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hold down the pages with flowers

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pages

This morning, a pdf of the interior of my forthcoming book, Euclid’s Orchard. And notes about how to send the corrections. Print it out, read it, and send the corrections as pdf comments. I’ve published 12 books and every time I’m surprised by how different the text looks in the capable hands of a good designer (I mean you, Setareh Ashrafologhalai!). I love the font — the late Jim Rimmer‘s Amethyst — and I’m interested to see how the photographs, most of them old family snapshots, amplify the writing. So now I’m going to read the essays and correct my errors and hope for the best. For this book about family history, about the unwritten and strangely coded stories I’ve tried to parse, and about (of course) the role of plants in my own history and reading of the landscape, it seems fitting to use a pot of roses to hold the pages in place. It’s a sunny morning, with a soft breeze. There are hummingbirds in the honeysuckle and the robins are singing the salmonberry song. I wish there was a way to encode this music into the book, and the scent of roses.

the vernal solstice

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At 9:24 this evening, the sun reaches its highest point of the year at the Tropic of Cancer. The solstice, from the Latin “solstitium, meaning “the standing still of the sun.” We’ve had such a long grey spring, with rain and low skies, but this afternoon the sky cleared and is now blue and cloudless. I’m hoping it’s not too late for beans (I’ve had to sow them three times because of slugs…) and that the tomatoes will come out of their sulk to put on some growth. The salad greens (vernal!) are lovely and so were these sprouts a few weeks ago, playing in spring grass in Edmonton.

weeds and grandma's shadow.JPG

That shadow in the bottom corner? Their grandmother, who misses them all.

 

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps,
And here you are the mother’s laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

—Walt Whitman

 

“go light”

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twin-flower

A week ago, foxgloves, yellow violets finishing, flashes of orange on the side of the highway that I knew were Columbia lilies, flashes of orange down the bank that I knew was the native honeysuckle, hummingbirds drinking deeply from the trumpets we used to taste as children. And today, on a walk on one section of the Suncoast Trail, orchids just about to bloom (or a week or so away), pink wintergreen (the prince’s pine still in bud), the last of the bleeding hearts, salal full and creamy, little clumps of rattlesnake plantain orchids about a week away from opening and alongside, what I think are ladies’ tresses. Thimbleberry by the fast creek. Siberian miner’s lettuce. Enchanter’s nightshade. Bending down to the scent of almonds in the twinflower patch—so beloved of Linnaeus that he gave the modest plant his name.

Just to say their names, to acknowledge their persistence in a world increasingly difficult to fathom—the incivility, the violence, terrible inequities, fires, shootings, knife attacks. Just to say their names as we walk a trail so familiar, along a flank of the mountain we’ve lived by for more than half my life and almost exactly half of John’s. To say their names, to remember them in poems, in songs, in dreams:

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

—Gary Snyder, from “For the Children”

Hawkweed, ninebark, self-heal.

 

Bedtime Reading

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bedtime reading, approaching summer

I always have a stack of books on my bedside table and I’m often reading three or four simultaneously. Sometimes that’s because a certain mood requires a certain book. Human Acts by Han Kang is so devastating that I can only read a few pages at a time. The prose is quiet and even lyrical and it takes a few moments to realize that you are reading about bodies putrefying in the wake of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. It’s an important book, an important record. But difficult to absorb in many ways. How an army can massacre its own citizens. Mutilate them. Refuse the bodies the right to burial by those who loved them.

And Katherena Vermette’s The Break is extraordinary. The way the narrative unfolds is like a rich and beautifully embellished textile unfolding and when you look closely, read the details closely, you realize how dark the tale. And yet there’s light—as soft and quiet as moonlight across snow or the glowing stones in a sweatlodge fire. There’s hope too, for all the characters, almost indistinguishable from love.

Birth of a Theorem by Cedric Villani was a birthday gift from my mathematician son. I’ve read it once and it bears re-reading. As any of you who read my essay “Euclid’s Orchard” will learn, math was a subject that terrified me and still gives me nightmares. Or at least it did until I decided to find out why and how that happened and what I could do to find my way into its beautiful mysteries. Birth of a Theorem takes the reader into the process of developing a theorem and in many ways it’s not unlike the process of working out a quilt design or the pattern a collection of essays should take. I loved the correspondences even if the intricacies of the mathematics are completely beyond my thinking.

And The Summer Book is the new anthology of essays about the season we are just approaching (if we use the notion of astronomical summer to define the beginning…). 24 B.C. writers contributed pieces to this book and there’s huge range in the writing. Last night I read Sarah De Leeuw’s “Beige Corduroy Coat Worn Over Turquoise Bathing Suit”. A caption from a fashion magazine? Only in the imagination of a girl living in a remote town the summer before she enters grade six: “I imagine myself on a catwalk, perfect posture. The waves roll and crash on the beach north of Port Clements. The coat rides up over my bottom as I walk, an eyelid of turquoise bathing suit winking out.” My own contribution to the anthology is “Love Song”, 35 summers remembered into an essay about lakes and duck itch and picnics and birdsong. It’s an essay that gathers all my loved ones, the living and the dead,  together for a grand dinner, even the dogs.

Here they are, with their dishes of tomatoes, prawns, skewers of chicken, the familiar brownies dusted with icing sugar. They are standing on the patio where the young robins are learning to fly, where the lizards cross from woodshed to stones in the blink of an eye.

 

“her gift of New Dawns”

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morning roses

This morning I cut a bowl of roses for the kitchen—Madame Plantiers, a few dog roses from a wild cane (the rootstock for an alba which has since died), and few deep pink Tess of the D’Ubervilles. I love roses and grow a lot of them, not in any kind of tidy way, but simply finding a place where they’ll get light, pruning them in spring, and letting them go. I put pots of mint in among the tubs of roses on our upper deck—it helps to deter aphids. And I like to watch the vespid wasps scouring the leaves for scale and any other insects they can find to feed their larvae.

I’ve noticed this year that some of my roses haven’t thrived after our unusually long cold winter. One of the New Dawns, the one around the front door, is skimpy in both new growth and buds. There are two others so I think I will take some cuttings and see what happens. These roses came to me via an elderly neighbour of my parents when we first began our lives in this house. I wrote about her and her gift of New Dawns in an essay, “Ballast”, in my forthcoming Euclid’s Orchard:

I’ve taken my share of cuttings. My three New Dawn roses come from the garden of my parents’ neighbour, Daisy Harknett. In her eighties, she told me how her mother started the roses from a slip given her by the Ferry sisters, a duo who lived nearby in one of the oldest houses in Saanich. The New Dawns, the palest pink (the colour of my baby daughter’s shoulders when Daisy gave me these cuttings), tangled themselves in the limbs of an equally ancient pear tree. That tree, with its cargo of roses! Later, the property was subdivided, and the back part, with an old stable, was sold. A man pulled out the rose with a backhoe. I don’t know where he took it.

     Some old wood, some new wood, said Daisy Harknett. So I cut pieces with both. I dipped the lower part of the wood in rooting hormone (though I could have used a tea of willow bark) and stuck them into little pots of soil. And now my New Dawns tumble over a beam, a pergola, and the front door of my house.

I want the New Dawns to continue, both because I love the roses themselves and because I want something of that time—the Ferry sisters, whom no one else seems to remember; Daisy, who had a family who will remember her and her roses (and wonderful pears); and the kind of ballast that inherited plants provide to our lives.

the same chair

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my father

It was the same chair where he sat fifteen years before, newly liberated from his job as a radar technician, and made himself simple tools—a cottage cheese lid cut into a circle and rigged with glass and a tiny mirror became a sextant; cardboard, string, a plastic straw, and a fishing weight became a quadrant. He had patience for this intricate work, but I don’t believe he ever did anything beyond finding latitude in his back yard and filling paper with sums. Maybe on the long sea voyages that took him away from us for two or three months at a time—once, six months—to the “Orient,” Australia, around South America. Maybe he was the sailor who left his bunk and looked at stars at night and wanted to know how to find his way, though by day he worked with radar systems, repairing them, fine-tuning them so the vessels were anything but dependent on celestial navigation. It would have made sense to have learned then, when he could perhaps have applied the knowledge to the dark skies near the Antipodes or approaching Madagascar. (from Euclid’s Orchard, forthcoming, Mother Tongue Publishing.)

“Time is an enormous long river”

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rivers

“Time is an enormous long river. My elders were the tributaries… every struggle they went through… and every poem they laid down flows down to me. If I take the time to ask… I can build that bridge between my world and theirs, I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get me through this world.”

In 1996, I bought the wonderful collaborative cd, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, in which Ani DiFranco used the stories told by Utah Phillips between songs in his concerts to make an amazing tapestry of music and language, his and hers. It was innovative in the best sense and I listened to it obsessively. I still have the cd though I haven’t listened to it for years. It used to be road music, the perfect thing to have playing as we drove down the Fraser Canyon or along the Similkameen River, wind coming in the windows and the smell of flint and pine.

Last night in my dream, Utah Phillips was saying, over and over again, “Time is an enormous long river.” I know why. Yesterday was a day when I sank into my bed and thought that there are simply too few hours for the things needed to be done. Or wanted. My garden is a jungle. I am trying to find the right images for my forthcoming book and it’s hard to figure out who, what, where, when. I have a basket of fabric I want to plunge into indigo dye — some of the fabric is tied and ready; some needs to be worked with. I need some days without anything else so I can mix dye and begin the immersions. When I reached for a board yesterday afternoon to knead bread dough on, I realized that all the shelves are thick with dust. Someone needs to clean! My papers need sorting (more on that in a few weeks). “Time is an enormous long river.” It is, it truly is, but you have be in it to be part of its flow and its accumulations of silt and history. I feel as though I’m on the shore, looking the other way.

Yet the river is here, the river of time, and everything in it rushing around my ankles, my knees, the scent of water, the beautiful muscular fish, the bodies of the drowned and living, the ripples I want to badly to replicate on cloth, the glitter of mica, the bridges with their ancient flaking paint, the one over the Fraser at Alexandria, the one over the Rosebud near Wayne, the pretty bridge at Chopaka. Does a river care about dust or weeds or filing systems? Time to find The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere and spend a hour or two listening again.

“containing faces like my own”

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two women

Among my father’s effects was an old Avon box with papers and a few photographs, all unsorted. I’d never seen these things until after my parents died and yet they have become my ballast as I enter my sixties, wanting to know the places left behind by my grandparents and what their early lives in Canada were like. An archive of the deep past containing faces like my own, languages I’ll never speak, a memory of rain on a tin roof in a shack in Beverly where my grandparents lived after leaving Drumheller, lilacs against the porch.

—from “Ballast”, an essay in Euclid’s Orchard, forthcoming from Mother Tongue Publishing, September 2017.

same old

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We drove from Creston to Osoyoos today, along the Salmo Creston Road where there was snow at the summit, and a frozen lake. Part of the road washed away, simply collapsed down the side of the mountain, and a crew working hard to replace it. Same situation at Bonanza Pass, the whole side of the highway washed down the ravine. The Kettle River was higher than I’ve ever seen it. Along a stretch of highway just past Bridesville, road repairs from water that had uprooted small pines and taken down pasture fences. And today of course the American president has pulled out of the Paris Accord. The world begins to look like a place I don’t want to remain alive in forever, though I want my grandchildren to have a safe and healthy planet. Their parents are doing the right things, one of them a climate scientist who must despair when she reads the headlines. But still she walks everywhere with her babies, feeds them well, reads to them, and doesn’t own a car, preferring public transit and a bicycle when possible.

But some things are reassuringly the same. The house I always stop to photograph at the foot of Anarchist Mountain? It’s still there. I didn’t stop today but can use the photograph from last fall because other than the fact that the grass was green rather than golden this afternoon, the house is beautiful and serene in its age and resilience.

lawless house, anarchist mountain

As we head for home—tomorrow!—I think of the summer ahead, the prospect of visitors (Forrest, Manon, and Arthur in late July, Angie and her beau overlapping I hope, and others here and there), the chamber music festival I help to organize, a new book arriving in early September, a garden (which will be overgrown when we arrive after two weeks away), birdsong from all those nesting near the house, swims in the lake, cool wine in late afternoon, the first sockeye on the barbeque.

An essay of mine is included in Mother Tongue Publishing’s spectacular The Summer Book and in it I remember everything I’ve ever loved about summers and my family. How time doesn’t pass, how it accumulates, how everything is contained in a single memory that takes a whole life to celebrate.

There are calzones in the basket and tins of sparkling lemonade; later, bottles of cider, cool from the shallows where they’ve been corraled with rocks. How long can a girl dive before her father accords her a perfect score, how many times can a boy circumnavigate the island with the throttle on low? Another practices the dead man’s float. Three years, or six. Drift on a raft under the low-growing spirea and bog laurel, count turtles on logs, crush a few leaves of wild mint in your hands while the years accumulate. Nine years, or twelve.

I called my essay “Love Song”. And it is.

on heaven’s door

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When we drove into the Waterton Lakes park, we were listening to Dylan. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” A song kind of melodramatic and full of guns but still somehow poignant. If you can listen to a whole song for a single line, a refrain, this is the one.

There were so many moments when I felt I was at that door. Early morning, walking along Pass Creek (this is one of its names and for obvious reasons, it’s the one I’ll use), through the red rock chasm, glacier lilies in profuse blooms on the slope. Driving the bison paddock where male bison were in the wallows and the females were settled along the edges of a small  lake, their young stilty-legged beside them. And mountain bluebirds on fenceposts—

bluebird

Last night we had a drink at the bar in the Prince of Wales Hotel. We didn’t stay there but I thought I’d like to ascend its long driveway and have a glass of something sparkling as the light faded. The view of the lake in its bowl of mountain was sublime. When we wandered out into the lobby afterwards — a huge baronial hall, actually — John saw the dining room and decided we should have breakfast there this morning on our way to Pincher Creek, then west on the Crows Nest highway. We were the only ones there for the first while, eating our eggs Benedict (well, mine were Florentine) at a table overlooking that serene view, watching three bighorn sheep come towards the tall windows, stop just in time, then settle on the grass in front of us.

breakfast companions

Now in Creston where we just ate delicious Indian food and drank some local Baillie-Grohman wine, a 2016 Récolte Blanche, lovely with the spicy lamb and paneer. Tomorrow we drive west towards home, through the Boundary country where my grandfather worked in 1911 at Phoenix and where I always feel my heart widen in those open spaces between Grand Forks and Osoyoos.  If we’re lucky, there will be bluebirds near Princeton and we’ll watch for the beautiful St. Ann’s church near Hedley. If heaven’s door opened, I know what I hope to see.