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We were talking in the kitchen a few weeks ago when my son said something that sort of surprised me. He said our place is a bit of a museum and that whenever he and his kids visit a small-town museum, they always see things that we have in our house. Oil lamps. A galvanized tub. Typewriters. (Imagine typewriters being museum-worthy!) Anyway, it was something to smile about. To wonder about. To tuck away as yet another indication of time passing.

And then the other night, my other son asked if I would read his boys their bedtime story. Sure, I said. I was already in my bed, reading, and the boys came up in their pyjamas with the book they wanted. It was When I Was Young in the Mountains, by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Diane Goode. I’ve written about that book before. It’s a lovely example of a writer looking back, not in a self-serving way, but in an intimate and moving tribute to the origins of her calling. Each moment is remembered with exactitude and the grandfather sharpening the child’s pencils so she can write everything down is such a beautiful detail.

So the boys snuggled in and I began to read. Look, one of them said: There’s your coffee pot! And the other one noticed the galvanized tub, just like ours, the one we bought when we were building our house. Their dad had his baths in it when he was a year old. And I remember sitting in it too, heavily pregnant with our second child, cooling off in the evening after a day of hanging drywall with John.

Being around grandchildren is (mostly) a gift. You get to see your own children again and have a second chance. A second opportunity to swim with them, make favourite meals, read the old books. And you can add a chapter to the family story you are always remembering, always telling: this morning, after John regaled them with how he was strapped 11 times in grade 5, I told them how I’d inadvertently made trouble for another child in grade 1 and that I didn’t know at the time how to step forward and admit responsibility. I told them I still feel badly about it, 64 years later.

So we live in a museum near the mountain. Our galvanized tub comes in handy for soaking plants that need special treatment and I still love the coffee pot I found in the Quilchena store at least 30 years ago. (The copper pot it replaced is in the back of a cupboard and is even more worthy of museum status.) The typewriter is out in the print-shop with our 19th century Chandler and Price platen press and the cases of vintage type. This morning I put away the family silver and the platters from the boys’ great-grandmother. On my desk, my wooden pencil box, some fossils, and a spruce cone from my grandmother’s village in Moravia.

When I was young in the mountains, Grandfather came home in the evening covered with the black dust of a coal mine. Only his lips were clean, and he used them to kiss the top of my head.

My own grandfather was a coalminer and maybe he kissed my father’s head, and my father kissed my head, and I kissed my grandson’s head as he left this morning. (His brother was already running to the car.) As the family drove away from the museum that is our life together here on a bluff near two lakes, we waved to them, Goodbye, goodbye.

Note: the quoted passage is from When I Was Young in the Mountains.

Thinking: about the bundle of linen I have stored away for an early September dye vat and how when I look up at the sky as I’m swimming my morning back stroke, I see all the blue possibilities: a line of white like a zipper, deeper when the water is reflected, and oh, the grey-blue of the kingfisher passing right over my head.

Reading: I was awake in the night this week, reading Mark Haddon’s amazing Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour. At first you don’t see the narrative in linear terms, because it isn’t. He’s composed the book in sections, which seem to be random. Or at least not exactly connected. But then you see the way he’s echoed his life, his relationship with his parents (spoiler: they are awful), his wife, his own mental health issues, his attempts to find a way to write the way he needs to (and his section on making historical fiction is just wonderful), how he’s inserted illustrations — photographs, his own drawings, other images — and how the reader puzzles through them, finding a strangely beautiful coherence. Some parts are laugh-out-loud funny (his history teacher, his gruesome description of a pilonidal sinus, a condition I also suffered with as a teenager), some parts left me weeping quietly, head turned from my sleeping husband.

Enjoying: The company of my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons, who come to the lake with us every morning, who help prepare great meals, and who have helped with some difficult jobs: staining a bit of the cedar on the tallest part of the house, splitting firewood. I love hearing the thock of arrows hitting the target when they’re out on the lane, shooting a bow, and then hearing the excited account of bulls eyes, or close.

Finding: 4 1/2 yards of dark green (almost black) dupioni silk at the thrift store yesterday for $9. I have in mind a project, which I know I am too careless to carry out well, but maybe I’ll rise to it. Or not.

Anticipating: Another month and a half of morning swims. I’ll go each day, I’ll swim my slow kilometre, and then one morning I’ll know it’s time to head to the pool. This morning I was doing a kind of casual math as I swam, trying to figure out how many kms I’ve accumulated this summer, and I lost count, but since mid-April I’ve been in the lake most days, apart from 5 days in Edmonton, and 5 days in Gatineau, and 3 days on the Island. Some days I’ve gone twice, or at least I’ve had an ocean swim on top of the lake swim.

Eating: Maybe the signature dish this summer is the simplest: blackberry ice-cream. Two cups of frozen blackberries in the food processor with a tablespoon or two of brown sugar. Whir them until they’re kind of crushed. Then add heavy cream, maybe a cup in all, drizzling it in and pulsing the food processor until everything comes together. It won’t hold. Don’t even think about freezing it. Have it on galette or in waffle cones or in a bowl. You won’t be sorry. You can add other fruit — it has to be frozen — like mango or raspberries or peaches. But somehow the simplest is the best.

So quickly the summer passes. Just last week, wasn’t it, I was tying up roses, planting out the tiny tomato plants. I was thinking ahead. Some family members would arrive in July, some in August. And now, it’s past mid-August. The curtains my granddaughter and I made over a week in late July, using 10 feet of ramie which we twisted and tied with hemp string, and then dyed with rose madder, and 10 feet of unbleached cotton which we soaked in the dye vat for lining, her measuring, me sewing: those curtains are now hung in an Edmonton bedroom. The French picture books I was going to read with E. are still piled on the living room table, though we are working our way through Les Trois Freres, and maybe, just maybe, my French is improving. A. is outside, constructing a golf course on our mossy area, and I’ve just cleaned the juicer after making two quarts of apple juice to freeze for winter. (I think if I make two quarts a day for the next twenty years, I’ll be able to make a dent in the 100 pounds of apples in the back room, picked just in time to beat the bears to the harvest. I’ll make pies for the freezer too once I have more time.)

I was thinking ahead when I woke this morning. Or maybe I was in the past, thinking my way to this summer. I always intend to accomplish more: well-weeded garden, shelves lined with preserves. (I did make 27 jars of blackberry jam two days ago and a dozen disks of pesto — I freeze it in silicon muffin cups, then unmold them and put them in ziplock bags.) I always intend. But every morning the swim. Every evening the stars.

My curtains are rough white linen and they filter moonlight. Some
evenings I still walk out in my cotton nightdress to pluck slugs from
the lettuces, watch for deer who bring their fawns to eat rose canes
escaping the fence. How many generations of deer, how many of bears
lying in wait for the apples to ripen as they turn over stones on the
path for the abundance of ants? Four, or seven, or thirty-two. And even
the dogs, long dead, are racing in circles around the garden fence.
One of them loved blackberries, one ate salal from the bushes along
the driveway. In the dense woods a varied thrush adjusts its pitch,
another answers from the understory. The robin nest is filled again
with soft blue eggs. The weasel has yet to appear by the window,
though the curtains are now open, the roses are blooming.

We’ve eaten spot prawns and prime rib, a leg of lamb barbecued with branches of rosemary, lots of Grandma’s focaccia, blackberry ice cream, a nectarine and blueberry galette, and tonight there’ll be figs from the Brown Turkey tree waiting to be wrapped in prosciutto and grilled, sockeye salmon for tacos, and pastry chilling for a blackberry and apple galette. At the lake each morning, the boys throw sticks for the caretaker’s dog Izzy, and yesterday one of the young mergansers was swimming alone.

As I swam this morning, I was making a life list of water, the bodies I swam in, the ones I yearned for as I drove by in a car or on a train: Ruby Lake, the Thompson River, Nicola Lake, the Pacific Ocean, a pool in a courtyard in Porto, the little curve of the Côa River (one I yearned for) where Ribeira de Piscos idled into it last November and where the guide said he could not advise swimming in it (I was wearing my bathing suit under my jeans), the Sovytsia River by my grandfather’s village in western Ukraine, the Englishman River I waded in as a child and wondering about falling into as a troubled young woman, the bright water of the Vézère River in France, the Madawaska River we swam in after E.’s birth, then later. I was thinking ahead to other rivers, other possibilities, and knowing that one day these very days will be memory. Boys throwing sticks to Izzy, unwrapping lengths of madder-dyed fabric on the grass in sunlight, my husband bringing in a bowl of figs from our tree. The grass is growing tall behind the garden and the tomatoes are ripening each day. One day these very days will be memory.

Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Note: the first quoted passage is from my essay, “Love Song”, published first in Mother Tongue Publishing’s anthology, The Summer Book, and then in my book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays. The passage of poetry is from Louise Gluck’s “Nostos”.

In the sandbox, the boys were waging a war. A city built, then missiles arrived to destroy it. Not nuclear, the newly-8 grandson assured us. When they came to the table on the deck for their lunch, they told us about it. It was either WW4 or 5, imaginary, and almost everyone was killed. All 9 of them, though some went to hospital to recover, which was hard, because it too had been bombed and the injured were lying in the open air. It’s hard to build a civilization, E. confided. And what will the civilization require, we wondered. He thought for only a moment: A public library, a SuperStore, a museum, and a hotel with a swimming pool. They boys finished their lunch and went back to work.

I was awake last night, wondering about the Perseids. The previous night I’d gone from my bed to the dark deck, just a few small solar lights stuck in potted plants, and I leaned against the railings. One, two, three satellites, doodling across the sky. And then a meteorite, so swift I almost missed it just by the vain queen Cassiopeia. I had a wish prepared. I had two wishes and luckily another meteorite shot across the heavens. I returned to bed and half an hour later John got up, then Forrest and Manon came up too. I heard them outside, exclaiming as they too saw the meteorites and made their own private wishes.

...beneath the tender protest of 
                    the stars.
     Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.

But last night there was haze, smoke haze or clouds. I remained in bed, thoughtful. The days are so full. Yesterday, the usual morning swim in Ruby Lake, and then later, an ocean swim at Francis Point. When I looked down at grandson A., he had wrangled a long length of bull kelp to shore and was examining it on the barnacled rocks.

This morning in the lake, I was listening to the boys throwing sticks for the caretaker’s dog (she comes to clean the little park when we are swimming so we’ve grown fond of her new pup who is as active as the grandsons) and I was thinking about wishes. Do we make them for ourselves or others? If you see two meteorites, is it ok to send one wish out to the world at large and keep one for your own private hopes?

John is out cutting firewood and one of the grandsons is keeping him company. The other is perched on the big rock in the meadow of moss, humming to himself. Or wishing. I have watered the decks and the laundry is whirling in the machine. 5 ripe figs wait on the counter to be wrapped in prosciutto and grilled on the barbeque. Pesto for dinner tonight, and ripe tomatoes. Last night we had blackberry ice-cream, the simplest kind, berries and cream and a tablespoon of brown sugar. I don’t like it, I love it! E. told me twice. Forrest and Manon left early for a couple of days away on their own so there are two fewer towels on the railings. These are days I wish for winter when the night comes down too soon and we keep adding logs to the fire.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife-edge of the snow with the voices of 
                    the dead dahlias.


(Note: the lines are Lorca's, from "City That Does Not Sleep", translated by Robert Bly. And photograph by Manon Labelle.)

T

When we swam in Georgia Strait yesterday, seals followed us. When we sat against the warm stones to dry, a heron flew over us and no one but me noticed that it shat just beyond where we sat.

The tomatoes are ripening. The sweet peas continue. The cucumbers are climbing the shelves in the greenhouse and a lizard has been basking in a dry corner. We picked all the apples, 100 pounds, because there’s been bear scat on our lower driveway. I bought a juicer. A colander of Merton Beauties makes a litre of pulpy juice and I am drinking a glass as I write this.

Swimming this morning, Forrest and I saw a boat in the far distance and it looked like it was levitating about 4 feet from the surface of the lake. A Fata Morgana, Forrest exclaimed. And I told him I’d been loons gliding above the water last week. Levitating loons, Manon laughed. It sounds like a rock group.

I may have created a monster situation: chickadees, nuthatches, and the Steller’s jays won’t leave us alone because I’ve been letting the kids feed them whenever they arrive on the railings. But monsters that alight on the children’s hands as light as wishes (though the Steller’s jays won’t eat from our palms. Not yet. But coming….). Monsters that settle on my shoulders when I take plates to the table or go out to shake a mat. Monsters that wait in the trees.

Tonight, a harbour supper (as Edith Iglauer used to call it): spot prawns, baguette, garlic butter tart with lemons, corn, salad. We stopped at Amy’s for the prawns and she took them from a freezer filled to the brim. This is wealth I care about, not gold coins but rosy commas of prawn to dip in butter, to wash down with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Maybe apples for dessert. Or blackberries.

This morning, salal pancakes on the ancient griddle given us 40 years by a woman then in her 80s, wanting it to be used. One pancake was embossed with BROCKVILLE ONTARIO and the mark of the maker: Smart.

Overheard: one boy as we drove to the lake: I know every bend in the road to get here. Another boy: I know this route by heart. And yesterday, the youngest, asking about our Honda Element, named Boxy in honour of the hero of Forrest’s childhood cartoon work, a box turtle who went on adventures all over the world, anyway, the youngest asking, How long will Boxy live? (Because they love riding in our Element, especially up our rocky driveway.)

Tonight I will suggest we lie on our backs on the deck to watch for the Perseids and that we should have our wishes ready should we see them.

For nearly fifty years I’ve been hiking to Skookumchuck Narrows to look at the rapids. The word Skookumchuck means Strong Waters in the Chinook Wawa, or trading language, that once stitched the Pacific Northwest together like a textile of intricate and unexpected fibres. For nearly fifty years I’ve looked at the wild boil as tides surge through a narrow strait and wondered at the power of water. Yesterday for the first time I was able to take most of my family (Sorry, Angie and Karna!) on a boat trip to the rapids, using part of the advance I received for my latest book, The Art of Looking Back. What better way to spend money earned from writing?

We had the best time. Our skipper Danny provided rules (necessary for the very energetic grandsons, including the one who’d already lost a sandal into the water as we waited to board the boat and was lucky his uncle Forrest was willing to shed his shirt and swim to the rescue) and lots of technical and stray information about the water, its speed (16 knots), the backeddies where a kayaker could wait out the turn of the tide, and also a beautiful visit to the seals at Canoe Pass.

We “surfed” through the rapids, the water undulated and boiling like a living creature, swirling around us, and it was as exciting as anything I’ve ever experienced. We all whooped and hollered!

This morning I was remembering the water as I came down to the kitchen to make coffee before Brendan and Cristen’s early departure. The little weaving on the wall by the dining room caught my eye. It was made by Lesley Cuming and the tag on it when I bought it offered its name: The Ocean is Sleeping. We saw all those colours as we raced through the water at Skookumchuck Narrows yesterday: dark blue, the azure of glacial till, the froth of white, iron brown kelp, bladderwrack clinging to the rocks as tightly as we clung to the edges of the deck. Some of the people I loved best on earth, three generations, hope, the taste of salt on my face. I wish I could load some of the videos I took so you could share the excitement of that strong water but for some reason I can’t. You’ll have to believe me.

As your boat draws in closer, the roar and the mist come out to meet you.” (Capi Blanchet)

Bring it on, I thought (but didn’t yell).

This morning, a fading moon over the lake as I swam, and a dozen swallows swooping, feeding on a new hatch of insects, some of them so close I could see their rufous undersides. How many make a summer? One? A pair? Or a dozen skimming the surface of the water, then rising high as music into the sky?

Yesterday we went riding in the morning, our guide leading us through the woods and up into the trails under the power lines, along the shoulder of the mountain. I was a girl again, though heavy in the saddle, a girl on a horse on a summer morning, though when I was young I didn’t yet own my beautiful red Laredo boots. I rode an Appaloosa, his rump dappled, and his face lovely.

Two kinds of bread are rising — sourdough and focaccia — and yesterday I made vanilla ice cream to have with nectarines and blueberries. The grandchildren are outside painting panels of cotton we’ll make into cushion covers and John is splitting big rounds of fir cut last fall. How many swallows make a summer? Any number.

…the trail to the lake for my swim, I was humming, not Kris Kristofferson’s iconic song, but the dreamier Carrickfergus,

My childhood friends and my relations
have all passed on now like the melting snow
so I’ll spend my days in endless roving
soft is the grass, my bed is free
oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
on that long road down by the sea

And no, my relations have not all passed on (Hello, brothers! A few cousins! Children and families!) but it was the light that had that long melancholy feeling to it. Dark hills, small islands shining, sky uncertain. I was never in Carrickfergus, though I love the song. And the road we took to the lake was not long but winding, passing trees heavy with last night’s rain. Henry says he knows every turn in the road and as we drove, he described them with a mapmaker’s detail.

The deer have been bringing their fawns. Twice last week, and once this morning. Cristen said they watched a doe with her young nibbling on hawkbit and dandelions by their bedroom window just before they came out for coffee at 7. A single deer has been around too, sticking his (because I think it’s a young buck) head through the greenhouse door to eat the leaves from a tomato plant and then finding a way to push through the netting protecting some other tomato plants in the boxes where we once we grew cucumbers. On a Sunday morning, coming down the stairs from the upper deck, I can smell the deer, their bodies damp with rain.

Sunday morning, coming down the stairs from my bedroom, I could hear children in the kitchen, asking the questions: What are we doing today, What’s for dinner tonight, Does anyone want to play horsehoes, Can we do archery. Not sure yet, Mexican food, No, and Maybe.

Yesterday there was origami, courtesy of visiting friends, and today a hike is planned to Skookumchuck Narrows, though I’ll stay home to catch up on laundry. This morning, a review in yesterday’s Winnipeg Free Press found its way to me.

Sunday morning, coming down to the water’s edge, I could see that the eagle was perched in an different tree, on the smaller island, and a swallow was taking its breakfast from the air, and a dead moth floated on the green surface.

I would swim over the deepest ocean
the deepest ocean
for my love to find

Mine knows where to find me these Sunday mornings, swimming laps under sun, in rain, under a cloud shaped exactly like a spawning sockeye salmon.

–During my swim this morning, I could have sworn I smelled pancakes cooking. Maybe someone in one of the far cabins was cooking an outdoor breakfast? I was taken back to my childhood summers, our family camping trips to Salt Spring Island or Englishman River or any number of sites between here and my father’s family in Edmonton. When I’d wake early in our blue tent, my brothers and I in our sleeping bags on deflated air mattresses, our mother still deeply asleep, our father out in the little skiff he’d made himself, fishing, I’d listen for birds, for the creak of my father’s oars as he came to shore with a string of bass or trout. He’d gut them and then dredge them in cornmeal before frying them in bacon fat to have with the buckwheat pancakes he’d cook on the big old griddle set over both burners on the Coleman stove. A coffee pot was balanced on a flat rock by the fire, steaming. This morning I swam, smelling pancakes, dreaming of those years, and when I opened my eyes, I was far beyond my usual place in the water.

–Yesterday I made pancakes and we ate them with blueberries, strawberries, and maple syrup. Last night we ate bowls of blackberries sweetened with a spoon of maple sugar, and a drizzle of cream overtop. The visiting grandchildren are fiends for blackberries and we just picked more. There was fresh bear scat on the trail.

–Granddaughter K. wanted to make curtains for her new room and she liked the rose madder cotton I dyed last summer so on this visit, we tied ramie with hemp string and worked out the mordant ratios, the dye weight, and we spent two days creating the cloth that is drying on our clothesline now. The two panels on the left will be the curtains themselves and the two on the right are lengths of unbleached cotton we free-dyed in the vat after the tied ramie had simmered for an hour and we’ll use them for lining. The same dye vat, the same cotton, but the results are quite different. K. said this morning, All we need to do is sew them now! Ah, yes.

–Under the clothesline is the stack of logs H. brought up from the area where John is splitting big rounds of fir. These are lengths of branches I cut in January with my small birthday chainsaw.

–Today marks two months since my new book, The Art of Looking Back, was officially published. So how wonderful it was to see this starred review at the Quill and Quire! I read it in my bed, drinking the cup of coffee John sent up with H., and I thought how rare it is to read such a thoughtful and insightful consideration of one’s work:

Kishkan’s beautifully rendered story explores power dynamics, personal responsibility, the relationship between artist and model, bodily autonomy, betrayal, and redemption. This story is many things: a reclaiming of identity, the setting straight of a historical record, a handbook for girls becoming women, a grace note – but most of all, it is a provocative and thoughtful work of art.

–When the parents of these grandchildren texted from the Okanagan, where they are spending a few days on their own, with a photograph of a laden nectarine tree and a question: Is there anything you’d like us to bring? I could only respond, Nectarines! If there are enough, I am thinking they would make an excellent galette, with blackberries, and some of that maple sugar to sweeten them. A dollop of whipped cream?