posts

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless

attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

We were driving home from our morning swim and we saw how far down the mountain the snow line was this morning. At our house, a light dusting, melting quickly, but the mountain was white. And at the high point of the highway, we passed right through the snow line, big trees on either side of the road carrying snow like a gift. How lucky I feel, said John, to have lived all these years in a forest, surrounded; by trees like these. How lucky. And we both began to list the things we’ve loved about our own woods: the bears, year after year, with cubs in spring, in the crabapple in fall; the deer, delicate faces, the young ones close; weasels racing along the eaves in search of mice and 3 times in our house, so unexpected that I didn’t know what to do until I thought of a broom and chased them out through an open door; the barred owls, deep calls this time of year, and in summer, and the quick high notes of the saw-whets, like a truck backing up; loons in the small hours down on the lake, the round rising to our house like an elegy; elk at the edges of the woods, the bulls carrying the weight of their antlers with such grace;

Steller’s jays, chickadees, hummingbirds, the ones overwintering, the ones arriving with the red currant blossoms, the western tanagers, kinglets, nuthatches, pileated woodpeckers teaching their children to drill into fir; the coyotes mating each February so close to the house that we hear both voices and feel a little like eavesdroppers in a moment of deep intimacy, and then the young in late summer learning to feed on their own.

How lucky we’ve been to witness them over the decades and sometimes I wonder if they have their own observations about us: how we’ve slowed, how we’re less inclined to chase a bear out of the crabapple or ask a coyote to stay away from the house, how we are two quiet older people but how in summers there are more of us, some sitting out on the deck until late into the dark, calling the owls, listening for the coyotes beautiful songs. How lucky to have seen the generations of bears in particular, the one sitting on the lane below the crabapple, the one pausing by the door to say hello, 20 years apart.

Note: the lines serving as a epigraph are Gary Snyder’s, from “Smokey the Bear Sutra”

47 years ago today, John was on a ferry heading to Victoria to participate in a fund-raising poetry reading at Open Space for bill bissett, organized by Warren Tallman. He was going to stay with a mutual friend, who asked me if I’d like to join them for dinner before the reading. I did, I didn’t like John (and I think the feeling was mutual), but somehow during the reading itself, I found myself deeply interested in him. Never mind that he had a partner in North Vancouver and I had someone I was going to return to in the west of Ireland. Later that night, after drinks with the mutual friend, he walked me home along Rockland Avenue and in some ways he never left. Well, of course he left, the next morning, and he sorted out his relationship, I sorted out mine (which meant going to Ireland), and after a sweet few weeks travelling together, including a boat ride on the Seine where we decided to break up as soon as we got home but didn’t, our lives have been entangled ever since. What you can’t see in the photo at the top of this post is that I am pregnant with our first child. In the study at the top of the stairs in that old house at the top of Lonsdale Avenue, John was drawing plans for the house we built, beginning when that baby was 2 weeks old. 2 more children, extra wings on the house to accommodate us all, and now the wings are closed off until summer when our children and their children come to fill every inch of space with noise and laughter (and sometimes tears). The first gift John brought me when he came to visit the week after we’d met was Van Morrison’s album, Wave Length. I put it on my turntable (remember those?) and listened to the songs that became part of my wiring. I could sing them all now. But maybe instead I’ll put a disc in the cd player (because I don’t do any of those streaming things) and remember how it felt to be newly in love, a life unfolding, and the memory of walking along Rockland near midnight with the scent of something sweet rising around us.

I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light

Remembering

It was a week ago today that we were arriving at Swartz Bay, passing first the bigger Gulf Islands and then the small ones, and I was remembering a summer sail on a friend’s boat, 50 years ago, when we anchored out near one of the little islands and rowed to shore in the dinghy. My friend had noticed on a previous sail that there was arbutus down on the island, victim of a storm, and he wanted to cut it for firewood. While we cut the wood into lengths with a Swede saw and piled it into the dinghy, blueberry muffins were baking in the cookstove in the galley.

Appreciating

The care taken by my publisher with my forthcoming book, The Art of Looking Back, and how the ARCs looked on the tables at the Western Book Reps Association Book Fair last Tuesday, and can you call a book forthcoming (May!) when your publisher gives you a copy of the actual book in its gorgeous hard cover, its opening endpapers a surprise that left you speechless? Can you?

Eating

On our last night in Victoria, we ate at Il Covo with Angie and Karna and it was one of the best meals in years. I had a beautiful Caprese salad on a bed of greens, fragrant basil on top, and halibut on potato confit. A couple of glasses of bright Vermentino wine from Sardinia. When we came out to the car, Orion was striding the sky right over us.

Watching

I’ve been watching the sky as it shifts from winter to spring. It’s hard to describe this but our kitchen faces west and something happens in early February, the light changes to pinky gold at dusk, not the wintery grey, and often there’s a gold scribble as a jet flies south, and then the stars against the darkening clear deep blue, and I think, We’ve made it through another winter. Or at least that’s how it feels. For now.

Loving

The little moments in the greenhouse: tulips and daffodils coming up, a few crocus in big tubs by the door, dappled cyclamen leaves, the green scent of overwintering olives, and the pleasure of cutting salad — arugula and miners lettuce — for our Valentine supper.

Sipping

Not yet, but looking forward to opening it tomorrow night to celebrate the 47th anniversary of our meeting, in Victoria, and also to celebrate something else. (See Appreciating.)

(Who wears it better?)

Appreciating

This morning, the first review of my book! And oh, it’s such a good one.

https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/the-art-of-looking-back-by-theresa-kishkan

Note: this was first posted 6 years and 1 day ago. I talk about my children and their lives; so much of what I wrote is still true, though Angelica shifted from registrar at the RBCM to collections manager in archaeology. I write also that John and I were writing a book together, about building our house, but I opted out of the shared project to work on other things. (He did write about building and he also wrote a memoir about his father.)

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Yesterday I was digging a bed in the garden, the one called Long Eye, laced under the surface with the roots of an extremely coarse grass. Where did it come from? Maybe in horse manure spread years ago. I was using the garden fork and then tracing the roots as far into the soil as I could, thinking about other things as I did so. I’ve always loved my garden. I remember using a pick to break up the rough soil about 35 years ago, one small area at a time, and then planting onions, some peas, lettuce. When the children were asleep, I’d go out in my nightdress to make sure that slugs weren’t feeding on the tiny seedlings. In those years John worked in North Vancouver and he’d be away for 3 or 4 days at a time. I didn’t know anyone here yet so my days were filled with children, simple meals, reading at bedtime because we didn’t have television, and would I have watched it anyway? Probably not. A confession: I don’t know how to turn ours on. It’s complicated. We have a satellite dish and there are several remote controls. I’d never watch on my own but some evenings there’s something special, the Ken Burns Country Music documentary being a good example. My friend Jillian Ridington asked me in the fall if I was watching it and I hadn’t realized it was on. But then the series began again this winter and we’ve tuned in most weeks. As Jillian said, there was a time when no one made distinctions about music. It was good or it wasn’t. When I listened to Hank Williams sing, it was eternal:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry…

In the garden, I remembered the days I would check the plants in my nightdress, bats flying low over the grass, and I’d listen for my children. We didn’t have baby monitors. But the windows were open. I slept to the sound of loons and owls. They did too. They were imprinted by this life, I hope, and in turn they left their own imprints. I find those impressions in surprising places. Our initials on the footings of our house, drawn in damp concrete. A faint ghost of a girl on the climbing frame or halfway up a tree down the driveway. The names they gave to landmarks. Last summer, calling the Forest Service to report smoke on the other side of Sakinaw Lake, I had to check myself when the man asked me for a specific location. I almost said, Well, directly to the SW of Grass Lake Mountain, because that’s the name Brendan and Forrest gave to the hump we see from our dining area, the hill the sun falls behind in spring, the hill Venus hangs directly above in February.

Today someone I’ve known slightly for years asked me about my children. What was Forrest doing in Ottawa, he wondered. Well, he’s a historian, I replied. He looked puzzled. He can make a living at that? His actual employment is with Library and Archives Canada, I explained, but I knew I’d lost him completely. And Brendan? That was easier. Sort of. (The man remembered he was a pretty hot point guard on the school basketball team.) He’s a university professor. He teaches math. There’s more to it but I didn’t elaborate. His daughter knows Angelica and so maybe he knows she works at a museum. (She’s a registrar.) All of these callings have their roots here, I think. Brendan explaining negative numbers to my father as they walked down the driveway before Brendan was in school made us realize that pattern and numeracy were part of his natural language if not yet his vocabulary. And Forrest (memorably) dressed as a Father of Confederation for Halloween when he was 6. We didn’t have television in those years but we had books and we visited museums. Angelica came to her present work indirectly, I think. She did a degree—well, two degrees— in Greek and Roman Studies and worked part-time at a Heritage site. That work led to training in conservation methods and that (eventually) led to her present job.

In those early years, I couldn’t have imagined where they would find themselves as adults. I wanted them to have happy lives and it seems they do. When I work outside, I listen for them still. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but I do hear them. We have a little ring of stones we make a fire within on summer evenings. On winter evenings too, if that’s when they’re here. We wave the smoke from our eyes and talk. The grandchildren roast marshmallows on the long forks we bought at the Denman Island ferry dock many years ago. I think about it all. John and I are writing a book together, a shared account of building our house, and part of what I’m doing is going through old daybooks to find out what happened and when. A daybook offers too little information about feelings and sleep deprivation and being overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that had to be done in a day. A week. But it tells me that we paid the guy who made our driveway on a particular day and that the lumber yard was sending a truck with a sling of north species 2x4s on another day. And that the well-drillers were coming up during a week in the winter of 1982.

There was a memo-to-self to buy a bank draft to pay for William Morris honeysuckle cotton for bedroom curtains in 1983. An acceptance to an MFA program for me, something I started but never finished because by my second year I had two children under 3 and had no time to travel into Vancouver for seminars. No time to write. Sometimes I despaired about that but deep down I knew that one day I would have time and I would make the most of it. In the years when John worked in North Vancouver and I was here with my little boys (because by the time Angelica was born, he was able to move most of his teaching to Sechelt), I remember the darkness of winter and then the beautiful deep blue evenings of late February, the ones we’re approaching now, the same scribble of jet trails across the western sky like a message just for me.

There were plum blossoms on the car when we went out this morning, and 3 deer in the parking area of the BnB where we are staying on Rockland Avenue. The sky was huge over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and as we drove towards the breakwater, we saw a film crew set up by the Surf Motel, our favourite place to stay in Victoria. (They close for a couple of months each winter…) Everything was charged with the magic of Victoria in February, the month we met in 1979: the plum blossom, daffodils in yellow swaths below Beacon Hill, people sitting at outdoor tables drinking coffee in the sunlight. We did that too, yesterday, after my event (with Kim Spencer, Bill Gaston, and Jesse Winter) at the Western Book Reps Association Book Fair, when my publisher Eve Rickert handed me 1 of 2 early copies of my new book, The Art of Looking Back. Paperback ARCs had been printed for the book reps and booksellers at the event but somehow she’d been able to have 2 copies of the book rushed from the printer and oh, it is everything I hoped for, and more. The cover has a canvas texture, perfect for the detail of portrait reproduced on it. I hadn’t expected the endsheet as I opened the book, a collage of the archive that inspired me to write this book: at the centre, the drawing the painter sent me shortly after we met in 1978 and which should have sent me running in the opposite direction; samples of the huge stack of letters he sent me over nearly 20 years; and other moments I used in the book to help me look back.

Plum blossoms on the car this morning, the scent of the sea as we walked the breakwater, the swirl of kelp below me when I stopped to look at a sea lion in the green water:

The kelp felt like the tangle of feelings I’ve had over the past 2 days–elation, a kind of far-sightedness as we walked in the Garry oak wood below Government House, hearing sea lions barking on the Trial Islands, seeing the new leaves of camas in the grass below the oaks, and even the memory of myself as a Brownie visiting Government House 65 years ago, LG George Pearkes hosting our pack for tea and asking us about knots. Yes, we sat out in sunlight too, at Ottavio Bakery in Oak Bay, my new book at hand, plum blossom on the Avenue, and although most people were drinking coffee, I had a glass of rosé, the day a swirl. I was awake for a good part of the night, re-reading, though it felt like the first time, The Art of Looking Back. I was surprised to see the sun rise because the night, like the years, passed in a heartbeat.

…I dreamed I was in Oaxaca, waking to the prospect of a swim first thing? Was it last night I walked to the roof-top pool in my bathing suit, a towel wrapped around my waist, and greeted Carmen, the white-winged dove, her rich mezzo-soprano arpeggios answering. Last night, or the night before.

I thought we’d return this year but life conspired. Crocuses are blooming by the Sechelt library so it’s not actually a hardship to be here on the Coast but somehow those cool evenings and warm days when we’d walk through the lively streets of Oaxaca, noting the doors, the bougainvillea spilling over a wall, the water trunk pumping up to a cistern,

the women selling mango and pineapple in a little cup, chili dusted on top, well, those are the moments I want to add up, one after another, until they measure a day, a week. The day we went to Hierve el Agua to swim in a mineral pool on the edge of the world

which was also the day we visited the weaver’s family in Teotitlán del Valle and chose a carpet, the one that is spread on the floor of my bedroom so that every time I walk on it, I remember the studio with its skeins of yarn, the indigo vat set into a long heavy table, marigold vat alongside, and stone mortars for grinding cochineal, lichens, pomegranate skins.

Was it last night? I think it was the night before. There was a day when I stood at the textile museum looking at Natalie Toledo’s beautiful creations and thought of what it must be like to be born among the bougainvilleas, the scent of dust and agave, doves singing deep-throated arias from the rooftops each morning, and I want it all again. Next year?

I walk upon the foliage
a heavy door opens,
I can touch the peeling walls
what does my nose smell?

Note: the lines are Natalia Toledo’s, from her poem “House of my Dreams”.

Note: this was first posted 7 years ago. A few more books. Still stardust.

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I’m at the point in my years when, looking back, I can see that my life has been an accumulation. I live in a place I love, I have a partner of 40 years who interests me and who I love dearly, I have wonderful children, and now the joy of grandchildren too. By my desk is a shopping bag containing the reading copies of my books, dense with small coloured stickies to indicate possible passages and themes for public presentations. There are 13 books, 15 if you include chapbooks, and there’s another due next year. And another in progress. Some mornings I wake with such excitement to get to my desk. (In truth, I am often up in the wee hours to take advantage of the dark and quiet, a working time that I’ve come to cherish.) There were long periods when it didn’t feel this way, I know. When my children were small, I didn’t write much. Well, to be honest, there were years of this. The man who’d been my mentor when I was in my early 20s used to ask me what I was working on—he was a lovely generous man, a good friend, but his life was organized around his work: he had a tireless wife who took care of the details, she drove him to work and she picked him up, she cooked, she managed their active social life, organized huge memorable parties and trips. He’d ask, and I’d think of the house we were extending to make more room for our expanding family, the garden I was growing to feed us well, the bread rising, the laundry that never seemed to go away, the changing needs of those I was caring for, and I’d feel sort of hopeless. About writing anyway. and I do remember days of sadness, of despair, when I felt time was passing, tides changing, and I was flotsam. It’s important for me to remember this clearly and accurately. That a life contains paradoxes. A shopping bag of books and a memory of despair.

I’m glad I came of age as a writer in a time before social media. I’m particularly glad that the years I spent immersed in motherhood and domestic life were what I needed to carry and sort out privately, to remember, to make use of as I could. There were lonely times. A letter to a far-flung writer friend, wanting reassurance that one day I might have time again for my own work, well, it would take a week to arrive and then a response might take another week. We didn’t use the phone the way we would now. Long-distance calls were expensive! I wonder if it’s easier now for someone struggling with the difficulties of an artistic practice? I see people on various social media platforms announce their successes and I wonder about those who are wondering (who must be, because some things don’t change. Small children and their needs, households, work, etc., and the knowledge that there are years of this ahead…) if they will ever write a novel, a collection of poems, paint, sing. How it must feel to watch from the sidelines, the very public sidelines, and wonder.

When the poet who’d been my mentor asked, What are you writing?, and I had to confess, Nothing, I wish I’d known that what was actually happening was that I was accumulating an archive. Like the scraps of cloth I hoarded with the intention of using them one day in a quilt or a braided rug, the details of my life were gathering in my memory, a codex of weather, recipes, observations of how my children learned to walk, speak, how one dog died and another arrived, how our summer camping trips took us to remote rivers, groves of Ponderosa pines, small museums in dusty towns where artifacts spoke to us (or to me at least) with such poignancy. What are you writing, he’d ask. Nothing. But just wait, I wish I’d known to answer. He once confided to a friend that he predicted a very successful writing career for me. If he was alive, I wonder what he’d think now. My “career” has been (continues to be) a modest one. No agent. Books published by small literary presses (to whom I am hugely grateful, not just because they’ve taken my work but because they’ve made a place for other books like mine, small lively currents a little outside the mainstream). But it’s a life I wouldn’t have lived any other way, if I knew then what I know now. If I could reach back and tell the young woman who wondered if she would ever write again, if I could tell her anything, it would be this: Planetary scientists tell us that 100% of the elements in our bodies have their origins in stardust. We are stardust, all of us.

Some mornings I open Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary to see if there’s something I could take as advice or consolation or even a divination.

divination(n.)

late 14c., divinacioun, “act of foretelling by supernatural or magical means the future, or discovering what is hidden or obscure,” from Old French divination (13c.), from Latin divinationem (nominative divinatio) “the power of foreseeing, prediction,” noun of action from past-participle stem of divinare, literally “to be inspired by a god,” from divinus “of a god,” from divus “a god,” related to deus “god, deity” (from PIE root *dyeu- “to shine,” in derivatives “sky, heaven, god”). Related: Divinatory.

What is hidden or obscure. Maybe that’s what I’m looking for, hoping for, rather than inspiration from a god. (What would that look like, I wonder?) So much is hidden. What happens next, to me, to all of us. Is there advice I could follow to accept with grace the years ahead? There are perils in being human, in being alive, anticipating the future. Maybe my writing is a way to modify my own anxiety, to offer an alternative: well, the world is on fire but I can work on a novella in homage to Mrs. Dalloway, with a party situated outside under honeysuckle with music played on cello and oud, or a novel set in a small fishing village at the end of the road where women stitch in the community hall and a secret room opens to reveal paintings of trees.

I wrote about the Diary and Mrs Dalloway here and re-reading this post I realize that I was perhaps edging towards my forthcoming book; the bookseller I mention and his shop and those years are at the heart of The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. (The bookseller even has a tiny cameo though I bet you won’t be able to find it! Maybe I’ll offer a prize if you do.) When I read the passage I found today, written on February 2, 1931, Virigina Woolf is about to finish writing The Waves, possibly my favourite of her books. I first read it as a young woman, well, a girl, of 18. I don’t think I quite understood it then though I could lose myself in the rhythms of the sentences, the dialogue, the beautiful passages in which I recognized something of my own sensibility, which wasn’t usually the case when that 18 year old read a novel:

There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

At my desk, the Diary held open by a piece of Oligocene sandstone filled with tiny shell fossils, I feel porous enough to let those sentences enter my thinking. She looks forward to a brief time of freedom, of being idle, the book written, not quite ready to be published (it would come out in October of that year, published by her own Hogarth Press).

…my feeling is that I have insisted upon saying, by hook or by crook, certain things I meant to say. I imagine that the hookedness may be so great that it will be a failure from a reader’s point of view.

Never a failure from this reader’s point of view, not as an 18 year old, nor as a woman in her 70s. What happens next. “Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.” I feel porous enough to let the sentences do whatever they want.

This morning, I’ve been in Ireland, not really, but there in my imagination. I dreamed last night that I was standing by the window of the little cottage I rented on Inishturbot nearly 50 years ago, looking out to see the donkey who sometimes lived in my field. (The farmer who owned him moved him from one stone-fenced area to another to take advantage of the grass.) He was solitary, like me. I used to take a kitchen chair and sit in the doorway with my breakfast and he’d amble over to accept crumbs, a segment of orange, a few almonds.

I thought about the dream as I ate my breakfast, a croissant with excellent chocolate melting into its warmed layers. The visceral sense of that time and place was a current in my spine. Sometimes that happens. You carry the intensity through your day, stopping now and then to remember how it felt to be in the doorway with a mug of instant coffee and the scent of a donkey on your hands.

Maybe I dreamed of that cottage because I’ve been re-reading my forthcoming book. Some readings and other events are being organized (the Gibsons Library in May, Munro’s in early June) and I guess I’m wondering what passages might work to suggest the book’s strengths. I don’t think I’ve found those bits yet. This passage takes me back to the Irish parts of the book but they don’t indicate the whole canvas of the work as a whole. Maybe that’s not the point though?

In many ways Turlough was the best place to arrive, its little cluster of buildings, its eleventh-century round tower topped with a conical cap. The caravan was parked at the bottom end of a field. The farmer who owned it left a hose at the top of the field for water, for Sheila and the cattle and the single donkey who lived in the field. Sheila was tiny, in her late seventies, and it was helpful for me to take a pitcher or kettle up to the tap, to empty the bucket she used as a toilet (that I used too), sheltered in a tent, anyway, to empty it along the line of fuchsia and hawthorn growing as a hedge along the stone wall separating the field from the back gardens of the row of houses that was the village. We burned the toilet paper in her little stove, along with bricks of turf and any sticks we found on our walks. Sheila had been an artist and when I told her something of my story, she said immediately, tartly, that of course he had been drawn to me but his feelings were his own business and he shouldn’t have burdened me with them. She didn’t have a lot of use for men.

I slept on a bench below the window, rolling out my sleeping bag each night and rolling it up again in the morning. There was a dog, Johnny, who’d appeared like me at the gate, wanting refuge and a place for his infected leg to heal; and several cats. Hooded crows flew over daily from the round tower where I think they roosted; their ash grey plumage, punctuated by black head, throat and tail, became familiar in the hedge as they waited for toast scraps. Sheila was a vegan but didn’t mind if I had milk on my oatmeal (she took a jam jar up to the farmer and he filled it with creamy milk from one of the cows who rubbed against the caravan). She made omelettes with millet, flavoured with snippings of wild garlic, and she made strong French roast coffee from Bewley’s in Dublin in a small brown jug, using a tea strainer to pour it into our cups. I hitchhiked into Castlebar and brought back almonds for her nut milk and cheese for myself. I brought us a bottle of French wine, and oranges. Dark chocolate, vegan approved. She picked St. George’s mushrooms and fried them in olive oil.

After a couple of days we went looking for a place for me to live. She’d arranged for me to caretake a cottage up some hills above Foxford, which we got to by bus, taking Johnny, a cottage owned by a forester she knew, but when we got there, we discovered Travellers had camped by it, burning the kitchen and sitting room floorboards for fuel. I didn’t need much but I did need a floor. She asked a few people she knew. There was a man in Louisburgh who couldn’t offer a house but did have an extra table. Someone else wondered about that house over to Parke where everyone had either died of the rheumatism or become too crippled with it to move because it was built right up against a seeping bank but he didn’t know how to get in touch with the owner, who lived in France. Someone else who occasionally brought Sheila ailing animals to care for, who knew everything about everyone, couldn’t think of anywhere likely. One morning I packed up most of my belongings and headed out to find somewhere, hitchhiking down the west coast, stopping in each small village to ask at the post office if anyone had a rough cottage they’d rent cheaply. A fish dealer in Clifden called one of his suppliers, a fishing family on an island off the coast, and they offered an empty cottage. Which was where I went, after returning to Sheila to pick up the rest of my stuff and to provide a new address for my mail. At her insistence, I went to talk to the farmer about having the donkey’s hooves trimmed. They were so long, they curled up at the ends like Arabian slippers. He smiled, sucked away on his pipe, and went on with what he was doing, which was fixing a fence with some lengths of salley.

Last night I dreamed of Ireland and in a way I am still there, the scent of a donkey, the scent of burning turf (I never had enough for a really warm fire but still the smoke penetrated my brown wool sweater so that I’d smell it for years after when I took the sweater from my trunk), and the sound of corn-crakes creaking in the tall wet grass.

Note: this was first posted seven years ago. And still, the winter is long.

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Like so many others, I find January a long month. A dark month. And although we are not in the middle of the polar vortex that is creating such frigid temperatures in other parts of the continent, it’s cold here. In the mornings I put on two or three layers and drink my coffee close to the fire.

But then there’s a morning when it’s somehow lighter. I woke at 5 a.m. on Monday and the sky was dense with stars against the deepest indigo. I thought, oh, that would make a beautiful quilt and then I realized I’d made several inspired by winter skies. In my book Phantom Limb, there’s an essay called “An Autobiography of Stars” in which I detail the making of a quilt for my daughter Angelica, set against a meditation on astronomy and the Leonid showers.

On each bed, a patchwork, for warmth and for safe passage through the night. In the sky we might fashion a parallel life, a world mirroring the topography of our own lives, irregular and beautiful, geometry in service to love. Sewing stars for my daughter to sleep under, I am fashioning a metaphor for my love of her and a belief in her luminosity, a parable of meteors and radiance and grace.

I have no photograph of that quilt to share but it was silvery stars—Variable Star blocks—on a ground of deep purple and blue. And I’m pretty sure I was making it in winter.

So a morning when it’s lighter, when you walk across the patio and realize that the winter jasmine has begun to bloom, single yellow stars in a thicket of branches:

A morning when you are looking forward to reading more of Dante’s Inferno by the fire. Last night we read the 4th Canto, the long beautiful lines taking us into the first circle of hell with Dante and Virgil. And in that place too is a bright fire with poets gathered—Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid. More company appears, every poet or philosopher or mathematician important to Dante. In the poem’s notes, written by Robert Pinsky’s daughter Nicole, she calls this “an abundant, almost ecstatic identifying list.” Dante and Virgil spend some time with them and then

         …my wise guide leads me away from that quiet
Another way—again I see air tremble,

And come to a part that has no light inside it.

Tonight we’ll go there, into the second circle. But even in that darkness, there will be beauty. I remembered in 2013, in the aftermath of having to take the vegetable garden apart for a septic field repair and then rebuilding it again, digging in a new border and finding, underground, unexpected beauty. When I’d dug up all the plants and trees a few months earlier, I thought I’d also lifted all the bulbs to set aside and replant again. But there, in the dark, an incandescent clump of crocus.