Category: Uncategorized

As many times as I’ve written about it, it still feels like a miracle. Years ago we had to have our septic field rebuilt. I remember the hard work of removing all the plants and trees that grew in the space over the field; we’d fenced the field against deer and bears, we’d planted our vegetable garden in long raised beds, and I’d used the areas by the fences for roses and perennials. I thought I’d potted up all the perennials and the man who came to do the rebuild carefully piled the garden soil, rich with 30 years of seaweed, compost, and (just before we realized the field was collapsing) a truck-load of mushroom manure, anyway, he piled the soil near the garden shed. After he’d finished doing all the work to install a new distribution tank and dig the lines, John built long boxes of cedar, using some wild-edged boards from a tree on our property as well as whatever else he could find. I gave the beds names: Long Eye, Wave, Old Deck, Raspberry Beret, Apple Round (for the Merton Beauty). This work happened over the late fall and winter and we carefully replanted everything we’d dug up. Imagine my surprise when I was digging a hole for a climbing rose to plant against the inside of the gate when my shovel brought up a clump of blooming purple crocus. Imagine seeing the clump on the shovel, the open flowers, the pollen dense and saffron yellow. I thought then, and still think, of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the mysteries of earth and the underworld and mothers and daughters. For reasons of my own, I have been reading the Hymn:

But when the earth starts blossoming with fragrant flowers of springtime
flowers of every sort, then it is that you must come up from the misty realms of darkness,
once again, a great thing of wonder to gods and mortal humans alike…

As many times as I’ve written about it, a miracle still.

Note: this is from Gregory Nagy’s translation, lines 401-3

Making

Over the weekend I pieced together the central part of the log cabin quilt I am making for my grandson H. These are colours he chose and although they’re not necessarily ones I would normally use– the orange in particular! — I love him enough to honour his request. What I love about log cabin blocks is how they are built, like actual structures, and then how you can achieve different effects by placement: the way I’ve arranged these makes a sort of god’s eye, doesn’t it? (If you remember that particular craft, wrapping coloured yarn or string around two sticks or drinking straws to make a diamond-shaped ikon, the standard project of Brownie groups and pre-schools. I have two or three hanging in my house.) Today I hope to finish piecing the top of this quilt, cutting and sewing a deep border at the top and bottom, and a narrower border on each side. Not sure yet whether I’ll use the deep blue (in real life, it’s sort of marine blue) at the outer edge of the cabin blocks or maybe a darker navy blue. I have both. I’ll lay the cabin blocks on top of each and see which I like best.

Reading

I’m still reading Becoming Human: Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture, in and around other books (Bog Queen by Anna North, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Still by Joanna Cockerline, among others). What I love about Becoming Human is the way the essays all circle the Upper Paleolithic in different ways, some of the writers taking a structuralist approach, some more taken with the process of making art, the materiality of it. I am too much a beginner to have an opinion yet but I remember standing with our guide by the two horses at Ribeira de Piscos, wondering at the why of the sites chosen to make the images. Why this rock, why not that one? Are they portals, I wondered. And the guide said quietly, Maybe the portals are the rocks that are not incised with images.

Appreciating

The way it felt to wake last Monday morning to find a message in my inbox from the associate publisher at Thornapple Press, providing this link to the first review of my forthcoming book. The thing that had felt abstract was suddenly real:

https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/the-art-of-looking-back-by-theresa-kishkan

Eating

Last Thursday, after a long day of errands, we continued on as we drove home, past our driveway, on and on to the Backeddy Pub in Egmont. The pub closes for January and part of February and we’ve missed its fire, its tacos, its chowder. We were the only table when we arrived though a few others came later.

Here’s John at our table by the fire. We were enjoying a drink and before we knew it, our dinner arrived: seafood risotto (sockeye salmon, scallops, mussels, saffron rice), chowder, a salad of bright greens, tangles of carrot ribbons, beet ribbons, and roasted golden beets, with quinoa and dried cranberries strewn over the top. And driving back that night, we saw the waxing crescent moon with the old moon in her arms. I thought of the folk bands of my young womanhood, Steeleye Span (with the glorious Maddy Prior) and Fairport Convention, how we sang those songs driving to mountains or (once) California, and I remembered “Sir Patrick Spens”:

A saw the new muin late yestreen
Wi the auld muin in her airm
And gif we gang tae sea, maister,
A fear we’ll cam tae hairm

Loving

The hummingbirds, the chestnut-backed chickadees, a raven on the Malaspina trail yesterday wheeling around in mid-air when I called to it, Thock, Thock, the robins back, the sound of red-winged blackbirds when I go for mail, the sound of coyotes the other night right below our bedroom, not yipping but trying a few bars of an old love song, and this morning driving home from the pool, the bobcat that raced across the highway in front of us, hopping over the abutment so that we saw the underside of its tail.

Hoping

On the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war it thought it would win within weeks, I am hoping for a durable peace. When I travelled to Ukraine in 2019, I thought it would be just the first trip of many. So many nights I’ve dreamed of the Carpathian mountains, the fields, shorn wool drying on bushes and fences after being washed in rivers, the beautiful churches, the faces of my distant family as they arrived at the door with gifts.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that I was trying to come up ideas for a quilt for my grandson H. I promised him one for the new room he will move into in the fall and he sent this bar graph:

He also sent this explanation in case I didn’t know what a bar graph was:

So I thought and I tried to imagine those colours in something I’d like enough to spent the necessary hours cutting, piecing, and then quilting (daily for months). In Victoria last week I went shopping for fabric because our sweet fabric store in Sechelt closed last year and I didn’t have anything in my trunk that would work. I piled the fabric on the table and waited for something to come to mind.

H. (like his other boy cousins) is intrigued by the fact that his grandfather and I built our own house. He always asks questions about the process and on many mornings during summer visits, I’ve seen John showing him how there are footings that hold the beams that hold the joists that hold…and so on. One length of lumber cut and pieced with another:

And then it occurred to me that I could make H. a log cabin quilt. You don’t see blue in his bar graph but I know he likes blue. So I did what I do, clumsily, which is to try to figure out the ideal size for each log cabin block and how to sash them (to make up for my careless measuring and piecing) and how to eventually come up with a quilt that is a good size for a bed. In 2020, I made my friend Anik a quilt to thank her for designing the pages for a chapbook I wanted to make to celebrate my 65th birthday and although she didn’t know she was getting a quilt, I’d asked her what colours she liked, and she told me. Like H.’s colours, they didn’t immediately bring a design to mind but then I thought of how Anik had lived in a panabode cabin when I met her and how a few years later she moved to the Netherlands to begin a life with Walter. I made four log cabin blocks with paths between them (partly because of my careless measuring and partly because those paths still exist between our houses, though we are continents apart).

H. lives a province away and in a few months the work will begin on a new house for his family. While that work happens, I will be sewing his quilt. Yesterday I made the first of 4 big cabin blocks and I hope to finish the other 3 today and tomorrow. Then the sashing, the borders, and eventually I’ll sandwich the pieced top with the lovely batting I ordered last week and the flannel I chose in Victoria for the back (for coziness).

In a log cabin quilt, the red represents the fire at the centre of the home. This morning ours is burning warmly, wood cut and split and stacked in the woodshed by the grandfather who loves to show his grandsons how a house is built. How the beams are built up of long lengths of 2x12s spiked together, the joists crossing them. The pattern is close at hand:

here I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
“When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.”
And I say this to Kai
“Look: We’ll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—”
And he sees.

Note: the lines are from Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles”, one of my favourite poems.

Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless

attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

We were driving home from our morning swim and we saw how far down the mountain the snow line was this morning. At our house, a light dusting, melting quickly, but the mountain was white. And at the high point of the highway, we passed right through the snow line, big trees on either side of the road carrying snow like a gift. How lucky I feel, said John, to have lived all these years in a forest, surrounded; by trees like these. How lucky. And we both began to list the things we’ve loved about our own woods: the bears, year after year, with cubs in spring, in the crabapple in fall; the deer, delicate faces, the young ones close; weasels racing along the eaves in search of mice and 3 times in our house, so unexpected that I didn’t know what to do until I thought of a broom and chased them out through an open door; the barred owls, deep calls this time of year, and in summer, and the quick high notes of the saw-whets, like a truck backing up; loons in the small hours down on the lake, the round rising to our house like an elegy; elk at the edges of the woods, the bulls carrying the weight of their antlers with such grace;

Steller’s jays, chickadees, hummingbirds, the ones overwintering, the ones arriving with the red currant blossoms, the western tanagers, kinglets, nuthatches, pileated woodpeckers teaching their children to drill into fir; the coyotes mating each February so close to the house that we hear both voices and feel a little like eavesdroppers in a moment of deep intimacy, and then the young in late summer learning to feed on their own.

How lucky we’ve been to witness them over the decades and sometimes I wonder if they have their own observations about us: how we’ve slowed, how we’re less inclined to chase a bear out of the crabapple or ask a coyote to stay away from the house, how we are two quiet older people but how in summers there are more of us, some sitting out on the deck until late into the dark, calling the owls, listening for the coyotes beautiful songs. How lucky to have seen the generations of bears in particular, the one sitting on the lane below the crabapple, the one pausing by the door to say hello, 20 years apart.

Note: the lines serving as a epigraph are Gary Snyder’s, from “Smokey the Bear Sutra”

47 years ago today, John was on a ferry heading to Victoria to participate in a fund-raising poetry reading at Open Space for bill bissett, organized by Warren Tallman. He was going to stay with a mutual friend, who asked me if I’d like to join them for dinner before the reading. I did, I didn’t like John (and I think the feeling was mutual), but somehow during the reading itself, I found myself deeply interested in him. Never mind that he had a partner in North Vancouver and I had someone I was going to return to in the west of Ireland. Later that night, after drinks with the mutual friend, he walked me home along Rockland Avenue and in some ways he never left. Well, of course he left, the next morning, and he sorted out his relationship, I sorted out mine (which meant going to Ireland), and after a sweet few weeks travelling together, including a boat ride on the Seine where we decided to break up as soon as we got home but didn’t, our lives have been entangled ever since. What you can’t see in the photo at the top of this post is that I am pregnant with our first child. In the study at the top of the stairs in that old house at the top of Lonsdale Avenue, John was drawing plans for the house we built, beginning when that baby was 2 weeks old. 2 more children, extra wings on the house to accommodate us all, and now the wings are closed off until summer when our children and their children come to fill every inch of space with noise and laughter (and sometimes tears). The first gift John brought me when he came to visit the week after we’d met was Van Morrison’s album, Wave Length. I put it on my turntable (remember those?) and listened to the songs that became part of my wiring. I could sing them all now. But maybe instead I’ll put a disc in the cd player (because I don’t do any of those streaming things) and remember how it felt to be newly in love, a life unfolding, and the memory of walking along Rockland near midnight with the scent of something sweet rising around us.

I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light

Remembering

It was a week ago today that we were arriving at Swartz Bay, passing first the bigger Gulf Islands and then the small ones, and I was remembering a summer sail on a friend’s boat, 50 years ago, when we anchored out near one of the little islands and rowed to shore in the dinghy. My friend had noticed on a previous sail that there was arbutus down on the island, victim of a storm, and he wanted to cut it for firewood. While we cut the wood into lengths with a Swede saw and piled it into the dinghy, blueberry muffins were baking in the cookstove in the galley.

Appreciating

The care taken by my publisher with my forthcoming book, The Art of Looking Back, and how the ARCs looked on the tables at the Western Book Reps Association Book Fair last Tuesday, and can you call a book forthcoming (May!) when your publisher gives you a copy of the actual book in its gorgeous hard cover, its opening endpapers a surprise that left you speechless? Can you?

Eating

On our last night in Victoria, we ate at Il Covo with Angie and Karna and it was one of the best meals in years. I had a beautiful Caprese salad on a bed of greens, fragrant basil on top, and halibut on potato confit. A couple of glasses of bright Vermentino wine from Sardinia. When we came out to the car, Orion was striding the sky right over us.

Watching

I’ve been watching the sky as it shifts from winter to spring. It’s hard to describe this but our kitchen faces west and something happens in early February, the light changes to pinky gold at dusk, not the wintery grey, and often there’s a gold scribble as a jet flies south, and then the stars against the darkening clear deep blue, and I think, We’ve made it through another winter. Or at least that’s how it feels. For now.

Loving

The little moments in the greenhouse: tulips and daffodils coming up, a few crocus in big tubs by the door, dappled cyclamen leaves, the green scent of overwintering olives, and the pleasure of cutting salad — arugula and miners lettuce — for our Valentine supper.

Sipping

Not yet, but looking forward to opening it tomorrow night to celebrate the 47th anniversary of our meeting, in Victoria, and also to celebrate something else. (See Appreciating.)

(Who wears it better?)

Appreciating

This morning, the first review of my book! And oh, it’s such a good one.

https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/the-art-of-looking-back-by-theresa-kishkan

Note: this was first posted 6 years and 1 day ago. I talk about my children and their lives; so much of what I wrote is still true, though Angelica shifted from registrar at the RBCM to collections manager in archaeology. I write also that John and I were writing a book together, about building our house, but I opted out of the shared project to work on other things. (He did write about building and he also wrote a memoir about his father.)

___________________________

Yesterday I was digging a bed in the garden, the one called Long Eye, laced under the surface with the roots of an extremely coarse grass. Where did it come from? Maybe in horse manure spread years ago. I was using the garden fork and then tracing the roots as far into the soil as I could, thinking about other things as I did so. I’ve always loved my garden. I remember using a pick to break up the rough soil about 35 years ago, one small area at a time, and then planting onions, some peas, lettuce. When the children were asleep, I’d go out in my nightdress to make sure that slugs weren’t feeding on the tiny seedlings. In those years John worked in North Vancouver and he’d be away for 3 or 4 days at a time. I didn’t know anyone here yet so my days were filled with children, simple meals, reading at bedtime because we didn’t have television, and would I have watched it anyway? Probably not. A confession: I don’t know how to turn ours on. It’s complicated. We have a satellite dish and there are several remote controls. I’d never watch on my own but some evenings there’s something special, the Ken Burns Country Music documentary being a good example. My friend Jillian Ridington asked me in the fall if I was watching it and I hadn’t realized it was on. But then the series began again this winter and we’ve tuned in most weeks. As Jillian said, there was a time when no one made distinctions about music. It was good or it wasn’t. When I listened to Hank Williams sing, it was eternal:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry…

In the garden, I remembered the days I would check the plants in my nightdress, bats flying low over the grass, and I’d listen for my children. We didn’t have baby monitors. But the windows were open. I slept to the sound of loons and owls. They did too. They were imprinted by this life, I hope, and in turn they left their own imprints. I find those impressions in surprising places. Our initials on the footings of our house, drawn in damp concrete. A faint ghost of a girl on the climbing frame or halfway up a tree down the driveway. The names they gave to landmarks. Last summer, calling the Forest Service to report smoke on the other side of Sakinaw Lake, I had to check myself when the man asked me for a specific location. I almost said, Well, directly to the SW of Grass Lake Mountain, because that’s the name Brendan and Forrest gave to the hump we see from our dining area, the hill the sun falls behind in spring, the hill Venus hangs directly above in February.

Today someone I’ve known slightly for years asked me about my children. What was Forrest doing in Ottawa, he wondered. Well, he’s a historian, I replied. He looked puzzled. He can make a living at that? His actual employment is with Library and Archives Canada, I explained, but I knew I’d lost him completely. And Brendan? That was easier. Sort of. (The man remembered he was a pretty hot point guard on the school basketball team.) He’s a university professor. He teaches math. There’s more to it but I didn’t elaborate. His daughter knows Angelica and so maybe he knows she works at a museum. (She’s a registrar.) All of these callings have their roots here, I think. Brendan explaining negative numbers to my father as they walked down the driveway before Brendan was in school made us realize that pattern and numeracy were part of his natural language if not yet his vocabulary. And Forrest (memorably) dressed as a Father of Confederation for Halloween when he was 6. We didn’t have television in those years but we had books and we visited museums. Angelica came to her present work indirectly, I think. She did a degree—well, two degrees— in Greek and Roman Studies and worked part-time at a Heritage site. That work led to training in conservation methods and that (eventually) led to her present job.

In those early years, I couldn’t have imagined where they would find themselves as adults. I wanted them to have happy lives and it seems they do. When I work outside, I listen for them still. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but I do hear them. We have a little ring of stones we make a fire within on summer evenings. On winter evenings too, if that’s when they’re here. We wave the smoke from our eyes and talk. The grandchildren roast marshmallows on the long forks we bought at the Denman Island ferry dock many years ago. I think about it all. John and I are writing a book together, a shared account of building our house, and part of what I’m doing is going through old daybooks to find out what happened and when. A daybook offers too little information about feelings and sleep deprivation and being overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that had to be done in a day. A week. But it tells me that we paid the guy who made our driveway on a particular day and that the lumber yard was sending a truck with a sling of north species 2x4s on another day. And that the well-drillers were coming up during a week in the winter of 1982.

There was a memo-to-self to buy a bank draft to pay for William Morris honeysuckle cotton for bedroom curtains in 1983. An acceptance to an MFA program for me, something I started but never finished because by my second year I had two children under 3 and had no time to travel into Vancouver for seminars. No time to write. Sometimes I despaired about that but deep down I knew that one day I would have time and I would make the most of it. In the years when John worked in North Vancouver and I was here with my little boys (because by the time Angelica was born, he was able to move most of his teaching to Sechelt), I remember the darkness of winter and then the beautiful deep blue evenings of late February, the ones we’re approaching now, the same scribble of jet trails across the western sky like a message just for me.

There were plum blossoms on the car when we went out this morning, and 3 deer in the parking area of the BnB where we are staying on Rockland Avenue. The sky was huge over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and as we drove towards the breakwater, we saw a film crew set up by the Surf Motel, our favourite place to stay in Victoria. (They close for a couple of months each winter…) Everything was charged with the magic of Victoria in February, the month we met in 1979: the plum blossom, daffodils in yellow swaths below Beacon Hill, people sitting at outdoor tables drinking coffee in the sunlight. We did that too, yesterday, after my event (with Kim Spencer, Bill Gaston, and Jesse Winter) at the Western Book Reps Association Book Fair, when my publisher Eve Rickert handed me 1 of 2 early copies of my new book, The Art of Looking Back. Paperback ARCs had been printed for the book reps and booksellers at the event but somehow she’d been able to have 2 copies of the book rushed from the printer and oh, it is everything I hoped for, and more. The cover has a canvas texture, perfect for the detail of portrait reproduced on it. I hadn’t expected the endsheet as I opened the book, a collage of the archive that inspired me to write this book: at the centre, the drawing the painter sent me shortly after we met in 1978 and which should have sent me running in the opposite direction; samples of the huge stack of letters he sent me over nearly 20 years; and other moments I used in the book to help me look back.

Plum blossoms on the car this morning, the scent of the sea as we walked the breakwater, the swirl of kelp below me when I stopped to look at a sea lion in the green water:

The kelp felt like the tangle of feelings I’ve had over the past 2 days–elation, a kind of far-sightedness as we walked in the Garry oak wood below Government House, hearing sea lions barking on the Trial Islands, seeing the new leaves of camas in the grass below the oaks, and even the memory of myself as a Brownie visiting Government House 65 years ago, LG George Pearkes hosting our pack for tea and asking us about knots. Yes, we sat out in sunlight too, at Ottavio Bakery in Oak Bay, my new book at hand, plum blossom on the Avenue, and although most people were drinking coffee, I had a glass of rosé, the day a swirl. I was awake for a good part of the night, re-reading, though it felt like the first time, The Art of Looking Back. I was surprised to see the sun rise because the night, like the years, passed in a heartbeat.

…I dreamed I was in Oaxaca, waking to the prospect of a swim first thing? Was it last night I walked to the roof-top pool in my bathing suit, a towel wrapped around my waist, and greeted Carmen, the white-winged dove, her rich mezzo-soprano arpeggios answering. Last night, or the night before.

I thought we’d return this year but life conspired. Crocuses are blooming by the Sechelt library so it’s not actually a hardship to be here on the Coast but somehow those cool evenings and warm days when we’d walk through the lively streets of Oaxaca, noting the doors, the bougainvillea spilling over a wall, the water trunk pumping up to a cistern,

the women selling mango and pineapple in a little cup, chili dusted on top, well, those are the moments I want to add up, one after another, until they measure a day, a week. The day we went to Hierve el Agua to swim in a mineral pool on the edge of the world

which was also the day we visited the weaver’s family in Teotitlán del Valle and chose a carpet, the one that is spread on the floor of my bedroom so that every time I walk on it, I remember the studio with its skeins of yarn, the indigo vat set into a long heavy table, marigold vat alongside, and stone mortars for grinding cochineal, lichens, pomegranate skins.

Was it last night? I think it was the night before. There was a day when I stood at the textile museum looking at Natalie Toledo’s beautiful creations and thought of what it must be like to be born among the bougainvilleas, the scent of dust and agave, doves singing deep-throated arias from the rooftops each morning, and I want it all again. Next year?

I walk upon the foliage
a heavy door opens,
I can touch the peeling walls
what does my nose smell?

Note: the lines are Natalia Toledo’s, from her poem “House of my Dreams”.