience is a good one. I’d like to be more patient. Do you remember Adrienne Rich’s poem “Integrity”? The one beginning with that astonishing line: “A wild patience has taken me this far…”? Maybe that’s the quality of patience I am looking for. Wild, problematic, untidy. The past two years have been hard in many ways. I felt I was shaken off my familiar foundation and I have been trying to learn how to made amends for my failings, to try to find a different way to look at the past and whatever future I have left. I have been trying to find a way to forgive myself. There’s been sadness in this work, and also anger. Also regret. It’s complicated. But patience would certainly be a better resource, particularly a wild patience.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere —
even from a broken web.

Do you see the spider webs in the fabric on the right? I didn’t know those beautiful arcs of white would be the result of the tying I did to the white cotton I began with. I wrapped with hemp string, tying it tightly in several places. I had faith, I think, that whatever the result would be, it would be beautiful. And on this cold late December morning, I will be patient until the days are warm enough to make a dye vat, to take my lengths of cotton and linen and even the raw silk I have saved patiently for the right time to give it a new life. Maybe this is true for me too. I don’t want a new life but I want to let the anger and tenderness breathe in me as angels now, not the difficult weight they have been for the past 2 years.

A wild patience. Can I choose two words for the new year? Can you? In the meantime, I wish everyone who finds me here a very good year. There is a little band of pinky-gold light on the western horizon, beyond the lake, beyond the trees. The chickadees are fluttering by the door and the jay is waiting in the big fir for more seeds. The morning has a kind of clarity, green, snowy white, the blue feathers of the jay. I wish everyone, even myself. In a little while, I’ll bring in the basket of blue fabric to sew by the fire. Nothing needs doing as much as that.

I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.

Note: the lines are from Adrienne Rich’s “Integrity”,

Today is the shortest day, the day when the dark surrounds us, early and late. Here we are keeping the fire burning and preparing a room for Angie and Karna, who will arrive in the dark. On the table, ribbons and tissue for the packages to go under the tree we cut up the Malaspina trail last Wednesday. It’s been waiting in the woodshed, leaning a little like someone tired after a long journey. We’ll bring it in the day after tomorrow. This way, it will still surprise me when I come downstairs on Christmas morning, the Chieftains singing the old carols. So today is the shortest day. How lovely it was the other night to sit at our table with dear friends to celebrate a birthday with the candles burning, their blue wax dripping onto the cloth. I sent my parcels east and on Christmas morning I’ll see the faces of those I love on the screen, showing me what I sent, what others provided. When I read this Rilke poem this morning (translated by Robert Bly), I thought, yes, a circle of light for everyone, because the dark is there, potent as ever: a great energy.

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! —
powers and people —

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

 

Last night, on his birthday eve, John looked out the window and said, I can see Orion.

The Road was lit with Moon and star –

It’s been damp lately, skies muzzy with cloud. Orion has always been his constellation, hovering over him as a young boy buying his first bow, learning the tension, the release of the arrow. I made this quilt for a grandson 7 years ago when he was turning 3, a swirl of autumn salmon, shell buttons for eyes and for the constellations present in our western sky on the night of his eastern birth crowning the top: Cygnus, Cassiopeia, and Orion. Still in the sky, as another birthday is celebrated.

The Road was lit with Moon and star –
The Trees were bright and still –
Descried I – by the distant Light
A Traveller on a Hill –
To magic Perpendiculars
Ascending, though Terrene –
Unknown his shimmering ultimate –
But he indorsed the sheen –

–Emily Dickinson

 

Note: This was first posted five years ago. It was a dark time, the uncertainties of COVID and a surgery gone sideways for my husband heavy in my heart and mind. But sometimes a piece of music can transport one and provide its own sense of healing.

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Some days are easier than others. For me, for us, for all of us. Yesterday was dark. When we went to pick up mail from the day before, we saw that all the parcel boxes at the community mail boxes had been pried open. This was the second time. Someone has been going around the Coast, stealing parcels from the community mail boxes. In a year when our lives are reduced and constrained, when so many people are depending on Canada Post for parcel deliveries and Christmas mail in general. There was confusion at the Post Office itself when I stopped in to mail my final family parcel. Usually you have a key to the parcel box in your individual mail box if you have a parcel. Or if the parcel is large, you have a card asking you to pick it up at the post office. Can I assume that I didn’t have a parcel in the box that was pried open if I didn’t have a key or a card, I asked. But no one could say for sure. It turned out I did have a parcel card in that day’s mail, for a parcel that hadn’t yet gone out. I wanted to ask if two break-ins in as many weeks meant that the mail person would no longer leave parcels in the community mail boxes but the post lady was already cross with me about a postal code she insisted was wrong on the parcel I was trying to mail so I left in tears.

Tears that were never far from the surface throughout the day. Someone scolded me in the 1st grocery story (long story). I got wet everywhere I went. John was grumpy and although I know he has more reason than anyone to be grumpy these days (paralyzed foot….), I took it personally. In the library stacks I cried. I cried as I loaded groceries in the back of the car from the cart after my stop at the second grocery store, unbagged because the cashier spoke sharply to me when I said I’d use my own bags. You’ll have to put things in your cart, then, and do it out in the mall area, she said. We can’t have your bags on the counter. (I know this. I’ve been shopping at this store for 40 years, and once a week throughout the pandemic. I wouldn’t have put my bags on the counter. But I didn’t want to cry in front of her so I just wheeled my cart out to the car with the groceries heaped in any old way.) Wiping my face with the back of my hand as I closed the trunk of the car, I suddenly stopped. Was that “Wild Mountain Thyme” I was hearing? It was. The older fellow who plays his guitar outside the liquor store, the one who usually plays old Gordon Lightfoot songs, who sings with a world-weary voice, and into whose guitar case I’ve dropped many twoonies over the years, was strumming and singing (behind a face-shield).

O the summer time has come
And the trees are sweetly blooming
And wild mountain thyme
Grows around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?

Some days are hard. You think of all the people who will be alone this Christmas, waiting for parcels or cards, you think of the cashiers saying the same thing over and over, hoping that someone doesn’t infect them, the nursing staff in the hospitals consoling, consoling (I think of how kind they were to John when he was in pain), the people working in post offices trying to do their best with mountains of deliveries to boxes that are clearly not safe, the families lined up at food banks, and you wish, wish for the beauty of summers in years gone by, the garden flourishing, your loved ones sleeping in every bed in your house, the long pink sunsets, and even the scent of thyme you’ve cut for the lamb you are preparing for the barbecue, enough for everyone.

I will range through the wilds
And the deep land so dreary
And return with the spoils
To the bower o’ my dearie.
Will ye go lassie go ?

Cooking:

The other day I was making candied orange slices for panforte and I made some extras to dip in very dark chocolate as a Christmas treat. The smell of them! And the anticipation of eating one at some point, with a glass of wine.

Listening:

Pablo Casals playing the Bach Cello Suites. The story of Casals finding the sheet music for the Suites at the age of 13 in a second-hand store in Barcelona in 1890 is an interesting one in itself, the music relatively unknown and seldom performed, and this particular score (a 1866 concert edition) much annotated by German cellist Friedrich Grützmacher. I have many recordings of these pieces but this is my favourite, or at least it’s my favourite for a mild day in December when the wind is blowing and chickadees are haunting the feeder.

Thinking:

As I swam my slow laps this morning, alone in the pool for half of them, I was thinking about love, how it sometimes fills the heart to the point of pain. I was swimming the backstroke and thinking about how this time of year always contains every Christmas I’ve known, the early ones when my brothers and I woke at 5, the later ones when my children woke early but waited until their dad put on the Chieftains recording, The Bells of Dublin, the title song (with the bell ringers of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin) bringing our Christmas morning to life. The ones away from home (Ireland, Italy), the lonely ones, the noisy ones, the ones where family and friends, now gone from this earth, ate at our table, the sweet ones, the ones yet to come.

Watching:

I have been watching the Anna’s hummingbirds dart back and forth to the feeder by my kitchen window, the cerise crown and throat of the male brilliant in the grey air.

Enjoying:

The warmth of wood fires, here every day, at the Backeddy the other night, how the heat is unlike any other, reaching the bones.

Finishing:

I thought I’d be finished this current quilt by now, thought I’d be working on one I’ve promised a grandchild, but somehow the stitching is slow (like my swimming), my needle finding a meandering line through the indigo-dyed linen, the rose madder-dyed linen, attaching a little shell button here, and here, and here.

Reading:

I somehow missed Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies when it first came out in 2012, maybe because I wasn’t swimming regularly then, but I read it last week, caught up in both the prose and the illustrations: swimming pools, bathing suits, old team members from her time as a competitive swimmer. A very original and fascinating meditation.

Appreciating:

The generous words of those who’ve commented on my forthcoming book, most recently (this morning) Evelyn Lau: https://thornapplepress.ca/books/the-art-of-looking-back/

Wishing:

I wish I had my life to live again, knowing what I know.

Remembering:

The moment, years ago, when I was sitting by the fire and turned to see a weasel standing on its hind legs, looking through the glass doors at me.

Note: I know it’s a little early for a solstice post but I wrote this last year and I realize that the quilt I am now working on uses the fabric I was writing about here. Every day I stitch into the blue swirls. It’s just after 8 a.m. and it’s barely light but at least I have this work to do when my own thinking goes dark.

I was asleep at the moment of the winter solstice, 1:20 a.m. Pacific time. Yesterday was a long day. We went to Vancouver for a medical procedure for John, to the same facility where I went every few weeks for 5 months last year to have my threadbare retinas stabilized and repaired. On our way down the coast, we stopped to pick up our mail from the previous day. Finally things I ordered in early to mid November are beginning to arrive so I was happy to open a package containing a copy of Christine Desdemaines-Hugon’s Stepping Stones: A Journey Though the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne, recommended to me by Clara Aussel who took John and I to Rouffignac and Font de Gaume in late October.

I was 19 when I first read about the caves in the Dordogne Valley. I wrote a poem about them, tucked away the memory of seeing photographs of animals alive on limestone cave walls, and finally we went to France this fall in order to actually visit the caves. It was wondrous. I felt I’d found my people, the ones who’d given us the gift of reindeer, bison, horses, mammoths. We were only able to visit two caves as well as the Lascaux reproductions but I knew then, and know now, that we’ll go back.

On the ferry from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay and in the medical facility waiting area, I read about the Vézère Valley where Clara took us and where I’ve actually found a little house I want to buy (but probably won’t). I was thinking of how humans make their mark. I was thinking about the night before when friends came for John’s birthday dinner. Amy and I were talking about indigo and I took her to the back of the house to show her the pieces I dyed in September. She was most taken by a 5 m. length of linen I’d twisted and tied. I remember that John held one end of the fabric on the patio while I twisted it as tightly as I could and then tied it with coarse hemp string, hoping it wouldn’t slip or loosen. I was curious to see what would happen when I immersed the length in the indigo vat, 7 or 8 dips, with long oxidation periods between. The linen was wheat-coloured so I didn’t think I’d get a clear blue. And I didn’t. It had sort of greeny underlights, or at least the parts of the fabric kept away from the dye from string were greeny. Here it is, recently removed from the last dip, rinsed, and hanging on the clothes line. (It’s the fabric on the right, with an untwisted middle section, because I didn’t want it to drag on the ground.)

Amy loved this piece. What will you do with it, she wondered. And I wondered too. 5 m. is a lot of cloth. I don’t really want to cut it, though it would make a beautiful quilt, I think. We spread it out in the back room and looked at it closely. You could see water in its movements, shot with light. You could see the inside of an abalone shell. You’ve obviously figured out this stuff, Amy said, and I replied that I absolutely haven’t. I have no idea when I begin what the results will be. And in a way I don’t care. I am committed to the process, though. Each twist, each stone I tie into a piece of fabric (the length second from the left is the result of beach stones tied into coarse cotton), each piece of string I cut and wrap: I am interested to see where they take me. In a way it’s a cave of my own making. Surrounded by blank linen and cotton, remnants of old damask tablecloths (the two small pieces at the far left), sheets, I begin to make a mark without knowing what it will be.

We each held the end of long length of linen across the bed in the back room and brought our ends to meet the other. Women have been doing this for centuries. Millennia. They’ve been immersing cloth in dyes made from roots and leaves, hoping for beauty, for light, smoothing out the wrinkles, folding the cloth afterwards. It’s been a dark year for a whole lot of reasons. I haven’t known how to find the light. though as of 1:20 this morning, it’s coming back. The other night, light shone through the linen we held and folded, it rippled like ocean water, the water I swam in off a little bay in Bute Inlet in April, the water I swam in almost every morning from the beginning of May until the beginning of October, entering Ruby Lake’s green depths, the linen held those moments, and others, and now folded, it waits for me to know what to do next.

This morning I had the chance to look at the digital ARC for my forthcoming book, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. The designers have done a beautiful job of arranging the material. The text is a series of sections, some brief, some longer, many of them in conversation with a portrait of myself, painted when I was 23. I didn’t expect to write a book like this but a few things conspired, in the way that they do, and I realized that I needed to do this work. It wasn’t entirely a happy process. In the course of writing about a story I’ve held for nearly 50 years, I came to understand that it wasn’t really that story at all. It was far more complicated, uglier, and there were times I wanted to quietly give up. But somehow seeing the portrait at the foot of my stairs filled me with shaky resolve, even though there was pain as well. And shame. I didn’t expect to write a book like this and yet I did. And this morning I looked at the ARC as though at a book written by someone else and I realized that it has substance. The form I evolved to carry the story works. Or at least it feels that way this morning.

What gift of counsel would you give your younger self if you could? I ask that with interest and curiosity. Would she listen? Would you have listened? Would I have paid attention to an older woman advising me to be patient, to care for myself, to value myself? Would I (she) have listened as she (me) talked about desire, manipulation, and boundaries? I wonder. I truly do.

Writing this book changed me, in a way. I feel quieter. I understand how the life that we live can be full of darker depths that we are seldom willing to explore. Exploring them is often a murky process and it would easier to simply leave them be. If there are other people involved, you can’t count on them being understanding and generous, though some of them will be, your own husband most of all.