posts

Yesterday we drove down to Davis Bay to have lunch with good friends. We sat long at the table, talking, talking, and one thing we talked about was artificial intelligence, the rise of ChatGPT, and so on. What the applications might be for such “tools”. The dangers. It’s not surprising that John and I are confounded by our culture’s eagerness to push human creativity and accountability to the sidelines in pursuit of the new. Before arriving at our friends’ home, we sat for a few minutes in our car parked at the oceanfront at Davis Bay, a place where we have seen humpback whales, fishermen, walkers, seals, little flotillas of surf scoters, yesterday a single large duck quite far out, the scent of salt and low tide flotsam coming in the window. Boats in the distance. Vancouver Island beyond, the mountains still snowy. Earlier I’d bought some plants at the nursery–a bougainvillea, light pink, to join the magenta one I overwintered in our sunroom, wishing again I’d been brave enough to fill my suitcase with cuttings of the orange ones, the deep pink ones, the red, the soft salmon, growing everywhere in Baja, but I didn’t want us held up at Customs at the Vancouver airport. (As it turned out, our entry to Canada was accomplished with the brief act of swiping our passports through a little machine. No human contact. So I could have brought as much bougainvillea as I liked.)

Anyway, AI. I’m sure there are practical applications and I look forward to talking to my mathematician son this summer about what those might be. Whether he trusts a bot to pursue the deep mathematical puzzles that keep him awake at night. I know that when he spent a term at the MSRI on Grizzly Peak, above the Berkeley campus, working with others in his research area, one of the practical applications for their work was medical imaging. Were bots involved? I’ll have to ask him. But–and this came up at lunch–do you want a bot to write a paper about the importance of George Orwell? To find meaning in the poems of John Donne? Why follow the lives of Jane Austen’s characters in a term paper when you could let ChatGPT take it from there? What about Miriam Toews’ women in that barn, talking, talking–and listening, too. Why not put their names and the crimes against them, their complicated choices, into an app and see what it comes up with. Why read, then? Why sit in a class of other students to discuss how a book, a poem, is constructed, how it fits or doesn’t with our contemporary values, why do that, and then not write about it yourself? Why go to class? Why bother? Am I missing something?

Apparently Thompson Rivers University is phasing out their Bachelor of Fine Arts program over the next three years, citing costs and enrolment as their justification. The program is described this way at their website:

Explore the dimensions of your creativity through a broad range of studio and theoretical courses in a variety of media. Benefit from 26,000 square feet of workshops and studio space and an art gallery for your work alongside other student and faculty exhibitions. Shaped around a core curriculum of studio, art history and theory courses, this degree encourages an interdisciplinary approach to learning which takes advantage of the many facets of the university community.

There are always financial and practical reasons to cancel things in this world but those can almost always be countered with excellent arguments for continuing to offer them. You could argue that students can learn anything on their own or elsewhere or that machines can do twice the work at half the price or, or, or…But I think of myself, a girl from a family for whom I was the first to attend university, a girl discovering that you could sit in a classroom and read Chaucer with others, discuss the Odyssey and Dante, understand their relevance to everything you might do next, a Miranda reading the Tempest for the first time and finding her own sense of wonder: “O brave new world,/That has such people in’t! “The first papers I wrote in university were enthusiastic but chaotic and I am grateful for David Jeffrey who took me aside to tell me that my ideas deserved better. He showed me a few grammatical, well, let’s call them anomalies, and guided me through a paragraph or two and I wanted so badly to improve. And I did. People I was university with went out into the larger world and did interesting and important things. They painted, wrote books (and continue to write them), one became a famous operatic tenor, several are archaeologists, social workers, doctors, one led the breast cancer research team here in B.C. for decades.  But why bother immersing yourself in, oh, an interdisciplinary approach to learning (studio, art history, and theory) because it’s not exactly cost-effective and there’s a computer program that could do it just as effectively and for a fraction of the cost. Why bother.

When John retired, in 2007, from the institution where he’d spent 35 years teaching composition to adult learners (he wasn’t allowed to teach literature courses or creative writing because he didn’t have an M.A., though he was invited to be a writer-in-residence at a big American university, he won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2006, and has published many books), he set up a writing prize to be awarded to a student at the Coast campus of the institution, in any discipline, who’d written a good essay or article. He believed, still believes, that good writing is important across the curriculum. And the Coast campus of the institution had programs in tourism, in other disciplines which required good writing. For several years, he’d be asked to help select the winning essay, along with colleagues. The award would be given at the end of the term ceremony, along with other scholarships and bursaries. I remember the first year of a new president’s tenure when her opening remark to the gathering of instructors, students, benefactors, families, and other well-wishers was, “Well, we finally got rid of that library.”   Imagine an educational administrator saying such a thing. She did. (She got rid of a lot of other vital stuff as well.) And that was when the prize John initiated went sideways too. It wasn’t awarded for several years. Then the terms of the prize were changed, against his will. It could no longer be given only to students from the Coast here. He’d always wanted something for local students, for whom travel off-Coast, as well as other costs, educational and otherwise, were often difficult, even prohibitive, and then there were a series of antagonistic phone calls about his involvement in the selection of the prize winner. It was as though his desire to see good writing rewarded, from any discipline, and his support for local scholarship were old-fashioned, unnecessary. So he washed his hands of the whole thing. I think the institution sends an accounting every year (it wasn’t an insignificant amount of money that he donated) but that’s it.

We were awake between 3:30 and 4:30, talking about all this in the quiet of the night. It would have been even quieter if we’d known that the sun-room door had been left open and that was the reason the cat kept leaping, wet, onto our bed, turning around a few times at my feet, then racing outside again. (I keep hearing little noises this morning and am hoping a weasel didn’t find its way in through that open door.) We talked about our love for ideas, for extending them, of recording them, our belief in human consciousness and its difficult complicated beauty, and maybe we both sighed at the same time, realizing we were being left behind by history. Oh, goodnight, brave new world.

Why bother. Why stand outside at midnight, dazzled by the starry sky, the wash of the Milky Way to the east of the house, looking for Orion striding above the garden, why bother, when you could put on special headgear and see the whole thing in simulated glory? I’m not saying that technology doesn’t have a place in our human lives. Of course it does. Looking at those stars through binoculars makes their narratives more beautiful and complex.  This morning, leaving the house for our swim, I stopped and said, Listen! From every direction there were robins calling their urgent spring song. I didn’t need an app to tell me what I was hearing. I didn’t need an app to tell me that the long whistle, the single note, was a varied thrush, or that the soft sweet trill in the flowering maples near the pool were yellow-rumped warblers. This is the world I love and I want it in every sound and colour.

Yesterday, as well as the bougainvillea, I bought a potted camas cultivar, C. quamash “Blue Melody”.  The leaves are creamy-edged. It’s not blooming yet but the other day Angelica sent a photo of the first camas she’d seen this year in Uplands Park.

Every year I mean to order the bulbs of the native camas and I never quite get to it. So seeing the cultivated version was a reminder. When I looked this cultivar online, I read that some gardeners were disappointed that the leaves reverted to plain green. I liked that. I like that plants want their older forms, the way the little clump of Erythronium oregonum “Yellow Pagoda” I planted years ago has reverted to the soft cream of the native fawn lilies that were its parents. I like how a climbing Alba rugosa rose I planted 35 years ago has returned to its rootstock, the prickly beautiful Rosa canina, with its early soft pink blooms and its long elegant hips. The canes of this rose hang over the window by my bed and twice I’ve seen a weasel pause its travels across the canes to peer in at me drinking coffee in bed in the morning. This is the world I love, the details I love, the old renegade tendencies of plants, of birds, of two people talking in the night about the original and beautiful capacity of human imagination. We want the older forms, language dense with meaning and intention. And love.

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Quick question–ChatGPT or William Shakespeare?

Yesterday I was on the other side of that blue window, at the sink, when I saw a chestnut-backed chickadee land on the wind-chime and tug at the string, which is a bit frayed with exposure to winter. (Like me.) There are a lot of chickadees around right now, gathering old drier lint and strands of grass from under the rhododendrons. They come and go. In deep winter they are regulars at the bird feeder. If it’s empty, they sit on the blue sill you can see in this photograph and agitate for me to to come out with more seeds. One year there was a nesting couple in one of John’s birdhouses fastened to the arbutus tree just beyond our big living room window. All season we’d watched the parents go in and out with food. And then one day, quite by chance, John was standing by the window when he saw a remarkable thing. Coached on by the parents, who were sitting in a nearby mountain ash, the nestlings were leaving their home.

He called to me and I joined him by the window. As we watched, 7 young chickadees appeared in the opening, one at a time, and they flew. They’d never flown before. The 7th was a little reluctant and it took some calling and urging on the part of the parents and the siblings who were also in the mountain ash, hopping a bit and tentatively flying from branch to branch. I’ve written about this before but every year, the old becomes new. Chickadees appear on the wind-chime and tug at the string. And you remember how these boxes you have set up in trees all around the house and garden were made specifically for violet-green swallows whose old boxes had fallen apart. John found plans, gathered up cedar, measured the door opening not once but twice before cutting, and we hoped the swallows would find them and nest in them. But although the swallows come in great exuberance in late April, inspecting each box carefully, they don’t nest in them. Down at the resort on Ruby Lake, they have palazzos for birds and our plain cedar houses no longer meet the approval of the swallows. But the chickadees do find them. And every year, I feel the same way: time hasn’t passed but has accumulated, the generations of birds echoing our own generations. Our house is ready for anyone returning.

Yesterday I cut some strands of fine red wool and draped them over rose canes and on the post beyond the sliding doors. This morning? Some of them have disappeared. In one of the little houses, a nest of dry grasses, tufts of our cat’s soft hair, fine red wool. And soon the eggs, soon the faces at the door, preparing to leave.

How time passes, how everything we knew is stored in our own bodies — the dull ache of sleepless nights, the sharp yearning for love, the sorrow of these empty rooms once filled with children laughing, fighting; their books, their toys, their filthy socks, and tiny overalls. One boy still sits under the original nest box (though I know it’s not possible, he lives in Ottawa) with his notebook, trying to sketch the swallow nestling that hangs out the opening, saying, Don’t fall out, Parva! Be careful. And I stand out among the trees, under stars, while the moon thins and fattens, turns soft gold in autumn, hangs from the night’s velvet in February, draws me out on summer evenings to drink a glass of wine while owls fill the darkness with that question: Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all? It was always me and I never once minded.
              –from Mnemonic: A Book of Trees (Goose Lane Editions, 2011)

For 40 years, I’ve grown tomatoes from seed. Sometimes I save seed, if I really love the particular tomato, or someone passes along seeds they think I might like. I have favourites–Principe Borghese, which make a beautiful roasted sauce (I still have jars of it the freezer from last year, though I use a jar or so every week); Pruden’s Purple; Black Krim; a couple of yellow pears that reliably appear in the compost; and others. In early May I put the seedlings on the upper deck, usually around 30-40 of them, and when they get tall, we train them onto strings that are fastened to a hanging stick. (The rows continue around to the right of this photograph, around the blue-windowed sunroom, turning a corner under John’s study, and around another corner. This place is optimum but the plants thrive around the corner too.)

In May and June, it seems they grow hourly. They are part of the season’s clock. I know where I am by the size of the tomato plants.

Remember June’s long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

When they flower, they’re visited by bees and other pollinators. I’ve noticed over the years that Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced bumblebee, is particularly fond of tomatoes. Last year my grandson A and I decided that those particular bees looked like they were wearing helmets from Ancient Greece when you got close to them and saw their markings. Last year he helped me water the upper deck on the mornings of his visit, after our early swim, and then we had coffee and juice at the table, surrounded by flowers.

This year I am having trouble even growing the seeds. I do what I’ve always done: plant them thinly in small trays in good starting mix. I keep them by the woodstove. I mist them. Oh, they germinate, they form seed-leaves but the first true leaves, the sign (for me) that it’s time to prick them out and put each in its own pot? This is the strangest thing. The little sprouts stop at the seed leaves. I got impatient with the first lot and pricked them out anyway but none survived. The second lot, Pruden’s Purple, are doing the same thing. I have two more flats, of Paul Robeson, a new-to-me cultivar, a big slicing tomato, supposedly, with dark shoulders; I say supposedly because I’m waiting for them to form their true leaves and they’re reluctant. It seems that even the tomatoes are nervous about the state of the world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

I feel like Cassandra these days. (Remember her? The daughter of Priam of Troy, with the gift of prophesy, but no one believed her?) The other day in a nursery down the Coast, I was buying some plants–not tomatoes, not yet, but it looks like it will come to that–and the man at the cash desk commented on the capricious weather. It was cold that day, with rain and a bitter wind. He said that better weather is supposedly on its way. I replied that it was scary. That I’d lived in one place for more than 40 years and that this is the coldest spring I can remember. He murmured something, I couldn’t quite hear, and then I said, And we did this to the planet we supposedly love. At that point he quickly put my plants in a box, eager to be rid of me. I get it. No one wants an aging woman with wild hair carrying on at the cash desk when you have work to do — putting out bags of seed potatoes and watering the annuals.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

And now I am being careful about what I wish for. Warmer days, yes, but not too hot (the ability of bees to both pollinate and to reproduce decreases in extreme heat). Nights without frost. The third planting of tomato seeds (better late than never?) growing to full size, heavy with fruit, the pans of them roasting with garlic, rosemary, quarters of onions, the beautiful mutilated world somehow surviving, surviving us.

Note: the lines of poetry are from “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh.

The paintings were accumulating, a stack of them against the studio wall, beside Richard’s. Some days it was like she could hear them talking quietly, a conversation too low for her to hear. To make more room in the studio, she decided to store the finished canvases in the ghost gallery behind the little door. There was space under the lowest row on two sides of the room and somehow Tessa felt the paintings were truly in relationship with each other, not simply talking casually: the notched stumps, the saws, the stars seen through the netting of branches; the girls in a carvel-planked boat, hats blown back; the same hats floating on water, children holding lanterns against the dark. It was a place, alive in pigment, alive across time in some ways, the young girls in the boat rowing, rowing, as trees rolled down the mountainsides beyond them, as the world moved close to war, the skies so blue you could not imagine the planet was edging towards extinction. They were rowing towards me, Tessa thought, and I never knew until now.

For a little while, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find my way back into Easthope, the novel I began more than a year ago and put aside for a whole lot of reasons. One of those reasons was that I suddenly needed to write about a painting of me as a young woman, the result of a long-ago relationship with an artist. I immersed myself in an archive of letters and notes, in critical theory, and in the process I found out things about myself and friendships, love, power, and the male gaze. After I finished the writing, a long essay called “Let a body venture at last out of its shelter”, I tried to work again on Easthope. Oh, I fixed a sentence here, a paragraph there, but the actual writing eluded me. Why bother. A series of small disappointments about writing in general and Blue Portugal in particular had me thinking it might be best to simply stop. It’s not like my books are every wildly popular or successful, though I know those things are relative. I don’t write to be popular or successful. I write to find things out, to pursue an idea, a mystery, or to remember imperfectly and construct from those memories a matrix of meaning.

Anyway, I left the work alone. But then I found myself dreaming of the few days we spent at the end of August visiting Princess Louisa Inlet. In the dream I was back in the water. There were lions mane jellyfish just as there were among the rocks below the dock and I was trying to avoid them.

In the dream I could see the gelatinous bell or medusa but not the long mane or tentacles packed with stinging cells. It didn’t stop me from swimming, not in the dream or last summer, when I got up before everyone else on the boat and went for the most wonderful swim of my life in quiet water, two seals following me, light beginning to come over the tall mountains above the inlet, no sound but Chatterbox Falls cascading down the rocks, glacial and cold.

I wanted to be back there so badly that I wrote myself back. Or not me, but Tessa, the character in Easthope who has some of my personality traits. (And if her name is familiar, that’s because she was a child in an earlier book.) She’s interested in natural history, she isn’t interested in expanding her technological knowledge, she is curious about everything, but unlike me she can paint.

Tessa found the passages she loved, where Capi and her cargo of children found the entrance to the very inlet in which they were about to spend the night.
     The inlet is about five miles long, a third of a mile wide, and the     mountains that flank it on either side are over a mile high…
     She read, finding the rhythm of the prose as the Deserted Bay gently rocked in the beautiful water. (Those snowfields, the woods at the end of the inlet, the scars on the mountains, tying up at Trapper’s Rock.) Then she handed the book to Marsh, who continued, his voice low in the twilight.
     The stars had filled up the long crack of sky above me. Brighter stars than you see anywhere else…bright…so bright… Somewhere in that uneasy night I dreamt that I was watching a small black animal on a snowfield, some distance away. I don’t remember why I was so curious about it, but in my dreams it seemed most important for me to know what it was.
A seal slapped its tail near the boat – he’s looking for you, Tessa, said Marsh, putting down the book – and it was time for bed. Sam and Marty were pulling cushions off the benches to lower the table top down to make a double bed in the galley and Tessa tried to make up the bed for her and Marsh though she quickly realized that the shape of the foscle was too strange, almost triangular, to smooth a sheet over neatly. No matter. Do you mind if I open the hatch for the night, she asked Marsh. Nope, he didn’t mind. Poking her head through, she saw soft lights in the other boat, and a silvery crescent of moon over the inlet at the first narrows. When she got up to pee sometime before 5, she saw the summer triangle – Venus, Deneb, and Altair – where the moon had been at bedtime.

The photo at the beginning of this post is what I saw through the skylight. Before I went to sleep and when I woke the next morning at 5. That was the water that had me slip into it before anyone else was awake. Maybe the seals were surprised. I couldn’t see jellyfish because there wasn’t enough light but somehow I was blessed. Writing about that morning is how I am finding my way back into Easthope, the sound of water lapping against the boat, the rush of the falls, the wooden dock groaning a little as the sky brightened.

1.

In soft rain, we walked along the path under huge cedars and firs, a raven sounding a hollow call near the water, klook, klook, klook, near the water where the lilies were blooming. I was a child again, climbing over Moss Rocks to school near Easter, careful not to step on shooting stars, blue camas, and the small creamy white petals of the fawn lilies on delicate stems above the mottled leaves.

2.

I was a child again, riding my blue bike to Beacon Hill Park along the curve of Dallas Road, the sea we couldn’t swim in, sewage pouring into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I found condoms on the beach there, thinking them balloons, and was smacked by my mother for trying to inflate one. A child riding to Beacon Hill Park, its meadows blue with camas, white with the lilies, peacocks shrieking above the wind. I heard them in my sleep.

3.

In summer we will swim in the bay that is hung with mist. Small boys love the shore for the starfish, the crabs under rocks, the anemones pulsing in the tidepools. Looking up from the water, I’ll remember the lilies in their damp moss, the decades of seeing them, how the sea rises and falls, rises, falls, generations of ravens in the trees, and the oyster shells on the side of the path.

 “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body…

A morning when I am elsewhere, thinking, dreaming, and still trying to piece together some moments in my family’s history in Alberta. (Everything I write is a love song.)

                                    Listening to the young pianist playing Janáček’s “In the Mists,” I close my eyes and imagine the landscape where you were born. Foothills of the Beskids, near Janáček’s home village. He was a folklorist as well as a musician and gathered the songs and spoken tales of Moravia-Silesia. Did you sing? Did your family have its own musicians? Did you listen to the bells on the sheep and imagine them into simple tunes? Listening, I am in Moravia, I am in a village of white buildings painted with ultramarine flowers by Anežka Kašpárková, I am myself a babička, stitching blue cloth in long red stitches, my four grandchildren running in the tall grass.

                        Listening to the young pianist playing “In the Mists,” I hear birdsong, the brittle canes of winter roses brushing against my house, the sounds you would not have noticed in your daily work (a house without roses), feeding chickens, washing the laundry of a family of ten, then nine, then eight, then rising again, the deaths and births echoing the seasons, the river freezing, thawing, the return of green leaves on the cottonwoods in Drumheller, on the beeches of your childhood home in Moravia-Silesia, all of it hidden in mist, morning mist coming down off the Beskydy Mountains, frozen mist in your final years in Beverly, a stone’s throw from the North Saskatchewan River.

               Listening to the young pianist playing “The Madonna of Frydek,” I am in the fields of barley, soft grasses, poppies. A blown-away leaf, the composer said, could be heard as a love song. The children are running ahead, a bag of apples slung over the back of the oldest.
–from Blue Portugal & Other Essays, University of Alberta Press, 2022

Note: I first heard these Janáček  pieces played by Zoltan Fejérvéri. You can listen here.

Yesterday, when I woke up, I stood by the window for a minute, looking to the west. Everything was grey with fog. Everything, but the little spiral of wisteria vine just beyond the glass. I am drawn to spirals. I remember visiting Newgrange in Ireland, an ancient passage tomb dating from 3200 BCE, and seeing the spirals carved into rock. Symbols of the cycle of life? The journey from life to death and re-birth? The seasons change, the sun rises and sets, a seed grows, a plant dies, the skies change and then are familiar again. There are logarithmic spirals in the natural world that must have inspired anyone who paid attention: insects approaching a light source, the shells of mollusks, certain beaches, the flight of a hawk in pursuit of prey, the arms of the Milky Way. I sew them obsessively, both logarithmic spirals and Archimedean spirals where the distances between the turnings are constant. The triskeles at Newgrange can be found in pottery and coins from the Classical period of Greek history. Could I sew those into a quilt? I’ve never tried. But I do regularly find myself making paths between the spirals on my quilts and maybe that’s my own innovation on the tradition. Here’s a little section of the back of a quilt in progress:

The whorl of our fingerprints, the base of a pinecone, the pattern of petals in an unfolding rose. Winter, spring, summer, fall, the return of light, the darkness descending. Thinking leading to writing. An idea stitched into cloth. I think of Herakleitos, so beautifully translated by Guy Davenport:

This world, which is always the same for all men, neither god nor man made: it has always been, it is, always shall be: an everlasting fire rhythmically dying and flaring up again.

I am back in Easthope, the village at the end of the road, back to the novel I’d put aside to write “Let a body venture at last out of its shelter”, an memoir-ish essay which I am hoping can be published as a small book, back in Easthope, which resembles an actual place but is more in the tradition of Melville’s “It’s not down on any map; true places never are.” In Easthope, there are netsheds and boathouses, there’s a community hall clad in weathered boards, a little museum filled with marine engines and Depression glass. There are stories of drownings and murders and grizzlies who swam across the inlet. In a small house, there’s a surprising galley of paintings:

Each painting—and there were, what, 25, no, 27 of them—was of a stump. A huge stump, almost filling the canvas; its wood runnelled and lichened and sometimes green with moss. Tiny plants grew up from the flaring bases. Most of the stumps were notched with horizontal cuts, some barely visible under the lichens, carefully detailed. Against one stump, a long board with a metal tip. Against another, a long crosscut saw, rusted, with worn wooden handles. Trees—hemlock, whippy cedars, even a supple maple—sprouted from some of the stumps and around them, the newer growth, long green boughs, tall sword ferns, delicate huckleberry. She knew she’d seen some of the stumps alongside the Easthope Road. She and Marsh had even stopped once to take a photograph of one beauty. On each canvas, the lower left corner, a small jewel-like image of a tree. Tessa figured Richard had imagined each stump back to its original majesty, determining the species from its bark or odour or any characteristic he could determine from what remained. She knew she’d seen some of the stumps alongside the Easthope Road.

And what remained? A sturdy ghost, a presence in the green woods, a reminder of what the forest had looked like before the huge trees had been felled, with considerable skill and effort, and hauled away to become houses, factories (Marsh had bought some Douglas fir beams reclaimed from a factory in Gastown to shore up the floor on the netshed), schools, windows. Together, a gallery of ghosts, hidden away, lit by their own grey quiet light. She found a light switch just to the left of the door. With more light, she could see something else, something extraordinary. Just visible through the boughs surrounding the stumps, silvery stars. No, silvery constellations. Actual constellations, because she recognized Ursa Major, Orion, the Pleiades. She called Marsh to see. This house, she told him, is full of the past, but somehow it’s alive too. Look, Marsh, look. There are even stars in these. How did he do that? I thought I’d seen every room but now there’s this one, these canvases, 27 of them. Truly beautiful work. What else will we find? I don’t even want to think about it.

The world is so unsettled right now, the planet trembling on its axis. Some days I can’t bear to read the news. Instead I’ll write about Easthope, the scent of woodsmoke, fish chowder, and the sound of boat engines idling at the dock.