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Some mornings I open Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary to see if there’s something I could take as advice or consolation or even a divination.

divination(n.)

late 14c., divinacioun, “act of foretelling by supernatural or magical means the future, or discovering what is hidden or obscure,” from Old French divination (13c.), from Latin divinationem (nominative divinatio) “the power of foreseeing, prediction,” noun of action from past-participle stem of divinare, literally “to be inspired by a god,” from divinus “of a god,” from divus “a god,” related to deus “god, deity” (from PIE root *dyeu- “to shine,” in derivatives “sky, heaven, god”). Related: Divinatory.

What is hidden or obscure. Maybe that’s what I’m looking for, hoping for, rather than inspiration from a god. (What would that look like, I wonder?) So much is hidden. What happens next, to me, to all of us. Is there advice I could follow to accept with grace the years ahead? There are perils in being human, in being alive, anticipating the future. Maybe my writing is a way to modify my own anxiety, to offer an alternative: well, the world is on fire but I can work on a novella in homage to Mrs. Dalloway, with a party situated outside under honeysuckle with music played on cello and oud, or a novel set in a small fishing village at the end of the road where women stitch in the community hall and a secret room opens to reveal paintings of trees.

I wrote about the Diary and Mrs Dalloway here and re-reading this post I realize that I was perhaps edging towards my forthcoming book; the bookseller I mention and his shop and those years are at the heart of The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. (The bookseller even has a tiny cameo though I bet you won’t be able to find it! Maybe I’ll offer a prize if you do.) When I read the passage I found today, written on February 2, 1931, Virigina Woolf is about to finish writing The Waves, possibly my favourite of her books. I first read it as a young woman, well, a girl, of 18. I don’t think I quite understood it then though I could lose myself in the rhythms of the sentences, the dialogue, the beautiful passages in which I recognized something of my own sensibility, which wasn’t usually the case when that 18 year old read a novel:

There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

At my desk, the Diary held open by a piece of Oligocene sandstone filled with tiny shell fossils, I feel porous enough to let those sentences enter my thinking. She looks forward to a brief time of freedom, of being idle, the book written, not quite ready to be published (it would come out in October of that year, published by her own Hogarth Press).

…my feeling is that I have insisted upon saying, by hook or by crook, certain things I meant to say. I imagine that the hookedness may be so great that it will be a failure from a reader’s point of view.

Never a failure from this reader’s point of view, not as an 18 year old, nor as a woman in her 70s. What happens next. “Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.” I feel porous enough to let the sentences do whatever they want.

This morning, I’ve been in Ireland, not really, but there in my imagination. I dreamed last night that I was standing by the window of the little cottage I rented on Inishturbot nearly 50 years ago, looking out to see the donkey who sometimes lived in my field. (The farmer who owned him moved him from one stone-fenced area to another to take advantage of the grass.) He was solitary, like me. I used to take a kitchen chair and sit in the doorway with my breakfast and he’d amble over to accept crumbs, a segment of orange, a few almonds.

I thought about the dream as I ate my breakfast, a croissant with excellent chocolate melting into its warmed layers. The visceral sense of that time and place was a current in my spine. Sometimes that happens. You carry the intensity through your day, stopping now and then to remember how it felt to be in the doorway with a mug of instant coffee and the scent of a donkey on your hands.

Maybe I dreamed of that cottage because I’ve been re-reading my forthcoming book. Some readings and other events are being organized (the Gibsons Library in May, Munro’s in early June) and I guess I’m wondering what passages might work to suggest the book’s strengths. I don’t think I’ve found those bits yet. This passage takes me back to the Irish parts of the book but they don’t indicate the whole canvas of the work as a whole. Maybe that’s not the point though?

In many ways Turlough was the best place to arrive, its little cluster of buildings, its eleventh-century round tower topped with a conical cap. The caravan was parked at the bottom end of a field. The farmer who owned it left a hose at the top of the field for water, for Sheila and the cattle and the single donkey who lived in the field. Sheila was tiny, in her late seventies, and it was helpful for me to take a pitcher or kettle up to the tap, to empty the bucket she used as a toilet (that I used too), sheltered in a tent, anyway, to empty it along the line of fuchsia and hawthorn growing as a hedge along the stone wall separating the field from the back gardens of the row of houses that was the village. We burned the toilet paper in her little stove, along with bricks of turf and any sticks we found on our walks. Sheila had been an artist and when I told her something of my story, she said immediately, tartly, that of course he had been drawn to me but his feelings were his own business and he shouldn’t have burdened me with them. She didn’t have a lot of use for men.

I slept on a bench below the window, rolling out my sleeping bag each night and rolling it up again in the morning. There was a dog, Johnny, who’d appeared like me at the gate, wanting refuge and a place for his infected leg to heal; and several cats. Hooded crows flew over daily from the round tower where I think they roosted; their ash grey plumage, punctuated by black head, throat and tail, became familiar in the hedge as they waited for toast scraps. Sheila was a vegan but didn’t mind if I had milk on my oatmeal (she took a jam jar up to the farmer and he filled it with creamy milk from one of the cows who rubbed against the caravan). She made omelettes with millet, flavoured with snippings of wild garlic, and she made strong French roast coffee from Bewley’s in Dublin in a small brown jug, using a tea strainer to pour it into our cups. I hitchhiked into Castlebar and brought back almonds for her nut milk and cheese for myself. I brought us a bottle of French wine, and oranges. Dark chocolate, vegan approved. She picked St. George’s mushrooms and fried them in olive oil.

After a couple of days we went looking for a place for me to live. She’d arranged for me to caretake a cottage up some hills above Foxford, which we got to by bus, taking Johnny, a cottage owned by a forester she knew, but when we got there, we discovered Travellers had camped by it, burning the kitchen and sitting room floorboards for fuel. I didn’t need much but I did need a floor. She asked a few people she knew. There was a man in Louisburgh who couldn’t offer a house but did have an extra table. Someone else wondered about that house over to Parke where everyone had either died of the rheumatism or become too crippled with it to move because it was built right up against a seeping bank but he didn’t know how to get in touch with the owner, who lived in France. Someone else who occasionally brought Sheila ailing animals to care for, who knew everything about everyone, couldn’t think of anywhere likely. One morning I packed up most of my belongings and headed out to find somewhere, hitchhiking down the west coast, stopping in each small village to ask at the post office if anyone had a rough cottage they’d rent cheaply. A fish dealer in Clifden called one of his suppliers, a fishing family on an island off the coast, and they offered an empty cottage. Which was where I went, after returning to Sheila to pick up the rest of my stuff and to provide a new address for my mail. At her insistence, I went to talk to the farmer about having the donkey’s hooves trimmed. They were so long, they curled up at the ends like Arabian slippers. He smiled, sucked away on his pipe, and went on with what he was doing, which was fixing a fence with some lengths of salley.

Last night I dreamed of Ireland and in a way I am still there, the scent of a donkey, the scent of burning turf (I never had enough for a really warm fire but still the smoke penetrated my brown wool sweater so that I’d smell it for years after when I took the sweater from my trunk), and the sound of corn-crakes creaking in the tall wet grass.

Note: this was first posted seven years ago. And still, the winter is long.

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Like so many others, I find January a long month. A dark month. And although we are not in the middle of the polar vortex that is creating such frigid temperatures in other parts of the continent, it’s cold here. In the mornings I put on two or three layers and drink my coffee close to the fire.

But then there’s a morning when it’s somehow lighter. I woke at 5 a.m. on Monday and the sky was dense with stars against the deepest indigo. I thought, oh, that would make a beautiful quilt and then I realized I’d made several inspired by winter skies. In my book Phantom Limb, there’s an essay called “An Autobiography of Stars” in which I detail the making of a quilt for my daughter Angelica, set against a meditation on astronomy and the Leonid showers.

On each bed, a patchwork, for warmth and for safe passage through the night. In the sky we might fashion a parallel life, a world mirroring the topography of our own lives, irregular and beautiful, geometry in service to love. Sewing stars for my daughter to sleep under, I am fashioning a metaphor for my love of her and a belief in her luminosity, a parable of meteors and radiance and grace.

I have no photograph of that quilt to share but it was silvery stars—Variable Star blocks—on a ground of deep purple and blue. And I’m pretty sure I was making it in winter.

So a morning when it’s lighter, when you walk across the patio and realize that the winter jasmine has begun to bloom, single yellow stars in a thicket of branches:

A morning when you are looking forward to reading more of Dante’s Inferno by the fire. Last night we read the 4th Canto, the long beautiful lines taking us into the first circle of hell with Dante and Virgil. And in that place too is a bright fire with poets gathered—Homer, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid. More company appears, every poet or philosopher or mathematician important to Dante. In the poem’s notes, written by Robert Pinsky’s daughter Nicole, she calls this “an abundant, almost ecstatic identifying list.” Dante and Virgil spend some time with them and then

         …my wise guide leads me away from that quiet
Another way—again I see air tremble,

And come to a part that has no light inside it.

Tonight we’ll go there, into the second circle. But even in that darkness, there will be beauty. I remembered in 2013, in the aftermath of having to take the vegetable garden apart for a septic field repair and then rebuilding it again, digging in a new border and finding, underground, unexpected beauty. When I’d dug up all the plants and trees a few months earlier, I thought I’d also lifted all the bulbs to set aside and replant again. But there, in the dark, an incandescent clump of crocus.

Following

The weather. All over North America it’s cold. No snow here, not yet, but hard frosts overnight and the air has that arctic echo running through it. Last night I got up and looked at the stars, hard and cold in the dark sky. This morning, looking for something else, I found this photo of my older grandson on the beach at Ruby Lake in January, probably 9 years ago. How mysterious the sky and the rays of the sun as it set beyond the lake. Everyone feels so far away, that family in Gatineau, another in Victoria, and the other? Who knows? They were scheduled to fly to Europe on Friday and their first flight was cancelled, rebooked for later in the day. Did they make their connection to Berlin? They feel very far away. In the night, I was humming Bruce Cockburn’s song:

Now I’m sitting here alone and sleepless
and wondering where you are
And wishing you were here
On the coldest night of the year

Listening

The other day, we watched John Huston’s film of the James Joyce novella, The Dead. I’d seen it years ago but somehow my mood on a cold January day wanted the lamplight, the sorrow of an early love, and oh, the music. The moment when the departing guests stop at the foot of the stairs because a last song is being sung, “The Lass of Aughrim”, by a lingering guest, Bartell D’Arcy, played by the wondrous Irish tenor Frank Patterson. And down the wide staircase, his golden voice, and that sad old story. So I found a recording online and this morning I’ve been listening to it, transported back not to Dublin but to Clifden, John King’s pub, where on an autumn evening, if you were lucky, a man whom you knew was a farmer out towards Ballyconneely stood and sang, unaccompanied, that beautiful song. And how a woman stood after and sang “Donal Og”, also part of “The Dead”, and how it felt that your heart would break.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Eating

Last night I roasted a duck, glazed in the final half hour with balsamic vinegar, honey, and lemon, and we ate it with a sour cherry sauce spiked with port, a dish of soft polenta, and salad of greens and strawberries. Tomorrow, I’ll make stock, the best base for wild mushroom risotto.

Finishing

I finally finished a quilt begun in fall, using two lengths of hand-dyed linen, and now I am looking at this bar graph sent to me by my second grandson, created to tell me the colours he wanted for the quilt I’ve promised him. (I made one for him when he was very small but he will be moving to a new house later this year and he’ll have his own new room. Time for a bigger quilt…) If you can think of a design using those colours, please tell me, because I’m lost. (TIGER BEETLES RULE!!!)

Appreciating

We have a woodstove in our kitchen, not a cookstove but an airtight, and it’s where I sit in a wicker rocker to sew, to think, to drink my first cup of coffee each morning. And in this period of cold weather, there is nothing nicer than wood heat. I am appreciating the stash of dry bark I can use to get the fire going first thing, its deep warmth, and how it feels like the oldest comfort on earth.

Liking

At the pool this morning, the air was cold! For some reason the heating system wasn’t working as it should. But the water was only a degree cooler than usual so once I got into my laps, I was fine. And even better when the lifeguard, who knows I don’t like to swim without music (because I hate listening to myself breathe), put on a soul/rhythm and blues playlist. Back and forth in the blue water, with Amy Winehouse’s rich voice, Aretha, a few others, condensation fogging up the big windows.

Remembering

This morning I was making the coffee when I suddenly remembered the dream I’d had two nights ago, a dream of a street in Toulouse where we walked ten years ago on a February afternoon and where a treasured necklace, of turquoise heishi beads made by Fannie Garcia of the Santo Domingo Pueblo near Santa Fe, anyway, where that necklace slipped its clasp, and how I never knew until later that day. I dreamed of the street, my hand on my neck, and in the dream I wasn’t sad because earlier that week I’d met the Venus of Laussel face to face in a Bordeaux museum, and knew that was the greater gift.

Note: 5 years ago, we were reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey each evening by our fire. How strange to read this post now, before the pandemic, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, before, before, before…

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Angelica called on Friday to ask about the tiny brown bird she saw spiralling up a tree trunk in Victoria. It looked a bit like a wren, she said to her dad. But he knew it was a brown creeper because we’d just watched one on this tree right outside our kitchen window (and there’s no creeper in this photograph so don’t strain your eyes!):

They spiral as they search the bark for insects and they use their tails for balance. While I was watching the bird the other day, I was thinking of stitching, long loose stitches as it moved up the tree trunk and as I sewed the spirals on Henry’s kite quilt. Did I think of the bird as stitching because I was doing that? Are its movements true spirals or do I imagine them that way because I love the Fibonacci sequence in nature and look for it when I am planting and harvesting? And sewing?

About stitching…On Friday night we were reading the Odyssey, Book 12, and John stopped to say, These lines could be an epigraph to one of your essays. The lines, spoken by Circe to Odysseus on his return to Aeaea from his visit to Hades, are part of Circe’s guidance to him as he undertakes what he hopes will be the final leg of his voyage home to Ithaka:

At dawn, sail on. I will explain your route
in detail, so no evil thing can stitch
a means to hurt you, on the land or sea.

We are reading Emily Wilson’s translation and it’s wonderful. But this moment, this word. I wondered how the male translators had handled this passage. So I went looking. My favourite translation until now is Robert Fitzgerald’s. This is probably because it’s the one I came to first, as an 18 year old university student without any Greek. I love the long muscular lines, the vivid language. Here’s how he translates that moment:

                             Sailing directions
landmarks, perils, I shall sketch for you, to keep you
from being caught by land or water
in some black sack of trouble.

And Robert Fagles?

But I will set you a course and chart each seamark
so neither on sea nor land will some new trap
ensnare you in trouble, make you suffer more.

I confess I don’t really know Homeric Greek. When I was writing my novel A Man in a Distant Field, I worked my way through Athenaze, Book 1, an introductory text for Ancient Greek. It was difficult, yes, but the protagonist in my book was translating some of the Odyssey and I needed to be able to do this for him. At that time we didn’t have a very good Internet connection. Ours was dial-up and using it for long periods meant no one could phone us so we tended to be sparing in how much time we spent online. I discovered the Perseus Digital Library, at Tufts University, a great resource for anyone interested in classical texts. You can read them in Greek or Latin or English. You can click on any word in Greek or Latin and you get a little window with a morphological analysis of the word. The Perseus site uses the 1919 A.T. Murray translation.

…but at the coming of Dawn, ye shall set sail, and I will point out the way and declare to you each thing, in order that ye may not suffer pain and woes through wretched ill-contriving either by sea or on land.

I have the Loeb Odyssey, in two volumes, which is Murray’s translation updated by George Dimock, still a prose translation, but the language is less archaic. Circe still points out the way and declares each thing.

When I work through the Greek text, word by word, at Perseus, and with my Godwin Greek Grammar, I get something like this.

But I at least bring to light a way eat each show by a sign in that place which contrivance of ill grievous (causing pain) sum salt earth suffer misery (calamity) have

No stitching. But Circe was a weaver and would she really use the language of mariners or something more related to the work she did with such skill? I love that Emily Wilson has, in this tiny moment in a huge text, brought a feminine (even feminist) gloss to the language of the poem. And I loved that we both noticed it, reading the poem together, while just outside brown creepers made their own metaphorical stitches on a Douglas fir that seems empty this morning without them.

I’m at my desk, working on a presentation for my forthcoming book. I’ll be introducing it to book reps in February and I’m thinking of the best way to describe it. It’s interesting to take a step back to regard it as objectively as I’m able to. Interesting–and difficult. I realize how complicated its story, how intricate its pattern, so much of which evolved in the writing, almost without me noticing. This is the way it happens sometimes. You open the woven bag of memories, you select a thread tied to, well, every other thread, and you follow them to see where they go.

In the process of writing The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze, I spent so much with my younger self. Myself at 23. Old letters, photographs, my journals, but mostly the portrait of myself hanging at the foot of the stairs leading up to my bedroom. That’s a detail of the portrait on the cover of my book. You can see from her eyes that she has something she wants to talk about, something serious. And so I do talk to her, in my book, as well as most days here in my quiet house on the edge of the western world.

During the worst part of the relationship I detail in my book, I simply left. I’d been planning to all along, I had a ticket to fly to London, and then a plan to take the train to Holyhead in Wales, and then the ferry across the Irish Sea. I had a plan to live in a cottage near Foxford in County Mayo although that plan had to be changed and I went instead to an island off the Connemara coast. It was a remarkable time in my life, I know that now, though at the time it felt, well, normal. Inevitable. I made simple meals, read in the evenings by candlelight (there was no electricity on the island), and wrote pages and pages in my journal. I was as close to knowing myself as I’ve ever been.

And all the while the painter sent regular letters, manic, loving, and, well, obsessive. I write about these things in my book.

So now as I try to describe the book in a way that might make it compelling to readers, I am listening to Richard Thompson. Somehow he has the words for how I feel about that young woman, though it wouldn’t be useful to a book rep, I don’t think. Or anyone else.

In the old cold embers of the year
When joy and comfort disappear
I search around to find her
I’m a hundred miles behind her
The open road whispered in her ear

Note: the lines are from Richard Thompson’s song “She Never Could Resist a Winding Road”. I couldn’t then either.

Thinking

I’m thinking about time. Deep time, recent time, the future. On my desk, two fossil chunks of the Sooke Formation, from the Oligocene period (34-23 million years ago). A seam of something like clamshell runs through the one in the middle of the photograph. The rock on the left is studded with small shells like oyster. In the little basket, some Eocene (56-41 million years ago) fragments from Whipsaw Creek near Princeton, B.C. — I’m not quite sure what the fossils are but I think leaves and maybe bits of insect, which are common in this formation. When I hold one of these rocks in my hand, I am part of the long spiral of time, of the plants, animals, the weather, the water, the relationship of day to night, and the events that have been filling our consciousness over the past week, the past year, decade, take a less prominent place in time. Literally, they take up less oxygen.

Reading

In my own self-designed program to learn more about paleoanthropology, I’m reading Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, edited by Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley. At night I lie back on 4 pillows with the book propped against my knees and I read, make notes in the margins, pause to think, and think again. Right now I am reading Henry de Lumley’s “The emergence of symbolic thought” and I keep noting this interesting trajectory of development: tools as simply tools, then as objects possessing their own harmony and beauty, of fire and its influence on group activity, symbolic thought evolving as humans buried their dead, commemorated them, decorated them, and then decorated caves, panels of rock, and how these things are all important to us now. I pause and remember the rock panel above the Côa River, two horses facing one another, and how contained in that moment is something so profound I can hardly imagine my life without it. Hardly.

Listening

Listen to this, I told John. It came up in my news feed and of course they had me at “Boulder to Birmingham”. They had me at Jessie Buckley.

Sipping

It was late afternoon, I was sewing, the light was falling, and all the day needed, all I needed, was Tio Pepe sherry in a beautiful Waterford glass. And Reader, it was perfect.

Finishing

How many times can I record that I am finishing a quilt that still is not finished? First I couldn’t think how to bind it. Then I found enough deep blue premade binding but something kept me from using it. It wasn’t quite the right colour. And the sewing shop in Sechelt has closed so there’s no easy way to find a better match. Sometimes I make my own bindings, using a contrasting fabric, but I didn’t have anything I liked the look of. But wait, I had yards of the indigo-dyed linen I’d used for one side of the quilt. I cut 4 inch wide strips, ironed them in half, then ironed 1/3 inch under. I’ve done two sides and might finish the other two today. This quilt has been long in the making, long in the finishing, but I love the colours, and love that I found them myself in the dye vat.

Appreciating

Oh, the stars! The last three days have been clear and cold, the nights too. How I’ve missed getting up to pee and stopping to look out a north window at Orion, the Great Bear, Venus. Not enough light to read by but enough to be alive under.

Looking

The amaryllis I planted too late for Christmas is blooming now, white trumpets edged with soft pink.

Wishing

As I swam my slow kilometre this morning, Crash Test Dummies on the playlist (lifeguards decide this, not me!), overhead lights turned low (because it was only me swimming), I was wishing I could set our table tonight for the whole family — we are now 14 — and talk in candlelight until all the wax had dripped down.

Note: this was first posted 4 years ago. I was trying to finish a quilt I made to reference the atmospheric rivers of the past months, waiting for thread. And today I will bind the quilt I’ve working on since September, composed of two hand-dyed lengths of linen, with my usual meandering line, punctuated with shell buttons.

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There were roses and pansies upon the facings of the coat; and the waistcoat was worked with poppies and corn-flowers.

Everything was finished except just one single cherry-coloured button-hole, and where that button-hole was wanting there was pinned a scrap of paper with these words—in little teeny weeny writing—

NO MORE TWIST

I don’t know how many years we’ve been watching Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester at Christmas. 15? 20? I love the story of the mice who help an ailing tailor finish a waistcoat for the Lord Mayor’s wedding, completing the work while he is sick in bed.

Completing, apart from that single button-hole, because they’d run out of twist. The tailor had tasked his cat Simpkin with purchasing the thread he needed and Simpkin, in a very feline way, was sulky about the tailor rescuing mice from their prisons under tea-cups and he hid the twisted thread away in a teapot. Last year, our first Christmas ever alone (because of Covid and because John was recuperating from major surgery), our Edmonton family suggested we might like to watch The Tailor of Gloucester with them; they found the animated version we love on YouTube and we have the entire Beatrix Potter opus here on dvds. That was sweet. This year we watched with Angelica and Karna and it was just as lovely as ever. The moment when the tailor, worried that he has lost too much time to illness and won’t be able to finish the waistcoat, and finds it laid out on his worktable with a tiny note —

I am thinking of the story this morning because I have only a few feet of stitching left to do on my quilt in progress but I’ve run out of the red sashiko thread I’ve been using. I’d ordered two spools, each wound with 30 meters. I thought that would be more than enough. But I guess some of my river systems (the way I’m thinking of the quilting) have meandered and idled and I’ve finished my spools. On the weekend I ordered more and it should be here later this week (though the delivery date changes every time I look up the tracking number). It’s not thread I can buy locally. The nearest source for the kind I like is a small business in the Fraser Valley. I’d ordered the blue momen cottons you can see immediately to the left of the long red strip in my photo (and the red is a true vivid red, not the orange-y colour you see there; I can’t seem to photograph its true colour) when I ordered the first spools of thread and this time I ordered more of those rich Japanese blues. During this bleak month, with its cold and snow and my own dark moments, sewing the blue cotton has kept me hopeful.

I’ve also finished the edits of my forthcoming Blue Portugal and it was the other thing that kept me more or less hopeful during January. Hopeful that despite our relative isolation, our collective anxiety about plagues and political upheaval, it’s possible to write about things one loves and wants to keep intact in memory and language.

It never occurred to me, as a child allowed to borrow an atlas during a wet recess or because I’d finished my assignments early, that someone might actually own an atlas, or several, that the pages would show how borders shift, how rivers change, oxbow, leave their banks, join with other watercourses, enter lakes, the waters amalgamating. Yet somehow a river can leave again, return to its original course, sure of its water.

When my thread arrives — today or tomorrow or even next week, because those are all the duly promised delivery dates–I’ll sew the final lengths of the rivers into place on blue cotton and on red. My stitches are nothing as delicate as those left by the mice but this quilt I’ve been making is intended for warmth and comfort during the winter months and its stitches are durable enough for that.

Remembering

The summer picnics, a little bay with logs to drape towels on, rocks to lift while tiny crabs scutttle from the light, wasps coming for the chicken, the pastries, the tins of San Pellegrino. How a shoulder tasted of salt, dried in sunlight.

Reading

Under the Christmas tree, A Truce That is Not Peace, by Miriam Toews. I read it in two evenings, it was like a woman talking, plain-spoken but richly engaged, profoundly observant.

Eating

Lentil soup, fish tacos, a toasted bagel yesterday at Strait Coffee, with cream cheese, capers, and smoked salmon (John ate the other half), a whole mango sliced over my yoghourt, the last tiny clementine from Spain.

Thinking

Just when I imagine that things can’t get worse, they get worse. A woman shot at point-blank on a snowy street, Greenland threatened, people in Kyiv trying to stay warm, hunger, fire, thinking, This must be the worst, and then it gets worse.

Wearing

My heavy winter coat, cashmere and wool, bought at the Thrift Store 20 years ago, given up by someone wealthy enough to shop at Edward Chapman, waiting on a hanger for me to find it.

Watching

Yesterday, walking the promenade in Sechelt after an appointment, watching for a grey whale who makes an appearance from time to time, watching a seal, a heron perched on a balcony (also watching), and the sky had that light.

Hoping

(See Thinking)

Making

I keep thinking that I am on the last few stitches of the quilt I’ve been working on since early fall, a whole cloth quilt using linen dyed last summer with rose madder and indigo, keep thinking that the run of stitches I am following across an open area will take me to the end of the sewing, but then I find another section I’ve missed, and I thread a couple of the sharp Hiroshima needles with blue sashiko cotton, and begin (or end) with an akoya shell button. I keep thinking I’m finished but I’m not. There will still be the binding to figure out.

Sipping

This is actually the anticipation of sipping but the birthday bottle of Steller’s Jay Brut, a birthday gift from John, which I’ve tucked away for an appropriate moment, maybe the arrival of my book in May or maybe something earlier (who knows or maybe just an acknowledgement of the presence of these rowdy friends in my life.

Wishing

(See Thinking and Hoping)

Wondering

How I will figure out the way into a new quilt, one for a boy who is anticipating a new room in a new house. I have an idea but no plan, no scribbled dimensions on an old envelope, no attempt to add up squares and strips in an arithmetic crossed out and corrected, and the right choice for the tiny fire at the centre of the blocks.