posts

I woke early, still on Gatineau time, and after I’d made coffee, I went out on the upper deck. Robins and Swainsons thrushes were singing in the woods beyond the grass. Something else, maybe a Western tanager, raspy and shrill. The dog roses began to bloom in our absence, the first dozen or so, and many more buds at various stages. I love roses. I love the old French cultivars, the noisettes, the moss roses, the David Austin hybrids. But the delicate beauty of a dog rose, petals the softest pink imaginable, the scent faint and sweet: these might be the ur-rose for me. You can’t really cut them. They fall apart, the petals fine as tissue. In the fall, they have most elegant long red hips.

In a pot below the dog roses, the sweet lemon lilies are also blooming. These are one of two species used to breed fancier cultivars but I prefer their simplicity. On long stems, the flowers are clear and perfect yellow.

I am looking for something, looking as I walk among the flowers, checking out the progress of the tomato plants. Do you feel this, sometimes, that the landscape is changing? That you are changing, that you no longer know how to read the map? And are the maps you have the ones you need? I am looking for signs, shifts, turns in the road. I told my grandson E. that I thought I’d written my last book and he was very interested in this. He kept asking me how many I’d written (17), how long it look to write each one, how many pages there were in each book, in total. How much the books cost. I could see his mind doing a simple math. And of course it makes no sense, economically. It was never about that. What was it about then? E. wanted to know. He kept coming back to it. He’s 7.

This morning, holding a bud of dog rose in my palm to smell its elusive sweetness, I was thinking ahead. Next year I’ll return to university. E. was very interested in that too. Maybe he was thinking of his classroom and how a grandmother might look at one of the small desks, her pencils lined up, her notebooks new and ready. What would she write in them? He was concerned my French wasn’t up to much but we read a few books together, him reading the text and me translating, or trying to. With his help, I could improve! And maybe in a classroom, actual or virtual, I could learn other things too.

As we were settling into our seats on the plane for the flight home yesterday, a song was playing quietly: Neil Young’s “Birds”.

When you see me fly away without you
Shadow on the things you know
Feathers fall around you
And show you the way to go
It’s over, it’s over

The landscape is changing. I have things to find out, to follow, to understand, or not, but I want to try. Feathers weren’t falling around me this morning but a dog rose petal landed on the sleeve of my old Japanese yukata, soft pink on the faded blue. Patterns are everywhere. Maps. Shadows on the things you know.

There’s been garden work, shopping for a magnolia tree, reading with Eddy to improve my French, drinks in the shadow of the National Gallery, and fish tacos with mango salsa.

1.

Many years ago, nearly 30, a dear friend, now long gone, brought me the gift of a Sussex trug. It’s a real one, made of coppiced sweet chestnut and white willow; the nails are copper. For ages it’s been hanging from the pot rack above the kitchen work-table. I use it in winter to hold a trio of primroses when they become available in the supermarket or in summer to hold bread for a dinner party. Today I took it down and put it up with the pots of salad greens to remind me to use it for tonight’s salad.

2.

The roses are beginning to bloom. First one, the pale pink Madame Alfred Carriere, a noisette climber, so sweetly scented I could smell it from the table where I was drinking my coffee before my swim. And then, turning, I saw the Blanc Double de Coubert just opening beside the table. Soon there will too many roses to name or count but today, these two:

3.

When I opened my email after my swim, I had a link to this review of The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, posted at River Street Writing. Catherine is a beautiful writer herself so I am grateful for her care and attentive eye and mind.

Kishkan is a movingly precise raconteur and the reader is held by her careful details: the “dark hair strewn with flowers” of one of Wilkinson’s early paintings of her; the empathic picnic they once shared of a “baguette and soft cheese, slices of apple…wine out of small tumblers”; the Grecian path in Iraklion fringed by “wild oats, henbane, the desiccated leaves of coreopsis”; or Ireland where she fled his incessance to a place of “dark bricks of turf cut from the bogs” to a “weather-beaten whitewashed cottage surrounded by grey-green leaves.” Woven within, allusions to Homer, Berger, Freud, Kristeva, as Kishkan interrogates the confusing past from an array of angles: her own shame or maybe her innocence, the painter’s wife, her possible perceptions in the wake of their divorce, the judgement of outsiders, and her own husband’s acceptance even as Jack’s erotically-tinged sketches persist despite her marriage and children.

4.

In the garden right now: two teepees of beans (Blue Lake, Hilda Romano, and Fortex, with Cerise du Japon to come), rhubarb, garlic growing as I watch it, kale both ready to cut and tiny volunteers to take over once it’s done, raspberries beginning to bloom, pebbly sage to mince over tiny fingerling potatoes, tree peonies full and open with the herbaceous ones in bud, the sweet yellow daylilies two or three days from opening, figs swelling on the two trees, wisterias about as beautiful as they’ve ever been in more than 40 years, every herb imaginable and maybe a few others too, lily of the valley, sweet woodruff, blueberries with their bells bringing in bees, one, two, three, and in the greenhouse just now, the most beautiful swallowtail (either a pale swallowtail or an anise) reclining on a branch of rosemary, so relaxed I could get close enough (almost) to touch it. But didn’t.

Note: I posted this in 2020. I wrote that I believed I’d found my mother’s biological father. Since then I’ve confirmed that yes, he was her biological father but more than that, I’ve learned that her biological mother was not a girl but in fact a young widow, with 4 children. I know her name. I know that she remarried after giving my mother away, paying a monthly fee for her care, and that she died in her 50s from cervical cancer. I know more about her than my mother might have dreamed. And it makes me grateful to my mother for her dedication to her own children and grandchildren.

______________________________

The years pass. The days of commemoration return. It’s been ten years since my mother died but I think of her daily. There was a time when I thought the most important thing on earth was to find out where she came from. She was a foundling, given up at birth, and had only a few clues to her biological parents. What did I think? If I found them, somehow she would be given a new life, in which she was cherished by parents instead of cared for by a foster mother who seemed determined to keep her in her place: a child unwanted and given away? I did think this. In a rather circuitous way, I found the man whom I believe was her biological father. I share DNA with his grandsons, his great-nephew. I’ve learned some things about him and one of those things is that he wasn’t interested in knowing about the child he’d conceived with a girl who was not his wife. I’m less interested in pursuing her origins now that I know it had nothing to do with who she was, only how she got to be in the world.

In this photograph, my mother is playing with her first child, my older brother Dan. It must be summer of 1952. They lived in a cottage above Gonzales Beach in Victoria. She told me many times how happy she was there. My father was away a lot. He was in the Navy and he’d be at sea for months at a time. Not long after this photograph was taken, my father was transferred to Halifax, where my mother had grown up and where my parents met in 1950. They went by train to Nova Scotia, stopping to see my grandparents in Beverly, so that they could meet Dan. Two years in Halifax — my brother Steve was born there — and then back to Victoria, where I was born. A little more than a year later, my younger brother Gordon was born, completing the family my mother always wanted. When I was 6 years old, we lived not far from Gonzales Beach and my father was away again, for 3 months. As she anticipated his return, I think I saw my mother as a person, separate from me, for the first time. She’d bought a new coat for the occasion, a coat that hangs in my closet and still smells faintly of her.

When we returned that day from CFB Esquimalt with the stranger who was our father to our house on Eberts Street, my parents went into their bedroom and we were asked to leave them alone. I imagined my mother twirling for my father in her new suit and then the two of them hugging on the bed. Her Harris Tweed coat was hanging in the front closet, and I went in, closed the door from the inside, and put my arms into its satin-lined sleeves where I could smell my mother’s Avon underarm deodorant mingling with the wool. I was inside her coat, inside the embrace she was now sharing with my father. I was my mother, hidden from her children, the collar of the tweed coat rough against my neck.

— from “Tokens”, Euclid’s Orchard, Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017.

And later: I’ve just remembered this photograph of me with my own children and love how it echoes the one of my mum and Dan.

I went out for a walk around the garden to see how plants are coping with the heat of the past few days. Yesterday when I went into the greenhouse to repot the little almond tree, growing from a seed I brought back from the Coa Valley in Portugal in November, I was surprised at the door by a lizard skittering into the stones that fill in a gap along the southern wall. And then later, I almost stepped on a young black and yellow snake, taking shelter under a low bench. There are tree frogs in the greenhouse too. Sometimes when I move a tray of beans or tomato seedlings, one will leap from the soil. There’s a small tub of water under the potting bench with a pot of corkscrew rush growing in it and the frogs like to cool off under the duck weed. Once, when I was pulling a pot of lettuce out from under the bench, a little frog landed on my wrist and stayed there.

And it seems there’s another mouse in the greenhouse. Look at that bean leaf! Two others have been eaten back to the stem. I’ve seen the cat walk by and sniff at the doorway but he doesn’t go in, which is probably a good thing for the frogs and now the reptiles who’ve discovered the warm pavers, the stones, the woodbugs under the saucers.

A walk around the garden, the scent of wisteria filling the air. It’s cooler this morning and I’m wondering if I’ll swim in a wetsuit or not. Yesterday I began my swim in neoprene and stopped partway through to pull it off and finish in my bathing suit. Normally the lake would be too cold for me to swim for long this time of year, though most years I begin with a short plunge in early May, working up to a full swim (around a km.) by the end of May. This year? The wetsuit made it possible to begin 3 weeks ago (and if I’d bought the suit sooner, I could have begun earlier!) but I didn’t know it would suddenly become so warm that the lake temperature would rise enough for me to do a longer swim on May 5. A single swallow was dipping over the water and I could hear ravens talking the trees. Klook, klook. And you too. And you.

Last night I dreamed I had three long tables to set on the west-facing deck. I found tablecloths, jugs to fill with lilac for the centres, and was counting silver cutlery in my mind, wondering if I’d have enough. 8 at one table, 6 at another, 10 at the 3rd. Who was coming to eat under the wisteria and what would I feed them on a warm spring evening? I counted plates: 15 of the Italian ones painted with grapes and figs, 8 of John’s mother’s blue willows, and the remaining Wedgwood Moon from the ones we chose for ourselves, buying a few in Bath in 1979 and receiving others as gifts, a stack of which John dropped years ago while clearing the table. Most of them broke but we still have 4. (There’s also a few old blue onion plates left from our camping days and a few others accumulated one way or another.) So in my dream, I had enough. Plates, cutlery, mismatched wine glasses polished with a linen cloth, and napkins at each setting. What was the occasion? I have no idea. But the wisteria in the dream smelled like heaven and this morning it smelled the same and it turns out there’s room for everyone to sit underneath and laugh. And who would they be?

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. (Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks)

I’ve been thinking about compost, how it serves as a useful analogy for my life. Maybe yours too?

How, when I plant the tomato seedlings into their summer pots, I’m reminded of 40 years of doing this. (For the first 5 years we were here, I grew them in the garden, which worked fine until they got blight. I moved them to pots after that and once this upper deck was built in the early 1990s, it became the place where they grow reliably, tucked under eaves so that rain doesn’t splash their leaves and make them vulnerable to blight, given strings to climb, and lots of sun.) I’m reminded of the cultivars I’ve loved best: Black Krim, Cuore di Bue, Brandywine, Pruden’s Purple, various versions of San Marzano; and always a few new ones to try: this year, Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye. I put wood mulch in the bottom third of each pot, then a cup or so of alfalfa pellets, a third of a pot of compost, dug from the bottom of the bins, and full of worms and other eager little lives (and once, I disturbed a nest of mice), then a few shovels of Salish soil from the dumptruck load of 3 years back. When I tuck the seedlings in, I give them a handful of a mix of Quality Farm’s fertilizer: kelp meal, canola meal, rock phosphate, and some other good things. Because of the climate shift, meaning that our summers begin earlier (it was over 30 degrees here this past weekend), I’m trying a version of the olla, a terracotta pot buried in the soil and filled with water (its drainage hole covered) for self-watering. I’ve put stones in the little saucers I’m using to top the pots and I’ve been happy to see bees visit for a drink. (The ones in this photograph are dry because yesterday was so hot that the water evaporated. But when I checked the pots undernearth, they were still half-full of water.) There are 15 pots on that upper deck and 5 more will join them this afternoon. And then what? I have so many more seedlings. (If you live near me and want a few tomato plants — small ones, I started them late, but in a few weeks it will hardly matter. They grow as you watch them! — stop by.)

So compost: an analogy. Anything useful goes into the compost bins — organic waste from the kitchen, grass clippings, sometimes paper, wood pellet cat litter (with the solids removed and chucked in the bush), some weeds if they’re not overbearing, prunings, etc. And when I dig deep, some of it is still recognizable: pineapple tops, a whiff of coffee grounds, the crumbling ash from the woodstove. Like memories or experiences, half turned to soil.

The vines love the bucket of compost they receive this time of year. When I got up in the night to pee, I thought, What’s that beautiful smell, and it was the wisteria growing just beside our south-facing bedroom window.

It is entwined with a dog rose, the earliest of our roses to bloom, probably next week. The past few nights we’ve heard something jump from the little edge of roof to the railing holding these vines aloft. A weasel? A flying squirrel? The night is filled with mysterious visitors!

late 14c., compote, “mixture of stewed fruits, a preserve,” from Old French composte “mixture of leaves, manure, etc., for fertilizing land” (13c.), also “condiment,” from Vulgar Latin *composita, noun use of fem. of Latin compositus, past participle of componere “to put together,” from com “with, together” (see com-) + ponere “to place” (see position (n.)).
The fertilizer sense is attested in English from 1580s, and the French word in this sense is a 19th century borrowing from English. The condiment sense now goes with compote, a later borrowing from French.
–from Online Etymology

The other thing that really loves compost here is the salad garden I grow in a northeast corner of that upper deck. When I used to grow salad in the vegetable area, the slugs would always find it. Maybe it didn’t matter but moving it to tubs in a cool part of the deck means that we have the best greens from April until November. I also grow microgreens in the greenhouse all winter. Some of the arugulas are perennial –that higher leaf in the middle pot for example — and with a handful of compost tucked around them each spring, they go forever. There are self-seeded clumps in the vegetable garden too and the slugs don’t bother them much. Too peppery maybe? (There are still 5 or 6 tubs to come up to join these ones.)

The other night we were having dinner outside and I said to John, Every purple lilac here comes from little shoots at the foot of the one in my parents’ garden. What about the white one, he wondered. That came as a tiny stick from a woman on Garden Bay Road. You should write this down, he said. One day whoever follows us here might want to know where things came from. And maybe I will. It’s a kind of compost, really. Years of leaves and sticks and the earth itself, pulled apart by bears, tucked around salad, dense with nutrients, rich.

Note: May, one of my favourite months, carries so many memories, including, since 2020, the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic, with its dread and quiet. This was first posted on May 12, 2020, and this morning the wisteria is not quite in bloom, though it’s heavy with buds. And because of ongoing life-guard shortages and other mild chaos, it’s not possible to swim regularly at the pool as we’re accustomed to so I bought a wetsuit to extend my time in the lake. (It’s one thing to plunge in breathlessly throughout the year and I do love that but it’s hard to have a sustained swim in cold water. The wetsuit is a good solution and when it hangs on the clothesline to dry after my swim, I’m reminded of the stories about women who are really seals.)

________________________________

I found my datebook buried under a pile of stuff on the dining table and I looked back to see how long ago it was that we began to live as we now do. 57 days ago we realized that it was no longer safe nor possible to move around our community as we were accustomed to doing. 60 days ago we at a quiet dinner at the Backeddy Pub, the tables well-spaced as they always are, and I remember realizing it was probably the last time in, oh, how long? (60 days.) I remember I had a second large glass of wine because who knew when the next time would be? (A glass of wine in a place overlooking Jervis Inlet, I mean, with the possibility of seeing whales, because of course I can have wine any time I like at home. And do.) We realized at dinner that we’d probably had our last swim for who knows how long. The lake near us is warming up and yes, we’ll swim there, but a thrice-weekly swim in the local pool, with its precise measurements to let you know how far you were swimming and its many clocks to tell you how long, coming out of the pool with the knowledge that you’ve done 50 lengths (at 20 meters each) in 47 or 52 minutes, well, it’s been 60 days.

John and I have both been writing. He’s working away on the memoir we’re supposed to be writing together, a record of house-building, building a life together, rooms being planned and framed and built as children were born to fill them, and then leave them. Somehow my own work on this has been put aside because I’ve been pulled into something else. I’ll return to the house and how we built it but right now I’m finding my way into the dark days of the Spanish flu pandemic and how it affected my grandmother and her young family. Somehow it’s taken on a special urgency as I live through the current pandemic. I also completed the final work on a collection of essays in winter and have been weighing and pondering the next step. It’s quiet work, lyric essays, and I don’t exactly have a line-up of interested parties at my door. But then no one is coming to the door. I’d be nervous if anyone did.

Things were to have happened in the 60 days. There was to have been a driving trip to Edmonton to see our family there. Another long weekend just coming up when we’d have been in Ottawa, helping to tear apart a garden shed to built a new one, a book launch to plan for The Weight of the Heart. I know people are doing these things in virtual time and space these days and I’ve gotten used to WhatsApp reading dates with grandchildren. I treasure those, even when faces break up or freeze. When a phone is somehow turned at the other end so you see a face, in repose, listening, but upside down. But Zoom? I can’t even begin.

This morning, in fine rain, we drove down to Sechelt to do the weekly grocery shopping, well-equipped with masks, gloves, sanitizer. I picked up a book I’d ordered — Square-Haunting by Francesca Wade — and that made me remember we’d hoped to be going to London in the fall for a few days of theatre and museums before flying to Czech Republic where a collection of John’s poems, in translation, is being published in Ostrava. In London we stay near Mecklenburgh Square, the locus of Wade’s book, and we wander in St. George’s Gardens, with its old ghosts and young children walking with their parents. These things will wait for us, I know, and I heard someone say that rather than think of ourselves as stuck at home, we should say that we are safe at home. And I am. We are. In one of those ironies you might not even notice if you were swimming three times a week and driving to Edmonton, flying to Ottawa, the flowers have never been lovelier. The dogwoods are more exuberant than I’ve ever seen them. The crabapple below the vegetable garden looks like a debutante in rich pink. And the wisteria! Returning home to see it framing the patio, I didn’t care about days. Standing underneath is to be deep in the middle of a bee opera. Allegretto, allegro, prestissimo. It’s music you listen to as long as it lets you, as long as it lasts.

Hoping:

I’m hoping the compost bins last a few more seasons. John built them, using old deck board, and plywood lids; removable plywood also slotted into the front part so you could get at the deep part of the pile. I am using the past tense because these bins have been knocked over and bashed up by bears SO MANY TIMES. (I know people say that there are bear-proof compost bins but the earlier ones we had just weren’t.) These bins are set on concrete slabs and after a bear — a young male, usually, and it generally happens only once or twice a summer — knocks a bin over and rummages through it for, well, what? Apple cores? Rotten cucumber?, well, anyway, we just put it back and do what we can to fix it. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be half-filling those black tubs with compost, topping them up with what’s left of the load of Salish Soil we bought 3 years ago, and planting tomatoes in them on the upper deck.

Anticipating:

Last week the associate publisher at Thornapple Press told me that my contributor copies (and a case of extras to have on hand) of The Art of Looking Back were being shipped from Toronto. Depending on the courier used, it usually takes 4 or 5 days. And sometimes the books are delivered to my house and sometimes the courier leaves them down by the neighbour’s gate and once a case of books was left in the woods at the top of the neighbour’s long driveway. Don’t ask me why. Even though I’ve had a copy of the actual book since February, I am so looking forward to opening a case of them (!) and putting a few in envelopes to send to people who deserve them. Family members, the friend who helped me decode a painting (cover uses a detail from this particular piece), the friend who generously read the ms. in its infancy and encouraged me to think about sending it to a publisher. (I’d thought it was something I’d tuck away in a safe place and forget about it.)

Footnote the next day: our neighbour called around 5 to say there was a note left on her gate saying delivery was attempted. The courier will try again today — and I called the company to tell them where to come.

Loving:

How life is bursting forth in the garden, in the woods (the dogwoods along the highway are spectacular), in the pots on our deck, the ones we’ve spent the last week lugging into place and fertilizing, trimming, arranging in groups: a little Mediterranean garden in one corner, with a fig tree, rosemary in Greek olive oil tins, a brilliant cerise bougainvillea; a citrus grove; a salad garden on the north-east corner where it stays a bit cooler in summer so that we can pick lettuce, magenta spreen, various microgreens, wild and cultivated arugula (and they do taste different!), miner’s lettuce, orache; and lilies everywhere so that we can smell them when we have coffee, or lunch, or dinner (different decks). In another week, this is what we’ll see as we approach the front door:

Wishing:

That there wasn’t still so much left to do to wrangle the vegetable garden into shape. I’ve mulched the garlic (planted last fall), tied up the raspberries, planted out the pea seedlings, mulched the blueberry bed. But oh, so much weeding still to do.

Reading:

The night before last, sleepless at midnight, I picked up one my library books, Karsten Heuer’s Buffalo Lessons: How Bison Returned to Banff National Park, and the next morning I said to John, This is a book we need to read together. We visited Elk Island when we were in Edmonton for Easter, something we like to do with our family there, marvelling at the huge bodies of the bison when we’re luck enough to see them. And now we have the memory of the two buffalo at Lascaux too. So yesterday morning we read the first few pages and this is what we’ll continue with:

Buffalo came from a hole in the ground in numbers so great they would support us forever. But when Europeans came the animals disappeared. They went back in that hole in the ground. The buffalo will eventually return. When they do, it will be from the sky and the mountains. (Elders’ telling of Blackfoot creation story, as recorded by Amethyst First Rider.)

I remember seeing videos of the first reintroduction of buffalo to Banff about 8 years ago, helicopters carefully lowering crates of them to the ground, and crying as I watched the animals return from the sky.

Watching:

Last night, sleepless (again), I stood by the big window looking south and everything was silver with moonlight.

Eating:

The first rhubarb crumble, salad snipped from the pots on the deck and the pots in the greenhouse and a clump of miner’s lettuce self-seeded in the garden.

Appreciating:

Tiny moments in the hubbub of the chaos from our neighbours to the south, tiny moments to remind me who I am and what I love: bringing up 4 pots of yellow daylilies to arrange in an old wicker planter given us 35 years ago by a woman who’d had it for her entire adult life (she was in her 80s), going into the kitchen for a jar of water for the plants and when I returned, finding a beautiful tree frog already nestling among the leaves; just now seeing a yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii), looking like it was wearing a Corinthian helmet as it paused in the forget-me-nots; spring azures alighting on the blossoms of the “Romeo” dwarf cherry, delicate as the flowers.

I have been sleeping with the windows open. Four and a half decades ago, we slept in a blue tent while we built our house, an old canvas tent given to us by my father, and set up on a plywood platform to keep us off the ground. At night we’d hear loons down on Sakinaw Lake, their long lonely yearning filling the darkness. Once we heard a cougar scream quite near and the dog, sleeping under the tarp spread over the tent and a small area we used for cooking, tried to dig herself under the platform. The membrane between us and everything else in the world around us was almost as thin as air.

The older I get, the more I miss those days. They weren’t easy, exactly. We worked hard, digging holes for the footings, mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow with water lugged up from Ruby Lake in 5 gallon barrels, framing walls, lifting them into place. We had a baby. I bathed him a metal bowl on the table John built using logs for the legs and bracing and lengths of shiplap for the surface. When he grew a little bigger, I bought a plastic baby bathtub, which came in handy when we went down to Ruby Lake after a hot day’s work to rinse off and swim; we’d put the baby in the bathtub filled with lake water and he’d cool off too.

I miss those days. In a closed house, you don’t hear the loons. You don’t hear the owls. Maybe you’d rather not hear a cougar but you wouldn’t have the choice with the windows closed. What you hear is the news, which is almost never good.

Last night, the windows were open. When I got up to put the cat out at 1:30 a.m., I heard loons, the long yearning and the crazy laugh. I heard something else rustling in the eaves. A weasel maybe? When I returned to bed, I thought about the deck I am readying for summer: I’ve planted sweetpeas, fertilized the tubs of roses and oriental lilies, arranged pots of rosemary at the foot of the Desert King fig. The sweet yellow daylilies are already in bud. Today we’ll put out the round table, the one where we drink our coffee after our morning swims.

I miss the days of sleeping with only a thin membrane of canvas between me and the night. I miss the wildness of our land, before the driveway, before the house, before the gardens, the woodshed, the greenhouse, the climbing wisterias and their heavenly scent. I miss those days but last night the window was open and I heard the loons, an owl, something rustling in the eaves. In a month the deer will pass with their young by the copper beech where my parents’ ashes are scattered. I’ll remember to stand at the edge of the woods and look back, back to where our house sits in its drapery of vines.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere
At once.

Note: the lines of verse are Gary Snyder’s, from “As For Poets”