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Thinking: This morning, swimming in cloud and cool water, I was thinking about the deaths last week of Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard, both of them writers I began to read in high school. I remember a teacher telling me in grade 11 that I would love Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and he was right, I did, and I re-read it every few years. I had no idea you could write a book about observing and praising the things you found in wild places. And Wendell Berry’s poems came to me around the same time, their simplicity deceptive, because they weren’t simple at all but carefully constructed, holding important ideas and they held as well so much goodness in them, templates for a ethical and generous world. When John and I met in 1979, there were many things we disagreed about — writing, books — but Wendell Berry was central to our reading and we realized that what we shared more than we thought. We just had different vocabularies, poetics.

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way.
–Wendell Berry, from “The Summer’s End”

Eating: We had an apple cake, made with windfalls, and it was delicious. The deep sweetness of apples turning under their skins to memory. And the bears are eating the last of the crabapples, ruining the tree in their urgency to reach every hanging fruit. When I stand at the upstairs window, looking out at the driveway, I see them once or twice a day, the huge mother and her two cubs. The cubs climb and the mother keeps watch below, fixing her eyes on me in the window. We know each other. She is the same bear who came last year to the door while I was quilting, looking in briefly, the tell-tale star on her chest. And she’s come before, years ago, sitting under the tree, sated with crabapples. In the old stories we might be friends, we might gather berries together, share news of our children, but in this story I know better.

Making: a mound of sand, a rhubarb leaf, cement mixed in the old wheelbarrow, the one we used to mix and pour the footings for our house, and two days of waiting for the cement to set. Yesterday we brought the birdbath to its place on a cedar stump near the steps leading to the front door. Stones for the smaller birds to stand on, an oyster shell, and clean water. They haven’t come yet.

Cooking: pappardelle with pesto last night, the salad we loved in Oaxaca at Cafe Boulenc (tomatoes, green olives, cucumber, red onion, parsley, cubes of sourdough bread toasted in olive oil), lamb burgers with garlicky yogourt and salad topped with slices of feta, fish tacos, black beans with the small fierce peppers from the greenhouse. Apple cake.

Working (on): the long horizontal panels of sky and water and myself swimming, organized as a quilt (this time: another time I arranged them as an essay). Stitching, I am finding a way into the next season, my needle meandering as a river meanders, pulling the blue threads of water, bringing the months of morning swims together, from mid-April until probably the week after next.

Loving: the morning visits from the Steller’s jays, thought I have to say I didn’t expect them to be quite as insistent as they’ve become, emboldened by the years of seeds. But to turn to their calls and whistles (and anyone who says you can’t have sustained relationships with birds, with reciprocal communication, is simply wrong), to see them in the blue they wear so casually, the blue I try for in my dye sessions, is to be both privileged and inspired. (This one is throwing a side-eye just after a squawk, while another, which you can’t see, is softly whistling.)

Listening: Over and over, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “There in myrtle shades reclined“, one of Dejanira’s arias from Handel’s HÉRCULES, a piece that forever reminds me of driving the road from Lillooet through Pavilion on our way to a Cariboo wedding, windows open, the cd volume turned right up, me singing along with my feet on the dashboard.

There in myrtle shades reclin'd,
By streams that through Elysium wind,
In sweetest union we shall prove
Eternity of bliss and love. 

This was the lake yesterday and the dark head is me, swimming. The air was 9 degrees. The water might have been a little warmer but not much. I loved every minute — the long strokes from one set of cedars to the other, the young merganser who swam past nonchalantly, the clouds above the dark islands. Yesterday, in the lake, I thought I might last forever, swimming my slow lake km. each morning. I loved smelling the hardhack hanging over the water, distant smoke from someone’s woodstove, the sudden tang of dried salal berries when I bent to towel off my hair.

But this morning I wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was even cooler, both the water and the air. I couldn’t find my place in the small swells of the lake. After about 2/3 of my usual swim, I came out to wrap my towel around me. I don’t want the season to end but I wonder if I am up to the shifts of temperature, the late rising of the sun (John points out we could come later in the day but it’s not the same), my body’s inability to get warm afterwards. This morning I am disappointed in myself. I have a wetsuit and might continue the early swims wearing that but I don’t love swimming in a wetsuit. It’s hard to actually submerge my body and it’s harder to breathe deeply with the suit’s constriction across my chest.

And the lake doesn’t feel quite the same either with the layer of neoprene between me and the water.

What I’ll miss when I finally stop lake swimming and return to the local pool with its uncertain schedules and sudden closures because of lifeguard shortages, anyway, what I’ll miss is how all summer my morning swims allowed for deep complex thinking. Oh sure, there are small disadvantages to entering that particular state of being. Some mornings I’ll be back-stroking with my eyes closed, working my way through a complicated puzzle, and then I’ll open my eyes to discover I’m far out in the water. But the wonderful synthesis of thinking and movement is worth the dislocation, the drift. The moment when the movement in the distance in not just ripples but an animal, an otter, and it sees you just in time to veer away.

(While I was writing this, a bear just loped past my window.)

We’ll see what happens tomorrow. In June, the end of summer felt so far away. We were feasting on garden greens, anticipating the raspberries, beans, tomatoes, squash, abundance of basil, the tart grapes, the Merton Beauty apples. The arrival of families, lamb on the barbecue, towels on the railings. Today I can’t get warm. There are tomatoes still, and basil, and apples in the back room, picked all at once when we realized the bears were anticipating them too. And maybe uncertainty is part of swimming, the possibility of the unknown. I think of Carl Phillips’ beautiful poem, “Swimming”:

…how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still
feel like that…

After my swim, I sat by the fire and tied stones into one of the pieces I’m dyeing today. I have two white cotton duvet covers, maybe 25 years old, and when I was washing them last week, I noticed they had some small stains on them. So I thought I’d prepare an indigo vat and see what I could do to give them a second life.

One of them is twisted and tied. I like this method because it often results in a relief pattern something like eel grass. Here’s that one soaking in water:

And here it is in its first dip in the indigo vat:

After ten minutes I fished it out and it’s oxidizing on the cedar bench while the other piece is having its first dip.

I sewed a kind of spiral and trail on the second cover, pulling the stitches tight, and I hope this will result in a nice shibori design. I also tied some of the stones in the first photograph at random on the rest of the surface. In the past, this technique has produced snow angels or birds in flight. You never know, though. It’s all about surprise, or at least it is for me, a complete amateur.

I like the process. I like the dreamlike state I enter as I stare into the vat and wait. Anything could happen. Steller’s jays are all around me as I dip cloth and spread it out to oxidize afterwards. It’s a blue they recognize, preening in the nearby trees. A blue I dream of, using my tongs to move the cloth around in the indigo dye, and later, at night, while the stars glitter and a coyote sings. It never gets old, preparing the cloth, measuring powders, rinsing, pegging the finished pieces to the clothesline to dry.

This morning, the water was quite cool; the sky, grey. Emails come from nearby friends, with photos of grizzlies, a sow and three cubs, below their house, feeding on oysters and clams at low tide. Most days we see a black bear sow and her two cubs arrive for the crabapples in our tall tree beyond the garden. Driving back from the lake an hour ago, a young coyote watched us from the side of the road above the marsh. John thought it was the same one who’d ambled up the trail to where he was standing by the copper beech tree. When the pup saw him, it stopped briefly before turning around and trotting away. Some days I think we will be that old couple knitted into their house by vines, the decks and garden taken over by wild animals. I can think of worse ways to end our days.

We went to Vancouver on Wednesday, pivoting at the ferry from our plan to take our car and shop for special things on our way home the next day when we learned there would be a one-ferry wait for car traffic. (We hadn’t made a reservation because it was mid-week in September. How the times have turned.) Turning around in the line-up, we parked our car instead in the lot and I quickly put some stuff in my shopping basket — toiletries, a change of clothes — so we could go as foot passengers. The plan had been to see the Odyssey at a matinee showing and we did that, using buses and Uber. In a way I wish I hadn’t seen it. So many disappointing things — the bad dialogue, most of the acting, the absence of key elements that have always been my touchstones when reading the poem: the entirety of book 11, with its moving and complex interactions between Odysseus and the dead (“But my heart/longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.”), Nausikaa at the river with her laundry, dreaming of a bridegroom, and of course the marriage bed built around a living olive tree.

So now we turn to autumn, waiting like bears for the salmon, for the geese to sound their wild cries across the sky. Our woodshed is nearly full, thanks to John’s hard work, and our pantry shelves are lined with jams and jellies. Every other year I’ve been working on a book — a novel, a collection of essays, a memoir– but I think those days are over. When I wake in the night, there’s no longer any urgency to find my way downstairs in the dark to my desk, to open a file and enter a world I’d lost myself in for decades. I have other plans in the works, a turn in the road, a bend in the river. What waits, unknown?

This morning when I went outside to feed the Steller’s jays who were waiting for their sunflower seeds, I heard the school bus on the highway below our house. It hasn’t stopped at our driveway for 23 years but I still hear it. I hear it slow down for the turn in the road and the part of me that remembers every morning of those years, making breakfasts, making sure lunches were stuffed into backpack, that forms were filled out, yes, that part: well, she still leans on the door to listen as the bus stops at the bottom of the driveway to pick up her children. It hasn’t stopped for 23 years. In other provinces my grandchildren have been back at school for a week or two now. Photographs arrived of them on their porches or standing with their bikes in front of their houses. New clothes. Smiles.

In grade one I walked to school along May Street to Moss Street, turning the corner, sometimes meeting a classmate. I had a plaid schoolbag. Saddle shoes. I figured out I could also take a different route, up over Moss Rocks and down a little street to Fairfield Road, right across from the Sir James Douglas Elementary School Annex where my grade one classroom was, the one where I day-dreamed by the window during the reading lesson because I’d already been reading for two years. I hated the readers we used. Fun With Dick and Jane, and others like it. Everything happened in one or two syllables. At home I was entranced by books about the Bob Whites of the Glen and Crabapple Farm and Blue Willow and Nancy Drew mysteries.

While I was swimming, I was watching the sun appear and disappear behind the little islands. One of my grandsons swam to them this summer with his dad. While they were with us in August, the children came down to the lake each morning, though mostly they waited until the afternoon to swim. They threw sticks for the caretaker’s dog when she came to pick up garbage and clean the bathroom. They brought books and sat with their granddad after he’d finished his swim (usually before me). They picked salal berries to bring back for pancakes. I don’t how many mornings we had salal pancakes when their parents were growing up but it seems like a hundred. Or more. The scent of the oil heating, the batter bubbling on the old iron griddle that left its brand on the bottom of some of the pancakes.

When I listened for the school bus, then, and this morning, I was listening to the passage of time, wasn’t I? The bus taking my children away from me, into the world, though for some years it brought them back again. Until it didn’t.

We grow old but we are always those others, the children walking to school across Moss Rocks, day-dreaming by a window, the young woman waiting for the school bus to make its way around the corner of the highway leading up from the lake and later in the day, pausing on the route to Egmont to let the children off to run up the driveway, home. Their dog was waiting at the top of the driveway, listening, as I listened.

Is it the light? Is it the smell of lake in my hair as I write this? Hearing a dog bark far away and thinking, Oh, it’s Lily, she’s still alive. I think of the beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”, by E.B. White in which these thoughts are also his. Mine. Ours.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design,

This morning, walking back to the car after my swim (12 degrees, a kingfisher skimming the surface of the lake, one island still dark, the other bright with early sun), I stopped to pick up this cluster of samaras, the winged seeds of big-leaf maples. Chartreuse and magenta. Take a photograph, I asked John, who had his phone with him. It feels early for samaras, early for the morning temperatures to be so cool. Early to be the only one in the lake while the sun takes its own sweet time to rise over the shoulder of the mountain.

Yesterday I made grape jelly, 11 jars of the most beautiful rosé preserve. I used our Chardonnay grapes mostly, tart and green, with just a handful of red wine grapes (Marechal Foch, I think, planted when we built the first extension of our house and wanted vines to cool the southern wall, so 1986 or 7?). I put a small sprig of rosemary on top of the jelly before sealing the jars. There was a little left over, enough for John’s toast this morning. (He said it’s delicious.)

I am writing down the days, the winged samaras, the jars of grape jelly, the trio of Steller’s jays waiting most mornings. The chickadees alighting on my hands as I take out some seed. The mother bear and her two cubs who came the day before yesterday, in daylight, to eat crabapples, the young ones in the tree, swaying on the upper branches, and the mum on her hind legs like a slow dancer, moving from side to side as she plucked the small sour fruit. When we saw them climbing the bank from the old orchard, one of the cubs racing ahead and the other at its mother’s heels, John said, They are so beautiful. And oh, they were, they are, their black coats swaying, their bodies somehow sinuous despite the bulk. (I must remember this.) I think of how rich a life can feel some days, for jars for grape jelly on a cloth by the stove, the vivid blue of Steller’s jays against the deep green firs, a pile of books by the bed, the scent of apples in the back of the house from the bags stored there, Merton Beauties, Bob Dylan singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (I confess to pressing repeat), and the arrival, like clockwork, of the bears for the crabapples. I know Louis MacNeice didn’t have a mature black bear in mind when he wrote “Autumn Journal” but somehow I am thinking of his lines this morning, September light in the trees, my bathing suit drying on the railing, and a sprig of leftover rosemary on the counter, for remembrance:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow

But it’s a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven’t got time for waiting game

In May the tomato plants were soaking up the sunlight, growing against the house on the second-storey deck. I loved sitting at the table, watching the bees visit, the yellow-faced, the Sitka, black-tailed, and I loved watching the fruits swell in July, ripening a bit later this year than last, but worth the wait. And now, on a cool September morning, the maples leaves beginning to turn, I’ve cut up many pounds of them to make roasted sauce.

The plump ox-hearts grown from seed bought at the Bolhao market in Porto, the Pruden’s Purples, Brandywines, small Romas, a few Berkeley Tie-Dyes, along with a head of our pungent garlic, branches of rosemary, olive oil, and some flakey Maldon salt. They’ll roast and caramelize a little and in December we’ll still be enjoying September’s tomatoes on pasta or pizza or spread on sourdough bread.

I haven’t got time for the waiting game. There are grapes to make into juice which will then be made into jelly, fragrant with rosemary and sage, apples (still!) to juice and freeze, beans to pick, though the deer got into the garden after a bear broke down one of the gates and made a bee-line for the bean poles, completely demolishing one tee-pee of romanos. Luckily there are several more still producing.

This morning at the lake a single loon called. Most days a single feather floats just beyond me. Soon the geese will be flying overhead and the birds who gather on the railings, watching the kitchen with such urgency for their seeds, chickadees and the nuthatches who fly with them, the Steller’s jays with their squawks and whistles, one of them following me from window to window, well, those birds will be our winter company.

And the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’d spend with you
These precious days I’d spend with you

Do we ever have enough? Enough time, enough room, enough of anything we thought we needed and worked for and got, and now live surrounded by, weighted down with, wondering if it was what we wanted anyway? I don’t know. September fills me with questions. 60 years ago I was a girl getting ready for grade 6, looking forward to whatever the year might bring. We lived in a house with apple trees, pear trees, and a grape vine on a fence along the driveway. My mother made pies and crumbles, apple sauce and butter dark with brown sugar, and even jelly, though those grapes were Concord and the preserve was deep purple. These grapes are mostly Chardonnay, though there are a few clumps of Marechal Foch too so the jelly will be green, with a faint pink tint. Or maybe true rosé. I don’t know yet.

These are precious days, when I stop to think about them. Swimming in a cool clean lake, eating a clump of grapes tasting slightly of wine, and a kitchen filled with the scent of rich sauce. I haven’t got time for the waiting game. There are apples to peel for pies, jars to wash, and bowls of tomatoes on every surface.

Note: the song is of course “September Song”, composed by Kurt Weill, lyrics by James Maxwell Anderson.