posts

Note: this was written in May, 2021.

I was sitting in that blue chair just now, drinking my coffee, when it occurred to me that the greenhouse we built to solve a few issues—too many plants in winter in the sun-room off our bedroom so that we can’t actually sit in it, which was the whole point when we designed the sun-room more than 30 years ago being perhaps the most important…—has in fact enabled my habit of never discarding seedlings when I transplant them. Choose the strongest plants, we’re told. But what if they all have the potential to be strong, given half a chance? That’s the reason I have at least 50 tomato plants this year and no room on the upper deck for eggplants and peppers which will spend their summer in the greenhouse. I was sitting in the greenhouse, drinking my coffee, when I suddenly felt, well, a little crowded. Some things will be moved out once the good weather is here to stay. Long tubs of basil will join the tomato plants. On the shelves at the end, on the left, are the pumpkins and other squash, just waiting for really warm nights. A few last trays of beans. (Most have been planted but there are still more…)

I don’t know any other way to do this. You plant seeds. You care for the seedlings. And then, what, you have to discard some because they’re not strong enough? Anyway, we’ll have eggplants, poblano peppers, and tomatoes. Beans. Cinderella pumpkins. Is there anything better in summer? Last week I took the last carton of roasted tomato sauce from the freezer, made from last summer’s abundance. (Method is here, if you’re interested.)

Last night I dreamed I was almost awake when I heard a voice, one of my children but I didn’t know which one, leaning over me as I slept, saying, Mum, mum. Mum, I’m here. And in the dream, I thought, Why have you come now, in the night, when it was fall I hoped to see you? It was a strange half-dream and I know it came from the experience of revisiting, for an essay, the memories of John’s surgery and its aftermath in October and November, long difficult weeks, with little sleep, so much anxiety as we kept having to return to hospital for various issues, and how isolated I felt during that period. It wasn’t as though it was a time when anyone else could have helped. Our Provincial COVID numbers weren’t great, people were being asked to stay home, within their pod, and we were told at UBC Hospital that we must consider John medically vulnerable for some weeks. Writing about those days, those weeks, took me there again and the voice in the night, saying, I’m here, Mum, was welcome but also discordant. You can’t be here. The timing is wrong. And when I woke, I was filled with messy complicated feelings.

My greenhouse is therapy these days. I sit with my coffee, breathing in the deep green scent of basil, rosemary, the soil mix I make with alfalfa pellets taking me back to the days when I had a horse and fed him a section of a bale of alfalfa most evenings, and I close my eyes while eggplants settle into their pots and everything grows in the spring light. I didn’t think I’d be writing about a dream when I started this post, didn’t think I’d be back, however briefly, at the UBC Hospital, listening to a nurse explain the process of care and healing.

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

–Gary Snyder, “What Have I Learned” (from the gorgeous Axe Handles)

Yesterday I swam in the lake, my first real lake swim of the year. I’ve gone in just for a quick dip several times and I did the same in Bute Inlet a few weeks ago, completely alive in its glacial water, but yesterday was my first sustained swim in water other than the pool where I try to go 5 mornings a week. When we drove down to the little beach area, the temperature was 8 degrees. The light in the maples on the trail was beautiful. The water was a little warmer than 8 but not much. Still, it felt good to walk into the lake and push out into its green depths. I could hear a loon but couldn’t see one. Last year, on May 31, a merganser swam along the edge of the shore with 17 new babies, all of them darting around in the shallow water, one after another, the mother carrying one on her back. Maybe it was just that morning that the merganser had led her young ones out of their nest in a tree cavity near the shore, down, down, one at a time, and into the water. But the only bird I saw yesterday was a raven circling high and croaking, maybe also hopeful for baby mergansers.

When we came back from the swim, it was warmer. We had coffee on our upper deck, among the flowering daylilies. I love the early yellow ones best, their colour and sweetness welcome in May. Bees entered their long throats as we talked. We talked about Granada, where we spent a few days in mid-March. I surprised myself by saying, I wish we’d never come home. A few things have happened in recent weeks that have required that I reassess the legacy of our years here, with our children, and after; a home is a shelter, a nest, a place of nourishment, or it should be. You think that and then you discover you have been wrong. Or have you? How do we know? I wish we’d never come home, I said, because my home no longer feels the same.

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

A nest in a tree, lined with grasses, wood shavings, the downy feathers plucked from her own breast. In this house that we built, digging holes for the footings, mixing concrete in a deep red wheelbarrow, framing walls and window openings, making stairs, hanging doors, there is such quiet. Sometimes the cat waits outside my study door for his breakfast. Sometimes a raven comes for the mice the cat leaves by the sunroom door, a shadow of wings falling across my window. What is confidence in the world, I wonder. In the meantime, the yellow daylilies invite the bees, dog roses by the bedroom are beginning to open. It will have to be enough. For now.

Note: The quoted passage is from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

For the first time in weeks, it felt like an opening. Fresh sky, cleansed from last night’s rain, birdsong. Do you want me to set up a target, he asked, and I thought, yes, that’s exactly what I want: my feet in the moss, the bow in my hands, string pulled to my cheek, the arrows alive in the air. I shot four arrows at a time and only one tumbled to the ground, the others reaching the box with the target taped to it, a few them finding the inner rings of the target itself. It felt like an opening, like I was opening a little from the days of despair, the sleepless nights, the difficult thinking. I don’t know if there will ever be a time like last summer, 4 children wanting their grandfather to teach them archery, and the bows strung, the arrows waiting in the holder held upright by stones. I don’t know. But there was an opening and I let myself through.

The bow (βιός) is called life (βίος) but its work is death. Bows were once strung with gut or sinew or rawhide. In their strings, an ancient music, a difficult tension, the bow itself turned back, a turning harmony as we hold it up, our hands finding the right position for the arrow, grip on the riser, our eye on the target, tension in our left hand, strength in our shoulder as we pull back. We hope for our arrow to sail true. Watching, we rub our arms, feel the ligaments pull, as we pulled back, took the tension into our shoulders, our bodies adjusting to the requirements of the weapon. It will take awhile.

After the grandchildren return to their homes, I keep a leather glove by the door so that I can quickly go out when I have some time, its close fit and surface serving the function as a shooting glove. I thought I would order string for the oldest bow, the one that was my husband’s as a young teenaged boy, but the more time I spend with the smallest bow, I realize I’ve found the one that feels the most comfortable. I can string it easily, remembering Odysseus:

like a musician, like a harper, when
with quiet hand upon his instrument
he draws between his thumb and forefinger
a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,
so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
a swallow’s note. (21: 375-382, Fitzgerald trans.)

Our target is in the shadow of the swallow’s house and listen, listen, even in quiet winter you can hear the hum and thok of the bow (there are gods here, too), its string alert, its lively arrows, and although everything is put away, the young buck steps up the green path tentatively, alert to the old music.

Note: the passage is from an essay, “On Swimming and the Origins of String”. (The essay moves from left and right justification on the page to echo the movement of swimming and archery and this particular passage is right-justified.)

Yesterday I surprised myself and finished the French patchwork quilt I began in the New Year. For weeks I didn’t feel like working on it. Its vivid colours didn’t suit my mood as I tried to find my way through a tangle of hurt and damage. But yesterday I saw it on the chair by the sliding doors to the deck and thought, Oh, just finish it. I’d made a deep binding, the yellow, and somehow it needed something else, so I threaded my sharp wide-eyed sashiko needles with cobalt thread and embellished the binding with a running stitch that was half-trail, half-river. When a line ended, I punctuated it with a small shell button. There. Finished.

I had in mind a recipient when I began the quilt but this no longer seems possible. So yesterday, after I’d spread the textile out on my bed and after I’d snipped the basting threads out, the ones holding the layers together as I quilted the spirals and meandering lines that have become a default pattern, anyway, after I’d snipped the basting threads and smoothed the completed quilt, I pulled it over me and I read more of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a book that suits my current mood and situation.

She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.

How true this feels, both as someone who was once a child and as someone who is now a mother. Under the bright quilt, I read and thought and then I got up to finish planting out the beans. I’d forgotten the cryptic squares, the deep blue ones with playful cats, and now I look at them as though they might carry a message from that foreign land.

“Those were splendid days. We didn’t know it then, of course, just how splendid they were. Children never do, I suppose.

Something is over.

I walked down to the old orchard. For three days messages have gone back and forth between my family members in response to something I did. I withdrew from a social media group composed of my children, their partners, my husband, and myself. I did it because a few relationships were fraught and I felt in the middle and I wanted quiet. I wanted a quiet place, quiet words, and I didn’t want to get caught up in complicated strands, a net woven of hurt and resentment. So I told them I was taking myself out of the conversation.

4 weeks later I wrote to them to try to explain what I’d done and things got worse. Old hurts, accusations; issues that I assumed were long over: well, they weren’t over. The messages got heated, new language entered our discussions, a particular therapeutic matrix, which became the foundation of the sentences in the messages to me, and we weren’t talking about my withdrawal from the family chat group any longer.

What were we talking about? More than 4 decades of mistakes on my part. I walked down to the old orchard and sat among the trees we’d planted with such hope 40 years ago, which had briefly thrived, produced fruit, under which a carpet of moss studded with wild purple violets and sweet-scented twin-flower had spread its dense green beauty, and which we’d abandoned because we couldn’t give the trees the care they required. It became increasingly difficult to water them, we tried several kinds of fence to keep out deer, bears, and elk, who found their way in and mangled the branches, ate the fruit, until, now decades older, we simply didn’t have the energy to continue.

Something is over. An old intimacy, without these current insistent expressions of love, but rather an intimacy with warmth, interest, and affection entwined, as the wild honeysuckle is woven into the branches of a Douglas fir near the deck, both thriving, but also independent. When I walked down to the old orchard, I sat on the bench we’d made using a raw plank of rough-milled cedar balanced on rocks. It was covered with dry lichen, and not simply covered with it but held together by a mass of fungal tissues, several organisms entwined, without vascular roots; when I pushed my finger against the edge of the bench, it crumbled like bread. The constant expression of love feels like an emptiness. Said over and over again, a refrain, without meaning. I love you, but. But. Meaning is care – with actions, over time, with language, sentences without the sad cliches of showing the true self, finding a path through healing.

The path that led down to the orchard from the house is overgrown, the boulders we set in place as steps covered in moss. I am older than the woman who walked up and down those stairs to care for the trees. I walk instead down the driveway and enter where we’d built a wide gate so we could drive our truck in with loads of seaweed or manure or a basket to carry the fruit back to the house. The gate is long-gone. Sometimes, looking down from the desk outside the kitchen, I see coyotes ambling through the orchard and sometimes a bear wanders down with her new cubs, passing information to them not so much about the present possibilities of apples but stories of the past: the honeyed golden plums, the pears, four kinds of apples, cherries sweet and dark. The old days of abundance, and beauty.

Sitting on the lichen crusted bench, I pull my toque down over my face because of flies, and I cry. I can’t stop. I am crying for the loss of affection, for the unspoken love replaced now by the repetition of it used to soften the criticisms and rebukes. I am crying for the dead trees. The Golden Nugget, sweet, with russeted shoulders, tawny skin splashed with orange. The pear I think I remember was a Conference. The golden plum overgrown with salal but still managing to put leaf on one stray branch. We had picnics here, we sat on the bench while children rolled down the slope of moss, startling sleeping snakes. In later years, bear scat held the remnants of pears.

Something is over. I lie back on the bench, the hard lichen prickling my back, and I cry for every tree that we planted with such hope, each child we raised with something I would have called love but now am afraid to name. (I love you but. But.) Violets are hidden in the moss, a small bird plucks at dry grass, abandoned wire that once described the shape of our hope. And the names of the trees: Melba, Transparent, Stella, hazelnuts too far gone to even think about restoring

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.

This week I am going to dye a batch of fabric with indigo. I’m waiting for the right time. I’m waiting for the hours, blue hours, when it’s warm enough, when the light is good, when I can give the fabric the attention it deserves. It deserves care. This has been a bad week for care. Yesterday I realized I hadn’t slept more than 4 hours a night for nearly a week. There are things going on. I am sadder than I’ve been in decades.

Each immersion of cloth in the indigo bath, from which oxygen has been removed, each rest on the cedar bench for oxidization, these allow the dye to bond with the fabric. Linen works best for me, the dye penetrating its fibres, so that the colour deepens. Bonds of colour, bonds of affection: I work towards these. Sometimes the results break my heart.

Songs are like tattoos. Last week we were at sea. (I am sadder than I’ve been in decades.) This week we are working in our garden, writing, talking at length about the things going on. We saw Carmen on Sunday afternoon and came home in the dark. When I dye the cloth, my hands turn blue.

A slash of Blue —
A sweep of Gray —
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an Evening Sky —

I have a long length of coarse linen with a swirl of fish batiked on it, not well, and it must have been the end of the dye vat because the colour is very pale. I will bind it up, wrap it in hemp string, and hope to deepen the blue. Deepen the blue until it is the colour of my own sadness and then I will make something with it.

Note: the poem is Emily Dickinson. Also you might hear an echo of Joni Mitchell.

Note: I’m going to go out to cut lilac and was reminded of this song. And this song always takes me back to Ireland in 1978.

As I roved out on a bright May morning
To view the meadows and flowers gay
Whom should I spy but my own true lover
As she sat under yon willow tree.

In 1978, I heard Planxty in concert in Dublin (I think it was Dublin, though it might have been Galway) and this song broke my heart.

I was getting ready to leave Ireland but I was going to return, oh yes, to make a life with a man I loved. I didn’t know the song was a foreshadow. That I would meet someone else in Canada, someone I immediately knew I wanted to spend my life with. He felt the same. We knew that, yes, but we both had ties and had to figure out how to snip them in the most graceful way possible. And it wasn’t tidy. I remember we had an argument over something now forgotten and Planxty was playing on my old turntable and this was the song that sent me out into the night, onto Fort Street, to cry under the trees in front of my apartment. He followed and somehow we figured out a way to move ahead. Part of this meant that we agreed I should return to Ireland to settle, as best I could, my attachments there.

This morning I went out into the morning and everything is so new and green that I cried again. There was birdsong—Swainson’s thrushes and robins, warblers—and the lilacs coming into full bloom. The tree I always think of as the Bride’s Tree, a crab apple brought to us by John’s mother when we first moved here in the early 1980s, is also about to burst into blossom and it’s already loud with bees. It’s the tree the bears love in fall for the small sour crabs and I’m happy for them to eat them, although I don’t know why they have to break branches in their hurry to gobble the fruit.

It comes, the pain of old love, just when you don’t expect it. When you are walking around your garden, planning to return in an hour or so with a colander to pick dandelion leaves, lambs quarters, chickweed, and kale for a green pie for dinner, when you are full of joy for the richness of your life. (A husband who brings you your first cup of coffee in bed so you can drink it by the open window and listen to birds. Who is building new steps for the deck because the old ones might no longer be safe for you and your grandchildren. Who responded to your comment that the orchard bee houses are now fully tenanted by making another, bigger one. Who moved his chair last night because the bees were trying to find another little hole in the wall behind him.)

A phrase will come to you and you are reminded that you were cruel. Reckless. But on a May morning, cutting a jug of those crab apple blossoms, the lilac, a few strands of Saskatoon berry, you can remember and feel a little of that old pain as you recognize the shadows under the spreading trees. What holds the trees close is also joy.

And I wish the Queen would call home her army
From the West Indies, America and Spain
And every man to his wedded woman
In hopes that you and I will meet again.

But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:  
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair  
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Last year I wrote a long essay about the past, about an artist who painted me and was more than a little obsessed with me. Writing this was prompted by a couple of things: I was sorting through a tall stack of the artist’s letters to me; and I wanted to find a way to truly think about that period by engaging a portrait of me that hangs in the stairwell leading from my bedroom to the first floor of our house. I walk up and down those stairs multiple times a day. The painting has been hanging there since 1993 when the painter brought to us as a gift to our daughter, who will perhaps one day want this in her home. (Not yet…)  Last summer a friend helped me take it out of its frame (it had kind of been cobbled into a frame and I’d always meant to frame it properly) and because he is an artist, I asked him about the pigments and the composition. I’d pretty much finished writing the essay months earlier but his analysis allowed me to add a section which in turn helped me to understand something about the artist’s process.

This essay is out on submission right now and to be honest, I wonder if anyone will want to publish it. It’s personal. Does anyone really want to know about that stuff? How I was courted and manipulated? How I was a surrogate in some ways for the artist’s real love, his daughter? But I found things out and I also found a solace in talking to this younger self and listening to her side of the story. Which of course is my story too but for years I kept it (her) at a distance, Oh, that old thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with me now. Except it did. I have his side of the story, detailed in the stack of letters, as well as the three volumes (sketchbooks!) of formal declarations of his love and need.

Yesterday I was working in my garden, planting some seeds, tidying the greenhouse, lugging pots of lilies to the various decks for summer pleasure. At one point I stopped in my tracks because the little Merton Beauty apple tree in the vegetable garden was loud with bees. It had become unshapely with the years and John pruned it carefully this year, looking at the shape of the branches in air, as structure, as potential bearers of fruit. We wondered if that would set back its blooms and fruit but it has loads of flowers and the bees were visiting each one. It’s been given a new life, the tree, and in some ways I feel as though I was given something too in my work to understand the young woman in the stairwell, now cleaned and reframed. That time of my life has been reframed, in a way. There was so much I took for granted, so much I was willing to turn away from, to deny. And now I have been pruned of those illusions.

I see the haste of this work, the urge to put the young poet down on canvas, the firm line of the right part of my head. I see how he would have sketched with a brush dipped in black, a line here, and here, and here. My friend shows how the eyes are not symmetrical and they are the eyes I see in the mirror every day, not symmetrical, but these are not looking at me, not directly; they are implicating me in something I am only now discovering.

A day later, this morning, I come down the stairs early and look up to the blank wall. A small hook to hold the wire at the back of the frame, which has been dismantled, the painting resting flat in a safe place. Everything has been taken apart, dusted, looked at closely. I have talked and talked and talked. A blank wall, and somehow I don’t know where to look, whose eyes to meet. A line here, and here, and here, and on the face I see in the mirror, a line here, and here, and here.

Note: the lines of poetry at the beginning of the post are from “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W.B. Yeats. The passages in conclusion are from my essay, “Let A Body Venture At Last Out of its Shelter”.

I have to say that our five days in remote waters were beyond my expectations. Not an off-note, not an indifferent meal — and honestly, Kelsey surpassed herself with each dinner: miso-glazed sockeye; ling cod on a bed of quinoa risotto; tenderloin beef with prawns; chicken stuffed with tomatoes and pesto and draped with prosciutto; a final dinner of prawns from the traps the crew set out as we went up Toba Inlet on Friday, retrieving them on Saturday just in time for them to be cooked with Dungeness crab, scallops, little mushrooms, and garlic. Nice wines. Desserts I’ll never forget: chocolate mousse with caramel sauce flecked with flakes of sea salt; cheesecake with raspberry puree; crumble topped with ice-cream; lemon tart and blueberries; and beautiful pavlovas dressed with berries and cream. The crew were stellar. We were welcome to join the captain, Ron, in the wheelhouse where he pointed out waterfalls, a particular view of Mount Waddington glowing in the light.

Twice I swam in Bute Inlet, in waters fed by glaciers. At the head of the inlet, we watched the tank of Chinook smolts head off to a point at the Southgate River where the little fish would be released to make their acquaintance with the water, imprinting, some of them–the ones not caught or eaten or grabbed by the grizzly who was grazing on grass on the sand to one side of the estuary– returning to the river to enter into the cycle of eternity. The fisheries biologist and technicians brought up a glass bowl with 3 of the tiny smolts, their parr marks still visible, no scales yet, and I watched them as we learned about the project to enhance the run after a slide damaged the spawning grounds in Elliot Creek and the Southgate. I watched 3 small fish swim in clear water and I kept thinking there ought to be a ceremony for moments like that. Maybe my swims counted.

I didn’t know where I was last night but I know I dreamed of the beauty of chocolate lilies on the tiny island we stopped at so we could stretch our legs, the scent of wild onions underfoot, a feral apple tree blooming its heart out.

The nights were not quite as dark as I expected because a few soft lights remained lit onboard. The night I looked out and saw the jellies, we were as far from home as I’ve ever been, or at least it felt that way. It was dark enough. I thought of Bruce Cockburn, maybe I even heard him sing, as the night can do that if you’re lucky, funnel music into your inner ear. There were hours of night still to go and in the morning, warm cinnamon buns, good coffee, and water everywhere, green water, deeply mysterious.

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light