Category: Uncategorized

After my swim, I sat by the fire and tied stones into one of the pieces I’m dyeing today. I have two white cotton duvet covers, maybe 25 years old, and when I was washing them last week, I noticed they had some small stains on them. So I thought I’d prepare an indigo vat and see what I could do to give them a second life.

One of them is twisted and tied. I like this method because it often results in a relief pattern something like eel grass. Here’s that one soaking in water:

And here it is in its first dip in the indigo vat:

After ten minutes I fished it out and it’s oxidizing on the cedar bench while the other piece is having its first dip.

I sewed a kind of spiral and trail on the second cover, pulling the stitches tight, and I hope this will result in a nice shibori design. I also tied some of the stones in the first photograph at random on the rest of the surface. In the past, this technique has produced snow angels or birds in flight. You never know, though. It’s all about surprise, or at least it is for me, a complete amateur.

I like the process. I like the dreamlike state I enter as I stare into the vat and wait. Anything could happen. Steller’s jays are all around me as I dip cloth and spread it out to oxidize afterwards. It’s a blue they recognize, preening in the nearby trees. A blue I dream of, using my tongs to move the cloth around in the indigo dye, and later, at night, while the stars glitter and a coyote sings. It never gets old, preparing the cloth, measuring powders, rinsing, pegging the finished pieces to the clothesline to dry.

This morning, the water was quite cool; the sky, grey. Emails come from nearby friends, with photos of grizzlies, a sow and three cubs, below their house, feeding on oysters and clams at low tide. Most days we see a black bear sow and her two cubs arrive for the crabapples in our tall tree beyond the garden. Driving back from the lake an hour ago, a young coyote watched us from the side of the road above the marsh. John thought it was the same one who’d ambled up the trail to where he was standing by the copper beech tree. When the pup saw him, it stopped briefly before turning around and trotting away. Some days I think we will be that old couple knitted into their house by vines, the decks and garden taken over by wild animals. I can think of worse ways to end our days.

We went to Vancouver on Wednesday, pivoting at the ferry from our plan to take our car and shop for special things on our way home the next day when we learned there would be a one-ferry wait for car traffic. (We hadn’t made a reservation because it was mid-week in September. How the times have turned.) Turning around in the line-up, we parked our car instead in the lot and I quickly put some stuff in my shopping basket — toiletries, a change of clothes — so we could go as foot passengers. The plan had been to see the Odyssey at a matinee showing and we did that, using buses and Uber. In a way I wish I hadn’t seen it. So many disappointing things — the bad dialogue, most of the acting, the absence of key elements that have always been my touchstones when reading the poem: the entirety of book 11, with its moving and complex interactions between Odysseus and the dead (“But my heart/longed, after this, to see the dead elsewhere.”), Nausikaa at the river with her laundry, dreaming of a bridegroom, and of course the marriage bed built around a living olive tree.

So now we turn to autumn, waiting like bears for the salmon, for the geese to sound their wild cries across the sky. Our woodshed is nearly full, thanks to John’s hard work, and our pantry shelves are lined with jams and jellies. Every other year I’ve been working on a book — a novel, a collection of essays, a memoir– but I think those days are over. When I wake in the night, there’s no longer any urgency to find my way downstairs in the dark to my desk, to open a file and enter a world I’d lost myself in for decades. I have other plans in the works, a turn in the road, a bend in the river. What waits, unknown?

This morning when I went outside to feed the Steller’s jays who were waiting for their sunflower seeds, I heard the school bus on the highway below our house. It hasn’t stopped at our driveway for 23 years but I still hear it. I hear it slow down for the turn in the road and the part of me that remembers every morning of those years, making breakfasts, making sure lunches were stuffed into backpack, that forms were filled out, yes, that part: well, she still leans on the door to listen as the bus stops at the bottom of the driveway to pick up her children. It hasn’t stopped for 23 years. In other provinces my grandchildren have been back at school for a week or two now. Photographs arrived of them on their porches or standing with their bikes in front of their houses. New clothes. Smiles.

In grade one I walked to school along May Street to Moss Street, turning the corner, sometimes meeting a classmate. I had a plaid schoolbag. Saddle shoes. I figured out I could also take a different route, up over Moss Rocks and down a little street to Fairfield Road, right across from the Sir James Douglas Elementary School Annex where my grade one classroom was, the one where I day-dreamed by the window during the reading lesson because I’d already been reading for two years. I hated the readers we used. Fun With Dick and Jane, and others like it. Everything happened in one or two syllables. At home I was entranced by books about the Bob Whites of the Glen and Crabapple Farm and Blue Willow and Nancy Drew mysteries.

While I was swimming, I was watching the sun appear and disappear behind the little islands. One of my grandsons swam to them this summer with his dad. While they were with us in August, the children came down to the lake each morning, though mostly they waited until the afternoon to swim. They threw sticks for the caretaker’s dog when she came to pick up garbage and clean the bathroom. They brought books and sat with their granddad after he’d finished his swim (usually before me). They picked salal berries to bring back for pancakes. I don’t how many mornings we had salal pancakes when their parents were growing up but it seems like a hundred. Or more. The scent of the oil heating, the batter bubbling on the old iron griddle that left its brand on the bottom of some of the pancakes.

When I listened for the school bus, then, and this morning, I was listening to the passage of time, wasn’t I? The bus taking my children away from me, into the world, though for some years it brought them back again. Until it didn’t.

We grow old but we are always those others, the children walking to school across Moss Rocks, day-dreaming by a window, the young woman waiting for the school bus to make its way around the corner of the highway leading up from the lake and later in the day, pausing on the route to Egmont to let the children off to run up the driveway, home. Their dog was waiting at the top of the driveway, listening, as I listened.

Is it the light? Is it the smell of lake in my hair as I write this? Hearing a dog bark far away and thinking, Oh, it’s Lily, she’s still alive. I think of the beautiful essay, “Once More to the Lake”, by E.B. White in which these thoughts are also his. Mine. Ours.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design,

This morning, walking back to the car after my swim (12 degrees, a kingfisher skimming the surface of the lake, one island still dark, the other bright with early sun), I stopped to pick up this cluster of samaras, the winged seeds of big-leaf maples. Chartreuse and magenta. Take a photograph, I asked John, who had his phone with him. It feels early for samaras, early for the morning temperatures to be so cool. Early to be the only one in the lake while the sun takes its own sweet time to rise over the shoulder of the mountain.

Yesterday I made grape jelly, 11 jars of the most beautiful rosé preserve. I used our Chardonnay grapes mostly, tart and green, with just a handful of red wine grapes (Marechal Foch, I think, planted when we built the first extension of our house and wanted vines to cool the southern wall, so 1986 or 7?). I put a small sprig of rosemary on top of the jelly before sealing the jars. There was a little left over, enough for John’s toast this morning. (He said it’s delicious.)

I am writing down the days, the winged samaras, the jars of grape jelly, the trio of Steller’s jays waiting most mornings. The chickadees alighting on my hands as I take out some seed. The mother bear and her two cubs who came the day before yesterday, in daylight, to eat crabapples, the young ones in the tree, swaying on the upper branches, and the mum on her hind legs like a slow dancer, moving from side to side as she plucked the small sour fruit. When we saw them climbing the bank from the old orchard, one of the cubs racing ahead and the other at its mother’s heels, John said, They are so beautiful. And oh, they were, they are, their black coats swaying, their bodies somehow sinuous despite the bulk. (I must remember this.) I think of how rich a life can feel some days, for jars for grape jelly on a cloth by the stove, the vivid blue of Steller’s jays against the deep green firs, a pile of books by the bed, the scent of apples in the back of the house from the bags stored there, Merton Beauties, Bob Dylan singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (I confess to pressing repeat), and the arrival, like clockwork, of the bears for the crabapples. I know Louis MacNeice didn’t have a mature black bear in mind when he wrote “Autumn Journal” but somehow I am thinking of his lines this morning, September light in the trees, my bathing suit drying on the railing, and a sprig of leftover rosemary on the counter, for remembrance:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow

But it’s a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven’t got time for waiting game

In May the tomato plants were soaking up the sunlight, growing against the house on the second-storey deck. I loved sitting at the table, watching the bees visit, the yellow-faced, the Sitka, black-tailed, and I loved watching the fruits swell in July, ripening a bit later this year than last, but worth the wait. And now, on a cool September morning, the maples leaves beginning to turn, I’ve cut up many pounds of them to make roasted sauce.

The plump ox-hearts grown from seed bought at the Bolhao market in Porto, the Pruden’s Purples, Brandywines, small Romas, a few Berkeley Tie-Dyes, along with a head of our pungent garlic, branches of rosemary, olive oil, and some flakey Maldon salt. They’ll roast and caramelize a little and in December we’ll still be enjoying September’s tomatoes on pasta or pizza or spread on sourdough bread.

I haven’t got time for the waiting game. There are grapes to make into juice which will then be made into jelly, fragrant with rosemary and sage, apples (still!) to juice and freeze, beans to pick, though the deer got into the garden after a bear broke down one of the gates and made a bee-line for the bean poles, completely demolishing one tee-pee of romanos. Luckily there are several more still producing.

This morning at the lake a single loon called. Most days a single feather floats just beyond me. Soon the geese will be flying overhead and the birds who gather on the railings, watching the kitchen with such urgency for their seeds, chickadees and the nuthatches who fly with them, the Steller’s jays with their squawks and whistles, one of them following me from window to window, well, those birds will be our winter company.

And the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’d spend with you
These precious days I’d spend with you

Do we ever have enough? Enough time, enough room, enough of anything we thought we needed and worked for and got, and now live surrounded by, weighted down with, wondering if it was what we wanted anyway? I don’t know. September fills me with questions. 60 years ago I was a girl getting ready for grade 6, looking forward to whatever the year might bring. We lived in a house with apple trees, pear trees, and a grape vine on a fence along the driveway. My mother made pies and crumbles, apple sauce and butter dark with brown sugar, and even jelly, though those grapes were Concord and the preserve was deep purple. These grapes are mostly Chardonnay, though there are a few clumps of Marechal Foch too so the jelly will be green, with a faint pink tint. Or maybe true rosé. I don’t know yet.

These are precious days, when I stop to think about them. Swimming in a cool clean lake, eating a clump of grapes tasting slightly of wine, and a kitchen filled with the scent of rich sauce. I haven’t got time for the waiting game. There are apples to peel for pies, jars to wash, and bowls of tomatoes on every surface.

Note: the song is of course “September Song”, composed by Kurt Weill, lyrics by James Maxwell Anderson.

Doing: Yesterday it rained on and off all day. The house smelled of apples from the buckets and bags in the utility room. So I made 3 pies for the freezer (with plans to make more today) and a crumble for us to enjoy after dinner. And honestly, is there anything nicer than warm crumble with a scoop of ice cream, in this case Kawartha Dairy’s wonderful Tragically Chip? Yesterday there wasn’t.

Making: I’ve been piecing together a quilt, horizontal strips, and yesterday (after the pies), I sewed sashing to the strips after working out the simple arithmetic of how to make the best use of the indigo-dyed sheets I’d put aside for this quilt. I have a big one for the backing and I had some of the first one left, the one I’d used for the strips, and what I had wasn’t ideal for the sashing — the lengths were short and it meant a fair bit of cobbling together. But it really doesn’t matter. My quilts are very much a reflection of my limited sewing skills and if I need to measure 3 times, cut once, then re-measure, and cut again, so be it. I hung the completed top on the clothesline between showers and I love how the indigo-dyed strips and sashing actually echo the sky on a bright day. Looking at it, I have the uncanny sense of swimming under the clouds and also within them, as I do on the days when the clouds are reflected in the lake’s surface.

Listening: I have been listening to as many recordings of Paco de Lucia (my favourite guitarist) playing the Concierto de Aranjuez. I don’t know, there’s something so deeply yearning about the adagio, and when Paco played it, he would allow a tiny moment for the heart to catch up with the music, and I am listening, my own heart caught in the strings, the oboe, the pauses, the hesitations. This morning, swimming, I was watching the moon in the western sky, a whole note hung in the bars of high contrails, and yes, it was almost exactly that.

Thinking: About words, how sometimes a word will enter your imagination, and take you to unexpected places. On my desk, Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things, open to “Squarings”, and these lines:

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.

And I held the word “river” in my own mind, I hold it now, remembering my father packing the car for a camping trip and telling us we would see the Sturgeon River, where his school friend had once dived from a bridge, and never came up, and how it became a haunting, a story I’ve remembered ever since, the boy with pale skin sinking, caught in reeds, mud, the unforgiving bed of the river, and the boys on the bridge waiting.

I’m getting ready to make an indigo vat to dye some lengths of linen and to try to extend the life of two duvet covers, white cotton, which have become a little stained over the years. It didn’t occur to me to over-dye them until I remembered I’d sent my daughter some photographs of a line of old sheets and some mystery fabric I’d bought at the thrift store for $2 (almost certainly a poly-cotton blend and all the dye guides tell you not to bother with polyester because its fibres won’t take dye) and then we talked about her upcoming birthday. What would you like, I asked, and she replied that she could use a duvet cover. I used the mystery fabric to make her one. (The fabric on the clothesline is still wet and this photograph shows what the blue dried to.)

So the duvet covers, some linen, 9 damask napkins, big ones (and monogrammed) , that I bought at the thrift store for a couple of dollars, and maybe an old sheet. I’m at work now, sewing the strips I pieced together earlier in the week together for a quilt top and they’ll need backing. An indigo-dyed sheet will work perfectly. Every time I have a quilt in mind, I ask myself if it might be a good idea to think about other colours, other possibilities, but nothing captures my imagination like blue. This morning as I was swimming my slow kilometre, I was watching the sky clear. It rained overnight and when we arrived at the lake, the sky was grey. But the little islands in the distance were lit by sun and as I swam the grey dissolved, transformed.

Sometimes I look up and see scribblings in the clouds. A long salmon skeleton, a few bars of music, the shapes of distant mountains. Today they were soft billows against the clear blue. And so far away. I think of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

I think that’s what I am trying for when I dip fabric into indigo dye: the distances I never arrive at. In writing, in quilt-making, in the relationships in my life. I do my best, or at least I think I do. But I also know I’m careless. I don’t take enough time. I’m impatient. I say I’m interested in process more than results, and I think that’s true, but maybe I could take more time with the process, guide my work a little more carefully. When I tie the old cotton duvet covers with string to find the pattern I won’t know until the work is done, I could be more intentional.

Today I might finish sewing the strips for the quilt top together. I measured, cut, pieced, and as I sew the strips into their sequence, I’m having to adjust and cobble little bits here and there because I made mistakes. I tell myself the mistakes are part of the process and it doesn’t really matter if there are anomalies in the design. The atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. When I was swimming this morning, I saw that distance, the blue sky with its summits, and myself so far below.

The other night we arrived home from supper at the pub in Egmont and saw this bear standing under the big crabapple tree below our vegetable garden. The bears come every year for the crabs that grow on branches too high for us to reach. Sometimes it’s a sow with a cub or two; she’ll send them up to the top boughs for the highest fruit. Sometimes it’s a young male, fending for himself, with a bit of attitude. These are the ones who break branches, who sway back and forth as they feed. They’ve come as long as we’ve had this tree, planted as a small offshoot of a tree in John’s mother’s garden. She brought it in the early 1980s. So these are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the original bears. They have very sophisticated spatial and temporal maps which they pass on to offspring. A neighbour’s plum tree, our crabapples, the salmon stream half a mile away.

Recently a grizzly sow and her 3 cubs have been sighted in our area. Grizzlies are not regular inhabitants on our part of the coast but they do swim from the mainland sometimes. My friend sent a photograph of the sow and cubs taken from her deck; they were feeding in a bay at low tide. This morning a woman told us they’ve been spotted not far from our place. Maybe that’s why the cat was skittish this morning, running from room to room, checking things out. Though he was skittish yesterday morning too and when I looked up from my desk, I saw a doe and her twins, their spots nearly faded away, eating salal at the edge of the woods.

Honestly, I’d rather think about and see animals than read the news. Every day, another crisis. I’m not turning away from it but when I weigh the dangers of failing diplomacy, trade wars, food-born illness (because of failing health protections), I’d rather learn how to live safely in the natural world. The rules are pretty clear: be responsible about garbage, food waste, your own behaviour on trails in their territory, and keep your vehicles locked because they’ve figured out how to open doors. (Last summer we woke to an open car door and muddy prints around the handle. But we realized that the motion light on our print shop must’ve scared the bear before it could do any damage. There was nothing in the car to attract it. Maybe the male with attitude?)

This morning one of the gates to the vegetable garden is broken. We picked the apples a few weeks ago because they ripened earlier this year but some mother told her offspring that there’s a gate they can break in late August and sometimes the reward is apples. Old lessons in a changing climate.

I hope the grizzly sow and her cubs find their way to a less populated area. I hope they travel safely. But the odds are against it. Last year the young grizzly who was sighted on a beach in Sechelt and who was trapped at Chapman Creek and relocated, found his way to Texada Island where he was shot by someone protecting his farm animals while officials argued about whose responsibility it was to move the bear yet again. The old stories have lessons for us: the girl who married a bear is one I read as a young woman and thought about during the years my daughter was a teen and how the story contains rules about sexuality and courtesy we might all benefit from learning. I think of Gary Snyder’s “this poem is for bear” with its beautiful epigraph: “As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.” Today John will fix the gate busted up by the petulant child of the god of the mountains and I’ll think about the low huff the bear gave as he walked away (he didn’t run) when we surprised him under the tree the other night.

Yesterday I was filled with urgency to make something. I felt it in my hands, my heart. Make something. And as I was putting clean sheets on the beds vacated by family members returned to their homes, I realized I had been thinking for weeks about the sky, the water, and how they were so pivotal to my sense of self this summer. Or any summer. Or winter. I looked at a stack of blue fabric, some I’d dyed, some acquired over time, and I realized I could sew my thinking into a quilt.

I cut long strips of indigo-dyed cotton and some Japanese cotton. 6 inches wide. I cut lengths of unbleached cotton and realized it would be too, well, plain on its own so I found some deep red linen, scraps from a Maiwa barrel where you could fill a bag for a few dollars with offcut. I was able to cut some 6 inch pieces of varying lengths, and I punctuated unbleached cotton strips with these.

So now I have everything cut into strips, pieced into long sentences of blue and white, punctuated with varying marks of red, and today, if I have time, I’ll cobble together a quilt top, the strips arranged horizontally, lengths of sky and water and the miracle of being alive within them.