posts

Note: we are far from the path of totality. And this morning I’ve been thinking about infinity, just as I was 3 years ago.

When I came up from the garden a few minutes ago, intending to sit in the greenhouse for a few minutes, I found that John got there first. He was in the blue chair by the door, smiling. It’s quite cool here today, though there was sun earlier, nothing like the summery weather last week, and when I went out to open the vent and door after lunch, it was 32 degrees inside the closed greenhouse. A few minutes ago? 22. The fluctuations are so interesting. It’s often 10 first thing in the morning and it’s been as warm as high 40s. The plants are thriving. I have a tub of water in one corner and I like walking around to mist or water the flats of seedlings, the pots of salad greens, the beans.

Anyway, he’d got there first. Why didn’t we build this years ago, he wondered. We’d often talked about a greenhouse but somehow time was consumed by other work. Or travel. Or just the dailiness that was different from the dailiness now. (I think our house was cleaner when we knew people would be coming for meals or to stay for a few days.) Why didn’t we. I thought about it for a minute or two and replied, We didn’t need it then. He looked quizzical. But what I meant was, I at least didn’t need something to devote myself to quite so strenuously. We were seeing our friends regularly, we were flying to Europe for work and/or pleasure (and honestly, the work part was pure pleasure too), to the cities where our children live. We were saying one day, Let’s do a little roadtrip, and a day later we were driving to Lillooet just for the pleasure of the Fraser River at that place, or to the Nicola Valley for its memories and the scent of sage, or to Grand Forks for borscht, taking the Bridesville-Rock Creek crescent this time of year for the wildflowers and yellow-headed blackbirds on a particular pond. There was no fear of this virus or any other one.

This year I felt sort of desperate. After I finished the revisions for Blue Portugal in March, I was sad for all the things I loved and which seemed so remote from me. Even the grandparents I wrote about, long dead, seemed even farther away in time and place. While I was working on the essays, I could look forward every morning to spending time in Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and other places where some of my ancestors lived. I was on and in the rivers I’ve always been drawn to. I was walking with my children in their cities or here. Most days I could remind myself of how lucky I am in the larger scheme of things and I know this, I do. But knowing isn’t always a solace.

Yesterday I had my first vaccination, something I’ve looked forward to for ages, waiting for my age group to be eligible. I wore a dress, tights, all my silver and turquoise bracelets (there are many!), and I took a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates to give to the woman who injected me. She was surprised and I saw tears briefly well up in her eyes. After I received my shot, I sat in the row of spaced chairs set around the perimeter of the hall where we were asked to wait for 15 minutes to ensure we weren’t going to have a reaction to the vaccine. People were sitting quietly. I was too but inside I was euphoric. It felt like something was actually shifting. I know of course that this isn’t the end of the virus and that we will never return to what we knew as normal. I suspect I will never walk through an airport again without wearing a mask. Will never feel comfortable in a market aisle with other people. But as I sat in the chair, I was elated. It’s the way I feel when I am in my little greenhouse among the plants. There’s hope in vaccinations and hope in green seedlings.

Late morning our Edmonton grandson phoned for a story. His grandfather read him Imagine A Night, the most stunning book about imagination and the kind of magic ordinary life can aspire to. Henry’s response was to talk about gravity and black holes. He’s 4. His father is a mathematician and his mum, a physicist, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was so lovely to hear him find the words to explain gravity (in response to one of the illustrations) and then to riff on space, black holes, and how his favourite hockey team is the Winnipeg Jets because of their symbol. I don’t think symbol was a word I knew at 4. After lunch, his 5 year old cousin in Ottawa called for a story too. We’ve been reading Iron Hans and so we continued with that and he very adroitly recounted the story so far when I asked him where we’d left off. His grandad asked him what he knew about gravity and wow, he had the whole concept as clear in his mind as anything. And infinity (because his dad had just given him a badge with the infinity symbol on it) — he told us about numbers and lines without beginnings or ends and all about the number googol: a one with a hundred zeros after it, named by the 9 year old nephew of an American mathematician. He was so excited to tell us about this number and how it was almost infinite.

In the greenhouse there is no virus. There is no danger. In my mind as I moved a tray of peas out to harden off, I was thinking of two small boys held to earth by its own dependable pull, held to us by something as mysterious, and how much I hope they can visit this summer for more discussions about timely subjects, stars, little frogs, the hidden places where the lizards live under the rocks, and how floating in a lake might be the same as, or different from, floating in space.

Friends came for dinner last night and because they’d been to Granada and we were just home from that beautiful city, I made a Spanish meal. Paella, full of sausage, chicken, swimming scallops, and octopus. (I had several bags of octopus tentacles in the freezer and prepared the contents of one of them, pausing before I skinned the tentacle which I’d just steamed for a hour to tenderize it to marvel at the unexpected spiral.)

Anyway, I made paella, salad, and a tarte made as one makes tarte tatin but with pears and figs poached in dry sherry and honey. We talked of Spain, we listened to Estrella Morente sing, and after dinner we went to our living room for coffee, at least coffee for those brave enough to drink it in the evening. (John did, and was awake for hours. I continued with Spanish wine…) My friend asked me to tell her the source of the image at the top of my website, this one:

She was sitting on the leather couch, the back draped with a quilt. Behind you, I said. And she turned to see this (or at least a completed version of this:

She was puzzled and so I explained how I’d gathered beach stones at Trail Bay

and tied them in diagonal rows on some coarse white linen. Then I made many immersions in a vat of indigo. Depending on the day, and my mood, I think of the resulting pattern as snow angels or birds. I showed my friend how I’d quilted with spirals and that reminded me of the octopus tentacles we’d just eaten, cut into pieces, sauteed in olive oil, and added to a pan of bomba rice, saffron broth, sofritto of onion, garlic, red pepper, and tomato, seasoned with smoked Spanish paprika, and simmered with chicken, chorizo, and small pink-shelled scallops. I thought of John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” We do. How else would friends in a room on the edge of the Pacific find themselves remembering Granada, paella, the beach at Trail Bay, indigo dye, a blue quilt backed with soft red flannel to make it cosy for winter evenings?

Because she was interested in that particular quilt, I showed her a few others in our living room, more recent creations,

and what she said couldn’t have pleased me more. You could have a show of these, she said, at the Arts Centre, and when I went to bed after saying goodnight under a starry sky, I felt warm with her praise.

This afternoon, I was waiting for John to finish up at a group he attends and when he came out, he apologized for being late. There’d been a discussion on AI and he was countering the opinions of those who felt it could free us up to be more productive. He said, No, it would be the death of civilization. And he continued, as he related his defence to me on the long drive home. That an algorithm might well create Shakespearean sonnets but they wouldn’t be the work of someone who was both the product of a very interesting period in human history and its interpreter, its eloquent poet. His creations are unique in their genius and their beauty. They have shaped how we think, how we remember (I can still recite the sonnet I learned when I was 16, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”, and knowing its formula doesn’t at all diminish its profound meaning) and there is nothing like them. It was a much more complex discussion than this but I thought about it in the context of my quilts, their origins, where they lead me, what they allow me to discover–about colour, about texture, about the beauty of materials, about patience, about impatience, and their relationship to everything else I do.

Here are the opening lines of Jorie Graham’s astonishing poem, “Before”, written in response to Édouard Vuillard’s 1898 painting, Repast in a Garden.

it came, before the turn in the cherished
wind, what we called history, the turn
towards, all of it more and more
towards – what is it that is
coming – must come – unfathomable, unbreakable – you want it so, your
future, no the
future, so
badly – you stand
on the threshold of your century as on a high
parapet, brush in hand, a ladder wrinkling the air as it rises,
a kind of singing,
rung by rung –
all of you bowing to it saying thank you, thank you my lucky stars I am living
now – right now –
of all times this is the one now…

Can you imagine AI writing this? Can you imagine AI creating the painting that was its inspiration? Would you want to read that? Or to look at something with any human enterprise wrung from its pigment, its language, its emotional context? Its history?

I know which I prefer. And when I am working on an essay, when I am hanging shells from driftwood to catch the air in an unearthly music, when I am stitching spirals in linen I’ve tied and immersed in a dye-bath and let settle in my mind until I see how to use it, when I am wrapped in its comfort, reading sonnets by the son of a glove maker living in the late 16th/early 17th century, I am hitched to everything else in the Universe. And grateful for it.

Note: I’m about to head out to plant some anemones in bowls in the greenhouse and I found myself wondering if this was its third year or fourth year. And here’s my answer, a post from late March, 2021.

On Monday, John finished constructing the door to the greenhouse and we ceremoniously fit it into its hinges. It opens and closes! The roof vent does the same! Yesterday was a shopping day down the Coast so we didn’t do any work on it but bolts were purchased to finish off the base (we were short a few) and I bought a thermometer for the wall. When we came up the driveway after our swim this morning, I saw the greenhouse standing in its place, looking exactly as I’d hoped it would look. I have to confess there were moments when I doubted we’d get to this point. We didn’t mean to put it together ourselves, though our younger selves would certainly have rolled up their sleeves and got to work, not on a kit (which is what we bought) but on something built from wood and old windows and funky as anything. Given our present circumstances—one of us with a post-surgical injury; the other one more of a helper than a builder—we ordered the kit because someone we know said he’d come to help us with it. But then he wasn’t available. The kit sat in the carport and I remember I said, Oh, come on. We can do it. There’s no rush. We’ll do it slowly. It’s not that we can’t do this stuff. It’s more that it’s difficult for John to move around on uneven ground because of balance (that foot!) but once he’s in place, with a chair handy, he’s fine. He has good spatial sense and can decipher plans and instructions. I’m sort of hopeless at that but I’m strong.

And slowly it was. There was the base to consider. The place we had in mind is on a slope behind our house. We’d need to work out a way to build up three sides against the top one. Rock! And lots of it. I can lift 50 or 60 pounds reasonably easily and the biggest rocks were not easy to lift. I’d trundle 4 of them at a time up in the wheelbarrow (up!) and we’d fit them into the frame we’d built of 4×4 (again, that had to be lugged up to the site and it was waterlogged so very heavy; we needed to square that frame and level it and then wait a day and level it again) on posts set on concrete pavers. So rock, then smaller rock to wedge into the gaps between the bigger ones.  Once that was done, then we had to fill the inner part with sand. Luckily we also needed to have work done on our driveway so the guy who came to do that brought sand and used his small excavator to carry buckets of it to dump in the base. Then pavers. There’s a space of 9″ along one side and end and the idea was to fill that space with beach stones. Yesterday I gathered some bags of those at Trail Bay and put a few down last night, just to see. Today I’ll do the rest.

That 2″x2″ wooden brace you see in the top photograph (there’s one on the long wall too) will come off and permanent corner braces will keep the post and beam solid. John will build proper steps to the door, wide ones, with room for a potted tree or two. I intend to bring one of my big Chinese pots to sit on the ground by the steps, with water in it for frogs. And a waterbarrel at the other corner to take rain from the little gutters (you can’t really see them but they’re there) for watering inside.

But right now? We have some planks under the house, wild-edge cedar from a tree that came down many years ago and that we had milled (there’s a passage about it in Mnemonic), using some of the lumber for various projects. I’ll drag them out.  John’s going to make a bench for one of the long walls, to put seedling trays on, and we have some other shelving units to find room for. Maybe by the weekend I’ll be bringing out my little olive trees and other slightly tender plants for their new home. Last night I put some tubs of greens I’d begun elsewhere—arugula and mesclun—and they looked very happy this morning.

The news is terrible. New variants, coups, the worst of human nature coming to the surface in ways I’d thought we’d left behind. I think of Du Fu:

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.
Moved by the moment, a flower’s splashed with tears,
Mourning parting, a bird startles the heart.
The beacon fires have joined for three months now,
Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces.
I scratch my head, its white hairs growing thinner,
And barely able now to hold a hairpin.*

The country may be broken, though hopefully not irreparably so. I’ll grow greens and lay beach stones in sand to cobble together new possibilities here at home.

*translation by David Hinton

This was the best trip, filled with good food, plays in London, flamenco in Granada, fado in Lisbon, exploring Porto with my older son and his family. The best trip, walking through the Alhambra with the sound of water everywhere, seen and unseen, orange trees hung with fruit. The best trip, until it wasn’t, precipitated by a British Airways gate person in Lisbon this morning who decided we couldn’t bring our carry-on cases onto the plane because “there wouldn’t be room with a full flight”. Her younger colleague demurred–the cases are small, light, and we’ve brought them as carry-on many times. But no. The woman insisted, even though the flight wasn’t full and there were empty overhead bins. So on the cases went to Vancouver, if indeed they made the connecting flight. Because we didn’t. Instead, we have been booked into a Heathrow-adjacent hotel with courtesy t-shirts from British Airways to wear to bed, dinner vouchers, and a new flight to Vancouver tomorrow, via Calgary. It could be worse. But it could also be better. Last night we went to hear fado in a tiny Alfama tasca and it was wonderful. Our hosts, Luis and Bela, brought course after course to our table — dishes of roasted peppers, olives, chorizo, followed by soup, baccalau, veal stew with fresh coriander rice. Endless wine. Chocolate cake and a caramel mousse, all of this presented with courtesy and kindness, so the rude attendant’s actions seemed unnecessarily cruel in contrast. Luis and Bela sent us out into the night with warm handshakes and farewells. Luis insisted on taking our photograph.

The other morning I finally found my way through the garden at the Carmen de la Victoria without getting lost. Tonight, in my British Airways t-shirt and no fresh clothes to wear tomorrow for the long flights home, I wonder why we just didn’t stay in Granada or Lisbon or Porto forever.