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sometimes the sky is an empty bowl

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The weeks have felt purposeless. Not hopeless — we’ve been taking plants into the sunroom, the greenhouse, pushing the hardier ones against the walls for winter. Seeing a few friends. Swimming in the local pool as many mornings as possible. At night I settle into bed with 4 pillows and a book: a great luxury. But to what purpose? To what idea of accomplishment?

This morning we were awake around 6:30 and the white curtains were soft with moonlight. Tell me where the moon is, I asked, and what else you can see. So John leaned over and pulled aside the curtain. Oh, he said, you need to see this! A sort of half moon, bright, and a tail of 3 stars. So I leaned across the bed and looked out. A haze of mist over the trees, and yes, a third quarter moon (I think? Because of what you can’t see: the dark side, and the half that you could potentially see if it was illuminated. So an exercise in dimensionality for those of us who are spatially challenged…), with three bright stars or planets to the east of it. Later, when I looked them up, thinking them all planets, I learned that they’re Jupiter, Mars, and Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo.

So — morning, but filled with the night’s beauty and mystery. John went down to make the fire and coffee and I plumped up my pillows to think a bit about what’s possible as we move into the colder part of the year, the months when I would in the past have been working on a book. Writing one, I mean, rather than simply reading. If I could knit, I’d make a sweater. I am already stitching a quilt, and I love this work, following a blue thread, both of us led by a sharp Japanese needle, through 3 layers, creating a new dimension as we proceed. I am already stitching, though the pattern is perhaps predictable: lengths of indigo-dyed cotton, some scraps of red linen, an old sheet cut into strips. A few days ago, I was re-reading an old blog post, inspired by a textiles exhibition I’d seen at the Barbican Centre in February of 2024 and I was thinking then about making a large textile work to document the early days of our lives on this land:

When I looked at the textile [note: it was Tau Lewis’s “The Coral Reef Preservation Society”], which is huge, my eye was immediately drawn to this small portal. I remember tears came to my eyes. But why? It was because I was remembering the months we lived in a blue tent here on the 8.39 acres we’d bought the year before, in 1980. We had the idea we’d build a small cabin where we’d spend time away from the city. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized we wanted to live here. We couldn’t afford to have someone build us a house so we decided to do it ourselves. And on the Easter weekend of 1981, with our two-week old baby and his diapers, his little sweaters and sleepers, a big tin bowl for both salad and bathing the baby, we came to our property and set up our tent on a plywood platform, stretched an orange tarp over it to keep us dry, and began the work of building a house. I’ve written about this in the context of essays and so on. But in the textile work I am planning, I’ll use tents made from old jeans pockets and fill them with emblems of the house-building years, the child-raising years, the years that have gathered themselves into baskets of saved blue fabrics, canning jars, scribbled notes about garden plans and recipes for desserts using the first rhubarb,

I’ve had a strange year, re: my so-called literary life. I wrote something I thought was worth publishing and have encountered only silence when I’ve queried publishers. Oh, well, I thought: I guess I’ve aged out. Maybe I have. In a culture where identity is increasingly in the forefront, mine has felt irrelevant. But in Granada last week, John and I gave a presentation of our work to a room of students and faculty and the reception was so gratifying. Afterwards instructors came to tell me they’d like to include my books on course reading lists and one man cried and I realized that my quiet writing has a relevance to those who are willing to listen. And even if it doesn’t, I need to do it. Last night I was up for awhile, thinking about arrangements of pockets, of portals, of tent flaps open and closed, and what you might see if you untie the little strings holding them in place. You might see a sleeping baby in a yellow sleeper with a blue tuque on his soft head, you might see workclothes piled in a corner, a bag of worn cloth diapers, a woman dazed with miracles and worry, and if I can do this properly, you might catch a glimpse of the future too: driftwood windchimes turning in the air, a garden latch, a woodshed, a tiny dead saw-whet owl on a stack of dry fir.

I was having the same misgivings about the literary life then, I realize, but now I’m further along the continuum. And I haven’t begun to work out another way to record and commemorate what I’ve known and loved; or how to find my way into something entirely new. Reading about Tau Lewis’s textile work, and feeling both the empty bowl of the sky and the need to fill it not with sentences and paragraphs but something else, something more palpable, maybe I’ve found my guide. The sky doesn’t need me. It’s not empty after all. When I looked out, not expecting a moon, two planets, and a bright star, it didn’t care in the least. The attention is mine: to hold or hoard or to extend, expand. To make something, to fill something. Not least myself.

redux: zuihitsu, playlist in an empty pool

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Note: this was posted 3 years ago. I’d still choose these songs. And the dark is moving in.

______________________________

heart in bowl

1.

I was the only swimmer in the blue pool, my strokes slow, my thoughts elsewhere, fabric piled on a trunk, before the cutting, before the piecing, before the hours of stitching. The quilt. A playlist from the 1970s when I was young. When my head came up out of the water, 2 lengths of the back crawl, Neil was singing, and I was a teenager, drifting down to the beach at lunch, taking one of the two possible trails. In my black bathing suit and my cap, my strokes slow, my thoughts elsewhere.

I’ve been in my mind, it’s such a fine line
That keeps me searching for a heart of gold
And I’m getting old.

moorcroft

2.

The lifeguards laughed at something. Outside the leaves were falling. I turned at the deep end and pushed my way through the blue water. Each song a palimpsest, the empty pool a reminder.

Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost

heart on tile

3.

Black bathing suit, blue cap, alone in the water. When I woke this morning, I knew I’d dreamed something wild and unsettling, packing for somewhere I’d never arrive at, nothing quite fitting, the train late, my ticket lost. I swam my slow kilometre in 38 minutes, no one else in the pool, never leaving my lane.

Started humming a song from 1962
Ain’t it funny how the night moves

Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in.

Note: this morning’s swimming music courtesy of Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger

an omelette, a glass of wine

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Last week in Sechelt, at the Thrift Shop, I found a copy of Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of her essays on food and drink. The price: $1. My introduction to her books was via Summer Cooking, a book on the shelf in the kitchen of a house I lived in one beautiful winter, a Maclure house on the sea in North Saanich. I loved her tart observations about everything from soup to nuts and her recipes were inspiring. Over the years I accumulated many of her books. I can’t remember where I first read the title essay from An Omelette and Glass of Wine but her description of the ideal omelette was imprinted on me forever.

What one wants is the taste of the fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon.

Yesterday we went for a walk in damp air, hoping to find chanterelles in our favourite spot. And Reader, we were not disappointed. Not an abundance, no, but enough to clean and tear gently into pieces, cook briefly in butter, and strewn over a nearly-set omelette, with a snipping of chives, tarragon, and a few crumbles of aged Cheddar cheese. That was our supper, by the fire, after a chapter of To the Lighthouse, with a glass of crisp white wine. Because, as Mrs. David admitted,

And although there are those who maintain that wine and egg dishes don’t go together I must say that I do regard a glass or two of wine as not, obviously, essential but at least as an enormous enhancement of the enjoyment of a well-cooked omelette. In any case if it were true that wine and eggs are bad partners, then a good many dishes, and in particular, such sauces as mayonnaise, Hollandaise and Béarnaise would have to be banished from meals designed around a good bottle, and that would surely be absurd. But we are not in any case considering the great occasion menu but the almost primitive and elemental meal evoked by the words: “Let’s just have an omelette and glass of wine.”

another morning divination

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Many mornings begin with a kind of divination. I look into A Writer’s Diary to see what Virginia Woolf was writing or thinking about (or both). I find companionship there. Not with her brilliance, I can’t pretend to that, but with her sense of both the dailiness of life and also the overlay of transcendence on the quotidian. I love to follow the topography of her sentences. I love the fluidity of her narratives. John and I are reading To the Lighthouse aloud by our fire most evenings and I often find myself laughing as one long passage, taking us inside Mrs. Ramsay’s mind and memory, has us following her impressions of one house guest or her difficult husband, engaging in deeply philosophical meanderings, anyway, that one long passage ending on a downbeat, as she remembers a kettle or an unfinished chore. Or Mr. Ramsay, waiting for attention.

Many years ago I read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, in two volumes. I’ve read other biographies of her as well — the ones by Julia Briggs and Hermione Lee are favourites — and books in which she is either central to the narrative or else a ghost haunting the story — I loved Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Olivia Laing’s To The River — but I come back to Bell’s book(s) because he was her nephew and has interesting insights into both events and her character. It’s affectionate, discreet, and humane. The set I have was found at Macleod’s in 2012. It feels like a degree of separation: Quentin Bell signed the first volume and he knew Virginia….

So, those divinations: what do I learn? What did I learn today? That in 1933, she recorded comments on an article about her in Granta saying that she was now defunct as a writer, “…that Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer.” Think about that for a moment. How easily a comment can be made and how deeply it settles into the self, the mind, the heart. It kept her awake at night.

But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change; also that I have, at last, laid hands upon my philosophy of anonymity…The thing is to free one’s self; to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

I sit at my desk and realize that I was also awake last night, thinking about anonymity, the quiet months that follow the first few heady weeks after a book’s publication. (The Art of Looking Back came out in May.) John and I often talk about these later years, how we didn’t expect to feel quite so, well, shelved as writers. Both of us have manuscripts we’ve tried to place* with publishers and the response has been silence. The old courtesies — a letter, even a form letter, a phone call — don’t appear to be the currency any longer. Mostly I’m philosophical — and in any case, I’ve been turning my attentions elsewhere, preparing to return to university next year, and to deepen my knowledge and practice of textile work. It feels like the right thing to do, and the time to do it, while my body and soul are still functional.

We often talk about these later years. We have the luxury of having written books we’re still proud of. We have a family we love, a cherished place on earth we’ve known for almost half a century, trees we planted coming into beautiful maturity — the Japanese maple turning as I write, the copper beech rising above the wire fence to keep deer away, my parents’ ashes scattered around its base. I have to admit I am treasuring the mornings I wake without that old urgency to find my way into a novel, an essay. No ideas hovering, and no prospect of them on the horizon. Will this continue? I can’t say. On October 30th, 1936, this, another divination?

I do not wish for the moment to write out the story of the months since I made the last mark here. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful and healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen and describe actual events; good practice too for my stumbling and doubting pen. Can I still “write”? That is the question, you see. And now I will try to prove if the gift is dead, or dormant.

The summer was extraordinary in many ways: cool mornings in the lake, with mergansers and trout; the voices of my grandchilren outside at dusk; setting the table for dinners of lamb, prawns, prime rib, pancakes; filling bags with apples and making pies with their goodness; fresh blackberry ice cream; deer crossing the grass like gods. I haven’t written anything for a year. I don’t miss it. My pages are these ones, entries of a sort, my fingers my doubting pen, my life the actual events.

* And of course it would be more useful at this point to have an agent but alas, silence from the dozens I’ve contacted over the years. Silence, or surprise: “We couldn’t sell a book like this.”

redux: an autumn meditation, after Du Fu

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Note: this was posted 8 years ago. Today we are bringing in plants again, more of them, because there are now half a dozen bougainvilleas, the 3 epiphyllums have (somehow) become 5. Offspring of offspring of offspring.

__________________________

sitting duck

It’s autumn again, the year turning as the planet turns, as the ocean at Long Beach last week eased into shore and then retreated, the silver of it in morning light as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been moving plants into the sun-room for winter. I always think this will take, oh, half an hour but of course the plants need to be pruned back, tidied, dead leaves shaken into a bucket. Some of them are the parents or offspring of things I’ve tended for more than 30 years. The jade plants, the scented geraniums, some succulents brought for me as Mother’s Day gifts at the local swap meet, a Meyer lemon I bought on a whim in 1987 and often have enough fruit from for marmalade. 3 huge epiphyllum cacti that bloom year round and draw the hummingbirds in summer when we hang them from the overhead beams of our deck pergola to shelter among the grape leaves and wisteria.

I came in to read Du Fu, his Autumn Meditations. Always the precise observation and always the sadness for friends gone, the summer only a memory, the sound of geese flying south.

Jade frost bites the maple trees
and Wu Mountain and Wu Gorge breathe out dark fear

as river waves rise up to the sky
and dark wind-clouds touch ground by a frontier fortress.

The chrysanthemums have twice bloomed tears of other days,
When I moor my lonely boat my heart longs for my old garden.

The need for winter clothes hurries scissors and bamboo rulers.
White Emperor City looms over the rushed sound of clothes beaten at dusk.

Yesterday I put my summer clothes away, lavender tucked into pockets. When John got up to make the fire and coffee, I heard him wonder aloud at the light over the patio, then his chuckle as he realized it was the wisteria leaves turned gold. It happened, as these things happen, as life happens, almost overnight. And every year we are startled by the unexpectedness of the usual. This morning, I thought, oh, I must ask my mother about something, and then realized, yikes, she’s dead. Has been for 8 years next month. But wasn’t only a year or two ago my parents joined us at Long Beach and sat on logs looking out to sea while our children turned cartwheels in the sand? One of the succulents I brought in was a Christmas cactus grown from a tiny slip from John’s mother. This year it’s loaded with buds.

green

As Du Fu noted, “Immortal companions share a boat, move on in the evening.” The plants come in and I find room for them under windows from a house built before the First World War, many of the panes still with their original wavery glass. That’s why my sight was blurry when I came downstairs. I’m sure of it.

a fall gallimaufry

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Watching: Every morning, I watch the jays while I drink my coffee. They are endlessly entertaining. There’s a pecking order — the one with white eyebrows is top jay — and they are pretty ruthless in protecting their seeds from the other birds. Yesterday, on a whim, I put the Steller’s jay bud vase Angie gave me out on the wooden platform where I strew their seeds. I wanted to see how they’d respond. You can see for yourself! The two brave enough to even come near wouldn’t hop onto the feeder itself but looked nervously at the vase. The vase, with its little bouquet of marigolds, stared back.

Reading: Some weeks the library shelves don’t offer up much that I’m interested in reading. Is it my imagination or are there more dragons, women with straining bodices, smoke rising from burning castles on book covers than, say, five years ago? Or ten? But last week I found a small memoir, Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, which I loved reading over two nights, trying to ration the pages so I could stay within the narrative of finding a rundown cottage in Ranikhet, at the foot of the mountains, and building a life there, surrounded by gardens and dogs. A little gift to read as darkness settles and the nights cool. (And if you’re wondering if I mean Arundhati Roy and have misspelled her name, the answer is no, but I did once read a novel by Anuradha, thinking it was Arundhati. Two different writers, not related to one another…)

Enjoying: The moment where one bold jay made eye contact with the vase.

Listening: For geese heading south. I heard them last week but couldn’t locate their skein in the sky.

Wearing: Well, not quite yet, but last week I found a beautiful handknit Icelandic sweater at a consignment shop in Sechelt, creamy wool with a yoke patterned in deep rose and clear blue. I’ve knit one sweater in my life, using Icelandic Lopi yarn, watched over by the Graces of the seed store at the Butchart Gardens where I worked for 3 years as a university student — full time in summers and weekends in the off-season. The women were almost all knitters and they helped me figure out the simple instructions, putting their hands over mine as I did the difficult parts, and praising the final results in a way a YouTube would never rise to. That sweater was blue, the same blue in the yoke of this new one, and the same kind of yarn, or maybe even the same threads, allotted by the Fates all those years ago.

Remembering: The other night John was watching something on television downstairs and I was upstairs reading Called by the Hills when a song drifted up the staircase like a ghost from the past.

Don’t sing love songs; you’ll wake my mother
She’s sleeping here, right by my side
And in her right hand, a silver dagger
She says that I can’t be your bride.

Like a ghost from the past, Joan Baez singing that song when I was in my late teens, her voice as high and pure as silver, dropping almost an octave for the second half of the third line, and everything in that drop: every sorrow of my teen years.

Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife
For I’ve been warned and I’ve decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

I was upstairs reading and I was listening and yes, I confess, I even wept.

Anticipating: Tomorrow will be our 47th wedding anniversary and I’ll make a special dinner of duck legs and polenta. Some years we’ve been here, some years away (two years ago in Paris; sixteen years ago in Vienna), but we always eat a celebratory meal and toast our time together.

Finishing: I’m not actually anywhere near finishing the current quilt-in-progress but I am already thinking ahead to the next one, something to showcase last year’s dye work.

clockwork

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This is usually the first jay to arrive in the morning, regular as proverbial clockwork. You could set your clock by the sound of its cry. This morning it yelled for breakfast and when I didn’t move quickly enough, it came to the screen door by the sliding doors to the western deck and clung to the top of the screen, tapping the glass with its beak. It’s the most aggressive of the jays who are habituated to this place. I know it by the white marks on its eyebrows, something I understand is more usual with interior populations of Steller’s jays. It’s only in the last year or two that we’ve noticed jays with the white markings. This one is top bird. It kicks the others out of the way and they only get to feed when it’s had its fill. Sometimes the air is blue with jays — the most I’ve counted at once is 7 and when they’re jostling for seeds, there’s a lot of vivid colour outside the window.

It’s the kind of clock I like best. Awake to the first light, the sound of cars off the Earls Cove ferry, the cat chirping for his breakfast. As much as I’d like to, I can’t live outside time. The world doesn’t allow that. Or maybe it does, but I haven’t figured it out yet. But to wake to the sound of a jay squawking and whistling (they didn’t used to whistle much but this guy with the white brows has a very pretty trill, used sparingly) or the soft progress of traffic from the first ferry of the morning or even (on occasion!) the sound of the coffee grinder if John is up first, and then the snap as he breaks cedar kindling to start the fire: these all enter my nervous system and ease me awake.

The day is conscious of itself, said Rumi, and I think the Steller’s jay with the white eyebrows might think that too. The day has begun. Come down, put out seed. Stand by the door and watch the tree fill with birds the colour you dream of in your deepest sleep. It’s exactly the clock you need.

redux: “the rough patch at the turn up the hill”

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Note: this was posted five years ago and refers to a surgery performed six years ago. I refer to an essay I’d written about our shared experience of that surgery — one enduring it, the other witnessing — and sewing my way through the process, and how I thought I might make a chapbook of the essay. I never did but the essay was included in Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee, published in 2023 by Arsenal Pulp Press.

____________________

stitch

A year ago this hour I was in my rooms on the UBC campus, waiting to hear from the surgeon who’d just replaced both of my husband’s hips. One hip was wonky and then with the long wait time for orthopaedic surgery, his second hip also deteriorated. When he was called late last September and told to prepare for both the surgery and the recuperation afterwards, we were filled with optimism. We got the equipment we needed, arranged our house for safe recovery, and made sure the cupboards were full. (Wine rack too.)

A year ago this afternoon the surgeon called me to tell me how well the procedure had gone. I walked over to the UBC hospital, a walk I was to take many times over the next ten days, and went through the rigamarole (stopped to answer questions about my health, putting on a clean mask to replace the clean mask I was wearing, signed the form to indicate the time I was visiting, sterilized my hands in front of the security officer at the desk) to visit John in the recovery ward. He was groggy but excited. Two new hips! The prospect of a return to our long walks up the mountain. Easier travel once the pandemic situation allowed that again. He was a little concerned that he could feel and move his left foot but his right foot was still asleep. The recovery nurse assured him it would also wake up once the anaesthetic had worn off.

I remember walking back to my rooms and calling our children. I also wrote a group email to extended family and friends to share the good news. But by the next morning, a year tomorrow, the story had changed. The right foot was still asleep and that was because John had suffered a compression injury to his sciatic nerve and its branch, the peroneal nerve, affecting his ability to raise his right foot. The chance of this happening was one in a thousand. Over the next week, consulting with the excellent physiotherapists who helped him to move around with a walker, to use stairs, to seat himself and then rise from that position, and with the surgeon who visited several times, as well as with other orthopaedic surgeons who also came to talk to us, we learned that the prognosis was a bit uncertain. The nerves would have to regenerate and that happens slowly. It can take two years. If it happens at all, because there’s only a 50% chance that the nerves will in fact completely regenerate.

Whatever happens we will do our best. When it’s light out, the trees brilliant gold and deep orange, the house finches busy at the work of opening maple seeds, I am ready for anything. But when the weight settles, I pick up my quilt and stitch free-hand spirals into the sashing between the log-cabin blocks. The process of moving out from the centre and then letting the thread find its way out into the open space is calming, in the way I suspect meditation might be. My meditations are of the practical sort though; they always have been. Kneading dough, weeding, watering tomatoes and easing their unruly stems around strings leading them upwards. So I’ll stitch and hope that the threads will take me–us–in the direction we need to go now. Sure-footed or not.

The following week was strange. I was alone (because I’d taken advice to keep myself and John as safe as possible from infections, including Covid of course), walking back and forth to the hospital with a flask of Camino hot chocolate for John (because honestly the food was quite awful and he needed something warm and rich), news from home, and well, just to be company for him in his room overlooking trees.

that week

Back in my rooms, I was working on two quilts. One of them, in the photograph above, had a complicated pattern of spirals in its sashing; I’d sit by a big window and sew. And think. I had a lot of thinking to do. About whether we were ready, about how to get us home, about the winter ahead. Now that it’s a year later and we got through that winter with all its equipment and further medical dramas (because only a few days after we’d returned home, we had to go down to the Sechelt hospital where John was admitted for an issue related to the surgery but also complicated, needing many tests and drug trials) and physiotherapy sessions, acupressure sessions, etc., I am reading a long essay I wrote during and after the winter. I wanted to record what was a life-altering event in our particular lives and I wanted to find the lessons in it. Because there were lessons, ones I might have anticipated and ones I didn’t. I’m thinking of making the essay into a little book, like the book I made of my essay, “Museum of the Multitude Village”.

The quilts were finished and went to their new homes — Anik’s house in Dordrecht, the Netherlands; and Cristen’s house in Edmonton. A year later, John’s foot has come a long way in its own recovery, although he will probably always have a slightly idiosyncratic gait. Think of Inspector Morse, if you are a fan of that television series. (In real life, John Thaw had a condition called drop foot, which is essentially what John has now.) Our long walks up the mountain aren’t quite what they were. Rough ground presents difficulties so we try to find places to walk where the terrain is even. But I have to say that otherwise, things go on as they always did. We swim — daily in summer, three times a week after the end of September. We built a greenhouse last spring. Over the past couple of weeks, John split and stacked three and half cords of firewood. Every few days he goes down our long driveway with a rake and a pick to level out the rough patch at the turn up the hill.

When I remember the week after the surgery, I remember the swelling, the bruising, the uncertainty. But also a kind of quiet beauty in the days. Leaves were turning and falling. There were finches in the trees. In the night I had a small lamp by my bed and I read Anne Boyer’s The Undying, finding in its dark record of Boyer’s harrowing experience of breast cancer a coded message that went right to my heart. You must pay attention, you must care from the bottom of your frightened heart. There is something to be learned from this. Find out, tell what it is.

The bruising is phenomenal. Your flanks, both of them, are deep blue and purple, streaked with red; they’re swollen, the swelling extending down your legs to your feet.

The trees are turning, the birds so lively in their branches, and even the rain against the window reminds me of time spinning from my spools of thread, drops finding a trail over the silver glass.

To take a set of objects and actions from one system and reclassify these as elements in another system is like fortune-telling.

cords

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“It is related phonetically to think as song is to sing”

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I should take a photograph, I said, after we’d begun to eat our Thanksgiving dinner. It followed a day of sunlight, a brief swim in cold water, some log-splitting, some talk by the fire. I almost didn’t make a special dinner. We were in Gatineau last weekend and had a few wonderful meals with our family there and a friend is coming next week (I think?) so we will celebrate nearly 50 years of friendship then as well. But then I thought we shouldn’t let the day pass without note.

Middle English thanken, from Old English þancian, þoncian “give thanks; to recompense, to reward,” from Proto-Germanic *thankōjanan (source also of Old Saxon thancon, Old Norse þakka, Danish takke, Old Frisian thankia, Old High German danchon, Middle Dutch, Dutch, German danken “to thank”), from *thankoz “thought; gratitude” (from PIE root *tong- “to think, feel”).

It is related phonetically to think as song is to sing; for sense evolution, compare Old High German minna “loving memory,” originally “memory.” Also compare related Old English noun þanc, þonc, originally “thought,” but also “good thoughts, gratitude.”

There are many things to be thankful for, though the world burns and tornadoes rage and crazy men act out their most violent impulses. I am thankful. I am healthy, I have a wonderful family, I have love in my life, I have a pile of books by my bed so that I can read myself to sleep each night, I have a handful of dear and treasured friends. When I look out the windows of my house, a house I helped to build, I see trees I’ve known for 47 years, a mountain that is my weatherglass, birds who come for breakfast each morning, the occasional elk herd passing through, bears who are sometimes a nuisance but always beautiful. Inside, the scent of cedar and alder burning in the woodstove. A basket with a folded quilt-in-progress to occupy my hands and thinking. An archive of my own books.

So I made a meal for the two of us to share. Prime rib, smashed potatoes like the ones we loved in Porto last November (the young man who served us told us his mother’s method), brussel sprouts roasted with tiny cubes of double-smoked bacon, lemon zest, and lemon balsamic vinegar, squash roasted with maple syrup and ras el hanout, a few Yorkshire puddings, just because, the salad we call Oaxacan because we first had this version at Cafe Boulenc (sort of panzanella, with toasted sourdough cubes, tomatoes, cucumbers, thin slices of red onion, sliced green olives, lots of parsley and basil), and for dessert, baked pears with caramel sauce. You might see that there are two bottles of wine on the table. John loves an occasional glass of red, especially with beef; and in these later years, my system prefers white. His is something ordinary, that was already open. Mine is a Mâconnais chardonnay, uncorked for the occasion! And the glasses? The Waterford Clannad that John gave me for my 50th birthday, more than 20 years ago, still intact.

There are many things to be thankful for, though days pass when I don’t remember to acknowledge them. Sometimes looking at the etymology of a word makes me realize how much I don’t know, forget, or fail to measure up to. My first impulse was to let the day go by. This morning, putting away the beautiful platters and bowls, the shining Waterford glasses, I’m glad we sat at our table as the sun went down and gave thanks, a good and useful word. “It is related phonetically to think as song is to sing.” Though the world burns, though the crazy men rage.

Note: the quoted passage is from https://www.etymonline.com/word/thankhttps://

Steller’s jays and roses: an October meditation

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It’s cool this morning, a fire burning in the woodstove, though I hope to swim once the mist has lifted. A sign of fall? 6 jays were waiting for seed on the railings beyond the sliding doors. Usually there are 2, or 3. I recognize those ones — one is large and aggressive, one has some white on its eyebrows and a bit of white under its chin (if a jay can be said to have a chin), and the third is a bit more timid than the others. But the gang this morning seemed interchangeable. If I don’t bring seed to them right away, they’ve learned to follow me around the house by appearing at windows where I can be found on the other side. Their favourite seems to be the window over the kitchen sink. They tap on it with their beaks. A couple know about my study and come to the chairs brought under cover for winter just by the window beyond my desk. They don’t tap so much as dance. I’m reminded of Louise Erdrich’s beautiful book about motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance, with its description of their courtship rituals. In late winter, our Steller’s jays are more attentive to one another, grooming each other, and I’ve always loved their tenderness. It’s not in evidence now, with the large one eating its fill and rushing at the others who try to take their share of seeds. But what can we know of them and their private affections? Their wildness is not ours, even if we think we might share something in the moment a jay peers into a window and taps at it with its strong beak.

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
–Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

By the fire, drinking my second cup of coffee, I looked through photos on my phone, deciding which to keep and which to discard. And it seemed so difficult to believe that every morning in June I could go out and cut roses to put in all the jugs. Moss roses, old sweet noisettes, sprays of unnamed apricot climbers. I’d go out in a rush to put on a sprinkler and stop to cut an armload of roses. The kitchen would fill with their sweetness. And later the sweet peas, the lilies, the clear blue agapanthus. For our Thanksgiving table, there are still some late roses to cut — Lady of Shalott, Mme Alfred Carriére.

In Gatineau last weekend, I paused for moment by a tiny painting I bought at the Kosiv market in western Ukraine in 2019. A man had small stall arranged with a few dozen oil paintings and when Angie and I arranged to buy a few — I was thinking of Christmas gifts for Forrest and Brendan and their families — he was so delighted to know they were going to Canada. I think I paid $10 each for the ones I chose. This one, though painted in spring, was a house I’m certain we passed on our way up the mountain to our hotel.

As my grandfather’s country moves into another season of war, I think of the the kindness of those we met daily in Ukraine, I think of the peace of that house, and I wish I’d bought every painting on display that day. I wish I’d never said no to a glass of horilka (given the number offered, I felt I had to decline some of them!), I wish I’d stayed longer, spent more time with the relatives who found me at the hotel on the shoulder of mountain you can see in this painting, and I wish that the worst humans didn’t have the most power in this world. It’s cool this morning, a fire burning in the woodstove, though I hope to swim once the mist has lifted. How many days do any of us have left to do the things that call us to attention? The jays squabble on the railings, hoping for more seeds, and any minute now the bold one will find my in my study, thinking a thousand thoughts that don’t seem to be connected, but are part of something I’m trying to parse. How roses can sustain us for seasons beyond their flowering, the memory of a small house under flowering cherry and pear trees (though I saw it in September) can shape the untidy dreams of hope, and the jays in their unruly constancy require generosity, and even love.

The ground I tend sustains me in early summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I’ll hoe for the rest of the year.
–Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance