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I’ve begun my lake swims again and although the water is a little cool, I know it’s where I want to be. These are hot days, scarily so for mid-May on the Sechelt Peninsula. The thermometer on the west wall of the house, not in direct sun, not yet, reads 35 celsius. That’s 95 fahrenheit. I did the morning watering and a few other garden chores after my swim and then it was too hot to be outside. So the lake will warm up earlier than usual, I think. I was glad this morning to be cool, to hear a creek running down from Mount Hallowell just to the right of the cedars in this photograph (from last summer). Glad yesterday to see an eagle fly over me as I did the backstroke. Glad to hear kingfishers rattling, one on either side of the little beach area where I leave my towel and go into the water.

These cedars mark one end of my swim. I begin here and I swim about 60 meters to another group of cedars, turning, returning. Some days I do 10 laps, or 20 lengths. This morning I did 5, because, well, because the water was cool and I had chores to do once home. I’ve done this particular swim for 7 years. Before that, I was reluctant to join my husband and other family members when they went down for an afternoon swim because I didn’t like the crowds. It didn’t occur to me that I could go first thing in the morning and mostly I would have the water to myself. It didn’t occur to me until it did. Last summer, from mid-May until the first week of October, I only missed 3 mornings. Oh, wait. We drove to Alberta in late September and were away for 10 days. We swam along the way, though — in Nicola Lake, in a pool in Radium, somewhere else too. I’ve become that person who travels with a bathing suit under my clothes, just in case.

In a few days we’ll leave for Salmon Arm where I’ll be part of the Word on the Lake Festival and after that, we’ll amble down through the Okanagan for a two nights, visiting our favourite wineries and hoping to swim. We’re setting up the timer in the greenhouse so everything in there will be watered and hopefully cooler days are coming for everything else. We don’t have an elaborate irrigation system (confession: it’s me…) but if we had this all to do again, I think we would. The shift has happened. In the past 5 or 6 years I’ve watched the western red cedars die in places where I thought I’d see them forever. The ones that are my turning point at the lake will probably live because they are near water. But the ones by the parking area are dying. A huge old hemlock has also died and I expect the parks people will take it down before long.

I don’t know what we do about this. I mean, us. People who try to do their best, who grow some food, who try to keep a light footprint. (You can see mine in the damp sand in the photograph…) When I hear about the fires in Alberta, the floods at Cache Creek and Grand Forks, when I read the thermometer on our western wall, I want to weep. Sometimes I do. This morning I remembered Maxine Kumin’s beautiful “Morning Swim” and when I got home, I looked it up. This is how it concludes:

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang “Abide With Me.”

This morning my bones drank water as I swam from one group of cedars to the other. The cedars drank deep too. They still can. But for how much longer? In just a few days the woods have dried, the moss is beginning to shrivel, and I find myself hoping that birds know to seek shadier places to build their nests as I watch them carrying tufts of grass and little sticks. The insects are quiet. It’s too hot for bees. The tomato plants, so vigorous last week, look sad this week; they don’t have enough bulk to keep cool. Was it only a week ago I was making marmalade in a kitchen warmed by the woodstove, listening to rain on the blue metal roof? “Water fell/through all my doors. I was the well.” I wish that was true. Well to the world, to the living trees, to the chickadee I can see from my window as I type this, a strand of dry moss in its beak.

On Mother’s Day, I remember my mother, Shirley Macdonald Kishkan, who died in 2010. I’ve written about her, most recently in my book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays. Here’s a section from “We are still here (J.S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004)”.

1. Allemanda, in Toulouse, on Mount Tolmie

The opening, grave and ominous.

My mother has been dead for seven years. I’ve been researching family history—hers, in part; though mostly my father’s mother’s origins in Horni Lomná, in what’s now the Czech Republic. Most days I find myself thinking about the strange and wonderful cartography of motherhood, across seas and generations, the maps imaginary and remote. How my mother’s mother was unknown to her—my mum was given up at birth to a foster home and raised to think of herself as motherless—and how that first terrible loss shaped her, blank area on the map. She told a granddaughter once that she’d only ever wanted to be a mother, as though she needed to fill the emptiness of herself with that function, scribble her place in geography. When I was young, it never seemed enough to me. I wanted more of her, from her. But now I realize—too late—what she gave me and my brothers.

In Toulouse, last March, I dreamed of my mother. I’d been thinking a great deal about geographical loneliness. Not only for a place one has left, often forever (my grandmother never returned to Europe and as far as I know, she had only very sporadic contact with her family there), but also the loneliness we feel when we try to follow the traces our ancestors left across a landscape. A map, on paper or in memory, a field loved by a child for its birdsong, the scent of plum blossom after a long winter, a tree planted to celebrate a wedding, a birth, an occasion long-forgotten. So the dream of my mother surprised me. She was on a guided tour, just before heart surgery. I always wanted to travel to France, she said, her eyes glowing as she jostled and joked with her new friends, but no one would ever go with me. She had photographs—a long road pink with oleander leading down to the sea, a restaurant filled with sunlight, a plate of sausage. (As far as I know, she never used a camera.) I held her hand and thought, I have another chance. We went to the restroom together and she was running. Please, Mum, don’t run, I pleaded with her, only half in fun. Please. I don’t want you to die on me!

(Walk three steps, then lift a foot. 2/4 time.)

Now I wish I’d offered to take her to France, though I wonder if she truly wanted to go or if the dream came from my own pleasure at the sight of umbrella pines, orange trees, the silvery leaves of olives. She confessed once, after my father died, that she’d always hoped to go to Greece. I looked at her with such surprise, I remember, because the trips she took were to Reno or Disneyland and once, to Hawaii. Packaged tours, on buses or charter flights. Later she and my father travelled to places he’d been to in the Navy and insisted she’d love: Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand. I don’t think she did love those trips but my father was persuasive.

I have a photo album sent to her after her foster sister died. Mostly it’s a record of her foster sister’s life but there are a few early photographs of my mum, aged three, in a garden, or standing by some stairs. She is chubby and dark-haired. So far away in time, in geography—she grew up in Halifax. But somehow curiously present, her clear eyes, her smile. (“Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee…” Her eyes, in mine. Her knees, with that migrating pain. At the end of her life, she could barely walk.)

Until her death, I don’t believe I ever danced an Allemanda. A linear movement in binary form. Walk three steps, then lift a foot. 2/4 time. Four couples, her children and their partners, promenading the length of her living room in an apartment on the slope of Mount Tolmie, entwining their arms, as one lifts a box of photographs (though none of France), another passes a load of her clothing (the cardigans, the polyester trousers, the tiny socks, a few threadbare nightdresses), and the remaining dancers keep their place in the movement. There is nothing French in the apartment, no music but what I hear in my head as I step, as I sort, as I turn, turn, the old harmonies returning.

From Toulouse, lift, lift, make a place in your arms for a mother who ran like a girl to rejoin her friends who waited in France, who watched deer make their own graceful steps below her window on Mount Tolmie, lace your arms with hers, turn, turn, towards her, away. Careful with your knees as you lift each foot, stand where she stood, 2/4 time, the years passing before the window, like the deer.

These weren’t the bears I saw at 6:30 this morning as I sat at my desk, working on my novel. I didn’t have a camera at hand so I couldn’t take the photograph of the sow with her tiny cub, not much bigger than our cat, Winter. The cub was prancing a bit and the mum stopped to poop just by the cascara tree. I went upstairs to watch them from the upper deck and when the mum heard the door opening, she ran into the woods, sending the cub up one of the big Douglas fir trees immediately beyond our house, just at the edge of the woods. This photograph is about 4 years old.

Wait, though. The mother might have been one of the two yearling twins accompanying this sow across the same patch of grass, heading into the same woods. How many generations of bears have walked the same route up from the old orchard, rounding the house by my study, and ambling into the woods? The average life-span of a black bear is 10 years, though they can live to be 30. They are intelligent animals, having a a high brain to body mass ratio. They have excellent long-term memories, particularly of food sources. Every fall they come for the crabapples in the old tree below the vegetable garden. We’ve seen bears regularly every year since we’ve lived here (1981) and the crabapple tree has been a destination for at least 35 years. One year a bear with a very distinctive chest mark came every day for a week. There’s an ephemeral pool under the tree, dry in summer, but once the rains come, it fills. I remember watching the bear plunging in for the floating fallen crabapples and then reclining on the area of our driveway we use for turning around. It was fearless.

I had been thinking that we haven’t seen bears yet this year, though we did see scats on the trail the last time we walked up on the mountain, thinking it was about time, and there they were, walking in the low-shouldered way they have, or at least the mum was walking that way. The little one was scampering, eager, glad to be alive on a spring morning. This time of year they love the sweet grasses, the buds of trees, and on walks up the mountain, we’ve been boulders turned over by bears eager for grubs and insects.

The more the world changes, the more the ugly men stand on stages and insult women or insist on their right to invade sovereign countries , the more fires burn across huge expanses of forest and plains, the more rivers flood and destroy whole towns, sections of highways, ways of living, the more I never want to leave my home. I want to sit in the early morning and watch a black bear sow stop to poop under the cascara and give her cub a secret command to climb a tree because of danger. She is right to be afraid of me. I’ve never seen a bear set a fire or log off an entire hillside, compromising the soil’s ability to retain moisture. Never seen one spray glysphosate along the highway shoulders to eradicate the orange hawkweed that grows in the gravel. Never seen one with a gun. I want to sit in the morning to watch them, alive in the old rhythm of the seasons. Grass, grubs, the buds of trees.

As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals; the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
                      –Gary Snyder

 

Note: I was looking for something else when I stopped to read this post from May 12, 2020.

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.

Yesterday dear friends came for lunch. They brought a bottle of Steller’s Jay Brut, a sparkling wine from the Okanagan made using the French champagne method. It’s a wine I’ve had before but yesterday, in the company of flowers, stories, a friendship that we determined began in the summer of 1985, it felt like exactly the thing to drink. We sat at our sunny table and ate frittata with asparagus, garden leeks, and feta, roasted potatoes with rosemary and winter savory from the herb table on the deck, and a salad of new greens from the pots I’ve brought out from the greenhouse to the upper deck–kale, arugula, a lettuce called Drunken Woman, and a mixed pot of spring mesclun greens. John made his vinaigrette, for which he is always asked the recipe. We laugh about this because I showed him how to do it–Dijon mustard, minced garlic, good olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a bit of pepper, stirred until it emulsifies. While we ate our lunch, a Steller’s jay came to the post to peer in, wondering about seeds. We talked about the jays, how I think of them as my most reliable friends because they came daily during the dark weeks after John’s double hip surgery that went sideways (not the hip surgery itself but an nerve injury suffered during…), followed by some unsettling heart issues that landed him back in hospital almost as soon as we arrived home from 2 weeks in Vancouver as he recovered from surgery, and all this during the pandemic, before the development of the Covid-19 vaccine. We were advised to stay isolated in order to give him the best chance of recovering from everything without the added difficulty of illness from the virus. So we did. Daily the jays visited and I looked forward to the blue flutter as they settled on the railings by the sliding door leading from our kitchen to the deck. Once John had moved beyond the heart issues and was becoming stronger, dutifully doing the exercises learned at his physiotherapy sessions, our friends asked if they could come for a distanced visit outside. It was winter. But the day they came was bright at least and I’d set up two tables on the deck, 2 meters apart, and put boards of cheese and other treats on the tables, along with some wine. When they arrived, they were carrying a box holding two casserole dishes of halibut cooked with pine mushrooms and three cartons of homemade chicken noodle soup. Put these in the freezer, they suggested, and enjoy a dinner you haven’t cooked yourself.

So I thought of that day as I sipped my Steller’s Jay sparkling wine, as I looked around the table, and listened to news of distant children, of bird sightings–they live on Oyster Bay, in sight of a little island where geese nest, where ducks dive and expostulate, and where ancient fish traps show up in the mud during the low summer tides.

Everything has its own history. Friendships, fish traps, bird migrations, the plates on the table which John and I bought in Bath in 1979 and carried home wrapped in jeans in our backpacks. Who used suitcases in those days?

Later we went to the upper deck for coffee. I went ahead with our friends and brought up an extra chair, explaining we were still in the process of setting up for summer. It’s the deck where we grow the tomatoes, sit after our early lake swim with coffee, and return to late at night to watch the meteor showers in August.

John brought up coffee on a tray and poured it out into tiny cups. Both friends commented on the cream jug. Of course there’s a story. John bought it for his mother in Venice in 1972 for the equivalent of $1.35. I don’t think she liked it. Her taste ran more to English china with roses in soft tasteful colours. I don’t remember her ever using it and when she went into care near the end of her life, the jug came to us. It was made on Murano though John didn’t go to Murano that trip. We went later, in 2009, in November, walking every inch of that beautiful haunted city. And for me it was haunted for another reason. My father was dying. When I’d left Canada, my father was sort of stable and I visited him several times. But by the time we arrived in Venice, things had changed. My brothers and I had made a plan and when I called my oldest brother from Paris, then Venice, wondering if I should come back immediately, he said, No, stay and enjoy your travels. Everything is in place. On the day we went by vaporetto to Murano, we also went to Torcello at the north end of the lagoon. It was a grey day, impossibly beautiful, and we went to Santa Fosca, a 12th century church built in the circular Venetian-Byzantine style. I lit a candle for my father, telling him I loved him and I was sorry I hadn’t been a better daughter. The scent of smoke and candlewax and cold stone, and yes, I cried. I felt close to him there. That evening I called again, from a telephone booth on a dark canal, and was told he’d died the night before (which was morning where we were, maybe even as I was lighting a candle for him on Torcello), and somehow Venice and its ghosts was as familiar as my hands holding the taper, the match.

On the table, the little jug from Murano, holding its own history of gifts given, gifts received, abandoned, returned. While we drank our coffee, two Steller’s jays chased each other from the arbutus to the big firs on the edge of the woods. I saw a mother bear send her two cubs up one of the trees a few years ago when she realized I was watching them amble through the moss. She went deeper into the woods and they bleated in the trees until she decided I wasn’t a danger and they scooted down. Everything, every place, has its history, its stories. Some days I wonder if I want to know how many years I have left on this earth. Would I want to know? Would you, I asked John.  No! was his reply. This morning I put away the dishes we’d used for our lunch yesterday, tucking the Murano jug back into the cupboard over the sink. The jays arrived, eager for their breakfast. And I took out a handful of seeds gladly.

 

I realized about a month ago that I’d missed the little window of Seville oranges entirely. Usually they come to the markets on the Coast where I live in January or February. It’s a brief period, no more than 2 weeks. That’s when I make marmalade. I use some Seville oranges, some Meyer lemons from the small tree (more like a bush) in my sun-room, and if the calamondin tree is bearing well, I use those too. Edith Iglauer gave me the calamondin tree for my 50th birthday and somehow I think of her as I cut the little fruits in half and take out their seeds. She’s gone but her thoughtfulness continues, in more ways than the presence of a little tree hung with tiny oranges in winter, but the fruit is living proof.

I missed the window of Sevilles, probably because we went to Mexico in January. In the cold dark weeks after Christmas, we were swimming in the ocean and walking on long white beaches. We were out in the Sea of Cortez looking at sea lions, blue-footed boobies, gannets, magnificent frigate birds, and brown pelicans; then having ceviche on the beach you can see in this photograph.

But I noticed we were out of marmalade a few weeks ago. I call the one I make “Winter Sunlight”. Eating it on toast is like taking in the brilliance of the sun and the vitamin C of every good fruit. Strangely the calamondin, usually productive in January and February, was laden with fruit and I sent John upstairs with a colander to pick it. Pick a few Meyer lemons too, I asked. Because the lemons were ripe enough to use. Ours has been a long cold winter, followed by a long cold spring. A month ago there was new snow on the mountain behind us, skimmings of ice on Trout Lake. We kept the woodstove burning. I never took the extra winter quilt off the bed.

Yesterday I cut up the lemons and calamondins, along with some navel oranges and one slightly pinker Cara Cara orange left in the fridge from a winter dessert. All the seeds went into a little square of muslin, tied with cotton string. The fruit soaked in some water overnight and this morning I boiled it until the skins were soft. Added sugar. Simmered the mixture until it reached 222F (on two thermometers because it seemed to be taking so long that I thought the first one might be broken). Ladled the marmalade into jars and put on the lids. When it cools, it will be labelled and put on the shelves in the porch.

But what will I call it? It’s not “Winter Sunlight”. Not only is the season wrong but I couldn’t use Seville oranges with their lovely bitter flavour. Part of me fears this is the way of the future. Nothing will happen in the old predictable sequences. But this marmalade is beautiful. The little bit I tried was delicious. The lemons were late, the calamondins too. When the Sevilles were in the market, I was swimming in the warm ocean and watching Costa’s hummingbirds in the palo de arco by the infinity pool where I also swam every morning. For that period, the woodstove was cold, the house empty. A few last jars of marmalade waited on the dark shelves.

When I make the labels, I’ll write “Delayed Sunlight” on each. There are more ominous ways to think of what’s happening on our planet as Alberta burns and Cache Creek floods. But jars of marmalade, the kitchen warm with the scent of citrus as the rain falls on our blue roof, a fire in the woodstove against the damp, and Du Fu to hold the season in words as each jar holds the sunlight.

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.
                        (trans. David Hinton)

Note: I know the season is late because this post, written May 6, 2018, has me cutting lilac and crabapple and those are not yet blooming this year. But the old paradoxes of the heart are perennial.

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.

1.

Last night you set the dough. A friend from so long ago you can’t remember when you last saw him, a friend who taught your children art, is driving up to have dinner. Last night, the dough. This morning, shaping and make dimples to hold good olive oil, rosemary from the pots on the deck, some coarse salt from Sicily. Sun hovers outside. Dark clouds too. What will your friend remember of those years? What have we all forgotten?

2.

You stood on a damp mulched path and cut stalks of rhubarb. A robin nearby pulled a worm from the soil where you planted new raspberry canes, tied up a few strays that got missed in the first round. Long red stalks, their leaves smoothed over the compost. Washed and trimmed, they wait for you to chop them with strawberries, they wait for their topping of oats and sweet butter, a drizzle of vanilla from Madagascar. In the old gardens in Fairfield, the widows grew rhubarb, bringing bags to my mother who stewed it with brown sugar. In the old gardens, rhubarb grew, and deep-rooted sorrow, a bag brought to the door.

3.

The orchid cactii have made their summer journey from sunroom to deck, hanging from a trellis with shells and a copper lizard. Already the hummingbirds have found them. I have been sad beyond words, living in a grey world, and now I look up from my work to see the blossoms opening to the day. Today I will make food for us to eat outside, I’ll chill wine, cut salad from the tubs of arugula, lettuce, kale, and parsley, I will ask the sadness to wait awhile before entering my heart.

4.

Shells are turning in the morning air. I don’t have a harp, I don’t have a flute, I have a shruti box that drones like a whale, deep-throated. I have a book of Rumi.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Turn the page quickly. Remember the rivers you have walked along, and into, and how you were held by water green and lovely. How your grown sons still remember the Nicola River, your grown daughter the ride you took by horseback to Salmon River and its memory of the sockeye runs before the Hell’s Gate slide in 1914, a river you have also driven along on your way to Salmon Arm, its silvery riffles so beautiful in sunlight. Before the slide and before bank erosion and flooding, agricultural run-off and the heavy feet of cattle making their way to water. (So many fish on this page, its wide waters.) How you stop at Lytton each trip to marvel again at the marriage of rivers, your husband’s arm around your shoulders.
   –from “How Rivers Break Away and Meet Again”, Blue Portugal & Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022)