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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.

Doing: Yesterday it rained on and off all day. The house smelled of apples from the buckets and bags in the utility room. So I made 3 pies for the freezer (with plans to make more today) and a crumble for us to enjoy after dinner. And honestly, is there anything nicer than warm crumble with a scoop of ice cream, in this case Kawartha Dairy’s wonderful Tragically Chip? Yesterday there wasn’t.

Making: I’ve been piecing together a quilt, horizontal strips, and yesterday (after the pies), I sewed sashing to the strips after working out the simple arithmetic of how to make the best use of the indigo-dyed sheets I’d put aside for this quilt. I have a big one for the backing and I had some of the first one left, the one I’d used for the strips, and what I had wasn’t ideal for the sashing — the lengths were short and it meant a fair bit of cobbling together. But it really doesn’t matter. My quilts are very much a reflection of my limited sewing skills and if I need to measure 3 times, cut once, then re-measure, and cut again, so be it. I hung the completed top on the clothesline between showers and I love how the indigo-dyed strips and sashing actually echo the sky on a bright day. Looking at it, I have the uncanny sense of swimming under the clouds and also within them, as I do on the days when the clouds are reflected in the lake’s surface.

Listening: I have been listening to as many recordings of Paco de Lucia (my favourite guitarist) playing the Concierto de Aranjuez. I don’t know, there’s something so deeply yearning about the adagio, and when Paco played it, he would allow a tiny moment for the heart to catch up with the music, and I am listening, my own heart caught in the strings, the oboe, the pauses, the hesitations. This morning, swimming, I was watching the moon in the western sky, a whole note hung in the bars of high contrails, and yes, it was almost exactly that.

Thinking: About words, how sometimes a word will enter your imagination, and take you to unexpected places. On my desk, Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things, open to “Squarings”, and these lines:

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.

And I held the word “river” in my own mind, I hold it now, remembering my father packing the car for a camping trip and telling us we would see the Sturgeon River, where his school friend had once dived from a bridge, and never came up, and how it became a haunting, a story I’ve remembered ever since, the boy with pale skin sinking, caught in reeds, mud, the unforgiving bed of the river, and the boys on the bridge waiting.

I’m getting ready to make an indigo vat to dye some lengths of linen and to try to extend the life of two duvet covers, white cotton, which have become a little stained over the years. It didn’t occur to me to over-dye them until I remembered I’d sent my daughter some photographs of a line of old sheets and some mystery fabric I’d bought at the thrift store for $2 (almost certainly a poly-cotton blend and all the dye guides tell you not to bother with polyester because its fibres won’t take dye) and then we talked about her upcoming birthday. What would you like, I asked, and she replied that she could use a duvet cover. I used the mystery fabric to make her one. (The fabric on the clothesline is still wet and this photograph shows what the blue dried to.)

So the duvet covers, some linen, 9 damask napkins, big ones (and monogrammed) , that I bought at the thrift store for a couple of dollars, and maybe an old sheet. I’m at work now, sewing the strips I pieced together earlier in the week together for a quilt top and they’ll need backing. An indigo-dyed sheet will work perfectly. Every time I have a quilt in mind, I ask myself if it might be a good idea to think about other colours, other possibilities, but nothing captures my imagination like blue. This morning as I was swimming my slow kilometre, I was watching the sky clear. It rained overnight and when we arrived at the lake, the sky was grey. But the little islands in the distance were lit by sun and as I swam the grey dissolved, transformed.

Sometimes I look up and see scribblings in the clouds. A long salmon skeleton, a few bars of music, the shapes of distant mountains. Today they were soft billows against the clear blue. And so far away. I think of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

I think that’s what I am trying for when I dip fabric into indigo dye: the distances I never arrive at. In writing, in quilt-making, in the relationships in my life. I do my best, or at least I think I do. But I also know I’m careless. I don’t take enough time. I’m impatient. I say I’m interested in process more than results, and I think that’s true, but maybe I could take more time with the process, guide my work a little more carefully. When I tie the old cotton duvet covers with string to find the pattern I won’t know until the work is done, I could be more intentional.

Today I might finish sewing the strips for the quilt top together. I measured, cut, pieced, and as I sew the strips into their sequence, I’m having to adjust and cobble little bits here and there because I made mistakes. I tell myself the mistakes are part of the process and it doesn’t really matter if there are anomalies in the design. The atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. When I was swimming this morning, I saw that distance, the blue sky with its summits, and myself so far below.

The other night we arrived home from supper at the pub in Egmont and saw this bear standing under the big crabapple tree below our vegetable garden. The bears come every year for the crabs that grow on branches too high for us to reach. Sometimes it’s a sow with a cub or two; she’ll send them up to the top boughs for the highest fruit. Sometimes it’s a young male, fending for himself, with a bit of attitude. These are the ones who break branches, who sway back and forth as they feed. They’ve come as long as we’ve had this tree, planted as a small offshoot of a tree in John’s mother’s garden. She brought it in the early 1980s. So these are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the original bears. They have very sophisticated spatial and temporal maps which they pass on to offspring. A neighbour’s plum tree, our crabapples, the salmon stream half a mile away.

Recently a grizzly sow and her 3 cubs have been sighted in our area. Grizzlies are not regular inhabitants on our part of the coast but they do swim from the mainland sometimes. My friend sent a photograph of the sow and cubs taken from her deck; they were feeding in a bay at low tide. This morning a woman told us they’ve been spotted not far from our place. Maybe that’s why the cat was skittish this morning, running from room to room, checking things out. Though he was skittish yesterday morning too and when I looked up from my desk, I saw a doe and her twins, their spots nearly faded away, eating salal at the edge of the woods.

Honestly, I’d rather think about and see animals than read the news. Every day, another crisis. I’m not turning away from it but when I weigh the dangers of failing diplomacy, trade wars, food-born illness (because of failing health protections), I’d rather learn how to live safely in the natural world. The rules are pretty clear: be responsible about garbage, food waste, your own behaviour on trails in their territory, and keep your vehicles locked because they’ve figured out how to open doors. (Last summer we woke to an open car door and muddy prints around the handle. But we realized that the motion light on our print shop must’ve scared the bear before it could do any damage. There was nothing in the car to attract it. Maybe the male with attitude?)

This morning one of the gates to the vegetable garden is broken. We picked the apples a few weeks ago because they ripened earlier this year but some mother told her offspring that there’s a gate they can break in late August and sometimes the reward is apples. Old lessons in a changing climate.

I hope the grizzly sow and her cubs find their way to a less populated area. I hope they travel safely. But the odds are against it. Last year the young grizzly who was sighted on a beach in Sechelt and who was trapped at Chapman Creek and relocated, found his way to Texada Island where he was shot by someone protecting his farm animals while officials argued about whose responsibility it was to move the bear yet again. The old stories have lessons for us: the girl who married a bear is one I read as a young woman and thought about during the years my daughter was a teen and how the story contains rules about sexuality and courtesy we might all benefit from learning. I think of Gary Snyder’s “this poem is for bear” with its beautiful epigraph: “As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.” Today John will fix the gate busted up by the petulant child of the god of the mountains and I’ll think about the low huff the bear gave as he walked away (he didn’t run) when we surprised him under the tree the other night.

Yesterday I was filled with urgency to make something. I felt it in my hands, my heart. Make something. And as I was putting clean sheets on the beds vacated by family members returned to their homes, I realized I had been thinking for weeks about the sky, the water, and how they were so pivotal to my sense of self this summer. Or any summer. Or winter. I looked at a stack of blue fabric, some I’d dyed, some acquired over time, and I realized I could sew my thinking into a quilt.

I cut long strips of indigo-dyed cotton and some Japanese cotton. 6 inches wide. I cut lengths of unbleached cotton and realized it would be too, well, plain on its own so I found some deep red linen, scraps from a Maiwa barrel where you could fill a bag for a few dollars with offcut. I was able to cut some 6 inch pieces of varying lengths, and I punctuated unbleached cotton strips with these.

So now I have everything cut into strips, pieced into long sentences of blue and white, punctuated with varying marks of red, and today, if I have time, I’ll cobble together a quilt top, the strips arranged horizontally, lengths of sky and water and the miracle of being alive within them.

We were talking in the kitchen a few weeks ago when my son said something that sort of surprised me. He said our place is a bit of a museum and that whenever he and his kids visit a small-town museum, they always see things that we have in our house. Oil lamps. A galvanized tub. Typewriters. (Imagine typewriters being museum-worthy!) Anyway, it was something to smile about. To wonder about. To tuck away as yet another indication of time passing.

And then the other night, my other son asked if I would read his boys their bedtime story. Sure, I said. I was already in my bed, reading, and the boys came up in their pyjamas with the book they wanted. It was When I Was Young in the Mountains, by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Diane Goode. I’ve written about that book before. It’s a lovely example of a writer looking back, not in a self-serving way, but in an intimate and moving tribute to the origins of her calling. Each moment is remembered with exactitude and the grandfather sharpening the child’s pencils so she can write everything down is such a beautiful detail.

So the boys snuggled in and I began to read. Look, one of them said: There’s your coffee pot! And the other one noticed the galvanized tub, just like ours, the one we bought when we were building our house. Their dad had his baths in it when he was a year old. And I remember sitting in it too, heavily pregnant with our second child, cooling off in the evening after a day of hanging drywall with John.

Being around grandchildren is (mostly) a gift. You get to see your own children again and have a second chance. A second opportunity to swim with them, make favourite meals, read the old books. And you can add a chapter to the family story you are always remembering, always telling: this morning, after John regaled them with how he was strapped 11 times in grade 5, I told them how I’d inadvertently made trouble for another child in grade 1 and that I didn’t know at the time how to step forward and admit responsibility. I told them I still feel badly about it, 64 years later.

So we live in a museum near the mountain. Our galvanized tub comes in handy for soaking plants that need special treatment and I still love the coffee pot I found in the Quilchena store at least 30 years ago. (The copper pot it replaced is in the back of a cupboard and is even more worthy of museum status.) The typewriter is out in the print-shop with our 19th century Chandler and Price platen press and the cases of vintage type. This morning I put away the family silver and the platters from the boys’ great-grandmother. On my desk, my wooden pencil box, some fossils, and a spruce cone from my grandmother’s village in Moravia.

When I was young in the mountains, Grandfather came home in the evening covered with the black dust of a coal mine. Only his lips were clean, and he used them to kiss the top of my head.

My own grandfather was a coalminer and maybe he kissed my father’s head, and my father kissed my head, and I kissed my grandson’s head as he left this morning. (His brother was already running to the car.) As the family drove away from the museum that is our life together here on a bluff near two lakes, we waved to them, Goodbye, goodbye.

Note: the quoted passage is from When I Was Young in the Mountains.

Thinking: about the bundle of linen I have stored away for an early September dye vat and how when I look up at the sky as I’m swimming my morning back stroke, I see all the blue possibilities: a line of white like a zipper, deeper when the water is reflected, and oh, the grey-blue of the kingfisher passing right over my head.

Reading: I was awake in the night this week, reading Mark Haddon’s amazing Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour. At first you don’t see the narrative in linear terms, because it isn’t. He’s composed the book in sections, which seem to be random. Or at least not exactly connected. But then you see the way he’s echoed his life, his relationship with his parents (spoiler: they are awful), his wife, his own mental health issues, his attempts to find a way to write the way he needs to (and his section on making historical fiction is just wonderful), how he’s inserted illustrations — photographs, his own drawings, other images — and how the reader puzzles through them, finding a strangely beautiful coherence. Some parts are laugh-out-loud funny (his history teacher, his gruesome description of a pilonidal sinus, a condition I also suffered with as a teenager), some parts left me weeping quietly, head turned from my sleeping husband.

Enjoying: The company of my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons, who come to the lake with us every morning, who help prepare great meals, and who have helped with some difficult jobs: staining a bit of the cedar on the tallest part of the house, splitting firewood. I love hearing the thock of arrows hitting the target when they’re out on the lane, shooting a bow, and then hearing the excited account of bulls eyes, or close.

Finding: 4 1/2 yards of dark green (almost black) dupioni silk at the thrift store yesterday for $9. I have in mind a project, which I know I am too careless to carry out well, but maybe I’ll rise to it. Or not.

Anticipating: Another month and a half of morning swims. I’ll go each day, I’ll swim my slow kilometre, and then one morning I’ll know it’s time to head to the pool. This morning I was doing a kind of casual math as I swam, trying to figure out how many kms I’ve accumulated this summer, and I lost count, but since mid-April I’ve been in the lake most days, apart from 5 days in Edmonton, and 5 days in Gatineau, and 3 days on the Island. Some days I’ve gone twice, or at least I’ve had an ocean swim on top of the lake swim.

Eating: Maybe the signature dish this summer is the simplest: blackberry ice-cream. Two cups of frozen blackberries in the food processor with a tablespoon or two of brown sugar. Whir them until they’re kind of crushed. Then add heavy cream, maybe a cup in all, drizzling it in and pulsing the food processor until everything comes together. It won’t hold. Don’t even think about freezing it. Have it on galette or in waffle cones or in a bowl. You won’t be sorry. You can add other fruit — it has to be frozen — like mango or raspberries or peaches. But somehow the simplest is the best.

So quickly the summer passes. Just last week, wasn’t it, I was tying up roses, planting out the tiny tomato plants. I was thinking ahead. Some family members would arrive in July, some in August. And now, it’s past mid-August. The curtains my granddaughter and I made over a week in late July, using 10 feet of ramie which we twisted and tied with hemp string, and then dyed with rose madder, and 10 feet of unbleached cotton which we soaked in the dye vat for lining, her measuring, me sewing: those curtains are now hung in an Edmonton bedroom. The French picture books I was going to read with E. are still piled on the living room table, though we are working our way through Les Trois Freres, and maybe, just maybe, my French is improving. A. is outside, constructing a golf course on our mossy area, and I’ve just cleaned the juicer after making two quarts of apple juice to freeze for winter. (I think if I make two quarts a day for the next twenty years, I’ll be able to make a dent in the 100 pounds of apples in the back room, picked just in time to beat the bears to the harvest. I’ll make pies for the freezer too once I have more time.)

I was thinking ahead when I woke this morning. Or maybe I was in the past, thinking my way to this summer. I always intend to accomplish more: well-weeded garden, shelves lined with preserves. (I did make 27 jars of blackberry jam two days ago and a dozen disks of pesto — I freeze it in silicon muffin cups, then unmold them and put them in ziplock bags.) I always intend. But every morning the swim. Every evening the stars.

My curtains are rough white linen and they filter moonlight. Some
evenings I still walk out in my cotton nightdress to pluck slugs from
the lettuces, watch for deer who bring their fawns to eat rose canes
escaping the fence. How many generations of deer, how many of bears
lying in wait for the apples to ripen as they turn over stones on the
path for the abundance of ants? Four, or seven, or thirty-two. And even
the dogs, long dead, are racing in circles around the garden fence.
One of them loved blackberries, one ate salal from the bushes along
the driveway. In the dense woods a varied thrush adjusts its pitch,
another answers from the understory. The robin nest is filled again
with soft blue eggs. The weasel has yet to appear by the window,
though the curtains are now open, the roses are blooming.

We’ve eaten spot prawns and prime rib, a leg of lamb barbecued with branches of rosemary, lots of Grandma’s focaccia, blackberry ice cream, a nectarine and blueberry galette, and tonight there’ll be figs from the Brown Turkey tree waiting to be wrapped in prosciutto and grilled, sockeye salmon for tacos, and pastry chilling for a blackberry and apple galette. At the lake each morning, the boys throw sticks for the caretaker’s dog Izzy, and yesterday one of the young mergansers was swimming alone.

As I swam this morning, I was making a life list of water, the bodies I swam in, the ones I yearned for as I drove by in a car or on a train: Ruby Lake, the Thompson River, Nicola Lake, the Pacific Ocean, a pool in a courtyard in Porto, the little curve of the Côa River (one I yearned for) where Ribeira de Piscos idled into it last November and where the guide said he could not advise swimming in it (I was wearing my bathing suit under my jeans), the Sovytsia River by my grandfather’s village in western Ukraine, the Englishman River I waded in as a child and wondering about falling into as a troubled young woman, the bright water of the Vézère River in France, the Madawaska River we swam in after E.’s birth, then later. I was thinking ahead to other rivers, other possibilities, and knowing that one day these very days will be memory. Boys throwing sticks to Izzy, unwrapping lengths of madder-dyed fabric on the grass in sunlight, my husband bringing in a bowl of figs from our tree. The grass is growing tall behind the garden and the tomatoes are ripening each day. One day these very days will be memory.

Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Note: the first quoted passage is from my essay, “Love Song”, published first in Mother Tongue Publishing’s anthology, The Summer Book, and then in my book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays. The passage of poetry is from Louise Gluck’s “Nostos”.

In the sandbox, the boys were waging a war. A city built, then missiles arrived to destroy it. Not nuclear, the newly-8 grandson assured us. When they came to the table on the deck for their lunch, they told us about it. It was either WW4 or 5, imaginary, and almost everyone was killed. All 9 of them, though some went to hospital to recover, which was hard, because it too had been bombed and the injured were lying in the open air. It’s hard to build a civilization, E. confided. And what will the civilization require, we wondered. He thought for only a moment: A public library, a SuperStore, a museum, and a hotel with a swimming pool. They boys finished their lunch and went back to work.

I was awake last night, wondering about the Perseids. The previous night I’d gone from my bed to the dark deck, just a few small solar lights stuck in potted plants, and I leaned against the railings. One, two, three satellites, doodling across the sky. And then a meteorite, so swift I almost missed it just by the vain queen Cassiopeia. I had a wish prepared. I had two wishes and luckily another meteorite shot across the heavens. I returned to bed and half an hour later John got up, then Forrest and Manon came up too. I heard them outside, exclaiming as they too saw the meteorites and made their own private wishes.

...beneath the tender protest of 
                    the stars.
     Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.

But last night there was haze, smoke haze or clouds. I remained in bed, thoughtful. The days are so full. Yesterday, the usual morning swim in Ruby Lake, and then later, an ocean swim at Francis Point. When I looked down at grandson A., he had wrangled a long length of bull kelp to shore and was examining it on the barnacled rocks.

This morning in the lake, I was listening to the boys throwing sticks for the caretaker’s dog (she comes to clean the little park when we are swimming so we’ve grown fond of her new pup who is as active as the grandsons) and I was thinking about wishes. Do we make them for ourselves or others? If you see two meteorites, is it ok to send one wish out to the world at large and keep one for your own private hopes?

John is out cutting firewood and one of the grandsons is keeping him company. The other is perched on the big rock in the meadow of moss, humming to himself. Or wishing. I have watered the decks and the laundry is whirling in the machine. 5 ripe figs wait on the counter to be wrapped in prosciutto and grilled on the barbeque. Pesto for dinner tonight, and ripe tomatoes. Last night we had blackberry ice-cream, the simplest kind, berries and cream and a tablespoon of brown sugar. I don’t like it, I love it! E. told me twice. Forrest and Manon left early for a couple of days away on their own so there are two fewer towels on the railings. These are days I wish for winter when the night comes down too soon and we keep adding logs to the fire.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife-edge of the snow with the voices of 
                    the dead dahlias.


(Note: the lines are Lorca's, from "City That Does Not Sleep", translated by Robert Bly. And photograph by Manon Labelle.)

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