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Yesterday we were driving down the Coast to do errands in Sechelt and we were talking about writing as we so often do. I was remembering the years when I didn’t, couldn’t, write, the years when our children were small, when I was up in the night with them for one reason or another, when my life was full to the brim with cooking, laundry, driving to and from pre-school, then kindergarten (because we live off the beaten track, the school bus wouldn’t come all the way out to our place to drop one child off after a half-day of kindergarten). I put the thought of writing aside for about 5 years, although it was probably more like 8. John wondered when it was that I began to find my way back to it and I knew exactly the moment, and in fact it wasn’t back, it was forward, forward to new territory, a new landscape, because I’d been waiting to write poetry again—I’d published two collections in my early twenties, and then a chapbook—but found instead that prose was what was available to me. I began with a few sentences:

I’d never noticed the way the fences of bleak houses lining the freeway out of Burnaby and Surrey were draped with morning glory, green leaves and the white trumpets covering chain-link and boards indiscriminately. Some of the houses had gardens but many had nothing but morning glory—it was mid-morning as we drove out—and I remembered a house I’d lived in as a child, for a few months only, until something better came along.

With those sentences, jotted into my notebook as we drove east from Vancouver towards the Nicola Valley, I found myself remembering and seeing two periods of time simultaneously, layered and entwined as the plants that were my guides:

The house made my mother cry. I didn’t know why then but I do now, remembering the paint flaking away from the board siding, the kernels of mice shit in the closets and cupboards, and the remnants of peonies and roses overgrown with morning glory[…]These houses brought it back and I could imagine the smell of the morning glory, sweet and rampant, bees deep in the white throats.

As I sat in the car, looking out, I was imagining myself back and I was also anticipating a period of time in a landscape I was learning to love. The sentences were leading me to a place and the place was not just physical, it was also deeply generative. On the trip we were taking to the Nicola Valley that summer, everything I was doing and seeing became part of that layering. We’d camped in the valley every summer and I knew I loved the dry air, the hills of bunchgrass, the scent of Ponderosa pine and sage, the sound of Clark’s nutcrackers as we woke in our tent in the mornings.

I loved swimming in the lake and then sitting in the sun while pollen fell from the pines onto my bare shoulders. When I wrote the sentences that began the essay that became “Morning Glory”, I remember thinking, Now I have to get everything in, I have to find a way to let everything have its place on the page. I walked through the small cemetery at the Murray Church in the townsite of Nicola, recording the names on the stones, trying to determine relationships, waves of diseases (reflected in clusters of deaths), pondering whom might be responsible for planting the clumps of iris, the tiny field bindweed. The excitement was the same that I’d always felt when I wrote poetry but I was discovering a different relationship to the page itself. I could stretch out my sentences, I could compound the imagery, use the measures of music—a longer musical line than I’d been able to work with in my poems—and I could also use the strategies I’d learned in the years of writing poems. Refrains, elliptical language, dense clusters of phrases, emotional acuity—those weren’t lost to me after all, as I thought they were when I’d lie in my bed at night wondering if I’d ever write anything again.

But then I could, I could write, though not in quite the same way. I wasn’t the same, though. My husband and I built a house ourselves, I’d given birth to three children, made a garden, and somehow what I wanted writing to do for me, with me, wasn’t what I’d needed it to do when I was a dreamy (and troubled) young woman testing waters often a little dark for her to truly enter with her whole self. Or that’s how it seems to me now when I read the poems I wrote then.

The last sentence of the first paragraph of “Morning Glory” interests me now:

I thought it meant something and wrote into my notebook “Morning glory” and the date, July 10^th, 1989.

By late fall, I had a draft of that essay, the first one I wrote, and I kept writing them, writing them, until I had a collection, Red Laredo Boots, and then another, Phantom Limb, and then another (linked), Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, and another, Euclid’s Orchard, and (recently completed) Blue Portugal. Now when I wake at night, it’s not to wonder if I will ever write again but how to keep up with what I have in my mind to do. That first essay ends with almost a premonition, it almost anticipates the last essay I wrote, “The River Door”, about my grandmother’s experience of the Spanish flu in 1918:

In one corner of the graveyard at Nicola, a tendril of pink field bindweed among the small stinging cacti. In an enclosure of white pickets, a woman who died in childbirth and the daughter who survived her for nineteen days, dying on her mother’s birthday, October 31, 1881, wild iris spreading over their little field of sadness. A young boy nearby, sleeping under the cover of traveller’s joy. God speed them all.

…or maybe it isn’t, but this morning the air was cool, the forest fire smoke haze could have been autumn fog on the lake below my house, and maybe the leaves have died because it is time and not because there’s been no rain since July. This morning I swam, feeling strength in my arms and legs, and when I came home, the Steller’s jays were waiting.

We have to go on, even though the salmon are doomed, the Douglas fir needles are falling in orange drifts, and particulates fill the atmosphere. But in the fridge, there was juice waiting, made from Chardonnay grapes growing against the south side of the house, and fragrant rosemary, so I made jelly, topping up the juice with port for colour and flavour. Listen! The lids are snapping as I write.

John is outside, cutting wood for kindling, and tomorrow it’s our wedding anniversary, 43 years since we gathered our families together in a room in Sidney and told each other poems. We were young and ready to make a life together, a life that has been good, and continues to be. This was us not even a year after our wedding, golden with that life.

So the shelves will hold garnet jelly, peach preserves, salsa made with tomatillos grown on the deck where we drank our coffee every morning over the summer, and watched bees in the mint, dragonflies pausing on bamboo stakes. You can see the yellow tomatillo flowers on the left, the ones the yellow-faced bumblebees loved, the bees my grandsons and I thought resembled the mask of Agamemnon discovered at Mycenae. Every place, every memory.

Smoke from distant forest fires hangs over my house. The Douglas firs are turning orange and the grass has been tawny since early August. This is the new world, the old world lost to our carelessness. Some days I am filled with something I can’t call grief but it’s close. A longing for the crisp fall days when the bigleaf maples turned reliably yellow, chrome yellow, the side of the mountain brilliant with them.

Instead of going outside today, I am working on my huge quilt inspired by memories of framing out kitchen. Here it is last spring, newly-pieced together:

I didn’t intend it to be quite so large but somehow I kept building the sections and when I’d finished, there we were. Within it, the blue windows of the kitchen, the sturdy north species studs (we bought a sling of framing 2x4s and sorted out the cedar to use for decks), the top plates holding the walls together. Small bursts of stars. The Japanese birds printed in the momen cotton. While I was swimming this morning, my slow kilometer at the local pool, I was thinking of how we will adjust to the world of smoke and loss. Of the thousands of salmon in northern creeks dead because the water levels were too low. The warm oceans. The memory of glaciers in the Rockies.

Yesterday I was working around the greenhouse, taking finished plants to the compost, watering the olives, wondering how on earth to prune the bigger one, and a tiny tree frog was going about its business in some empty pots on the long table John built with a plank of wild-edged cedar from one of our own trees, milled years ago. A ruffed grouse was poking around in the dry moss at the edge of the woods. There are mornings when I want to be up and doing everything I’ve always done and there are mornings when the smoke hangs over the world like a bad dream. Our bad dream, because we knew better, all of us.

I wanted a road trip and we had one. Parts of it were beautiful. Driving up Highway 5A from Merritt to Kamloops in glorious golden light. Seeing the Fraser River near its source, as blue as the pool I swam in this morning, but alive, alive, chalky with minerals, a single wild rose blooming on its banks. The geese at Canal Flats. The eerie Ktlil’k, or Spotted Lake, near Osoyoos, endorheic, mineral rich. By the time we were on the home stretch between Princeton and Hope, the smoke was so dense we could barely see in front of the car. I lost my bearings. Were we near the rhododendron grove? Was this still the Similkameen River?

Today I am working on a quilt inspired by memories. I have those, baskets of them, boxes stacked in my study, scribbled notes and letters. There are worse things than sewing, the strong sashiko needles taking thread in and out to keep the layers strong. Maybe the next quilt will remember the old familiar cartographies, the roads taking us away, and home, some of them still broken by last November’s floods, Highway 8, the Coquihalla still a work in progress, scribbled in blue thread, or red, the maps shifting, some of them useless.

I love this road at 6.30 in the morning, when
The solitary wind wakes up on a bench in the city square,
At a time of life, when you sleep badly no matter what
When you already don’t want to open every existing door,
Just certain ones.

                          –Halyna Petrosanyak, trans. Michael Naydan

Because I do, I love the roads at 6:30 a.m., at noon when the sun is clear, in evening light as they lead towards the horizon, its distant door waiting.

1.

There was the week you drove to Alberta and the week you drove home. So much to remember and so much of it the same. The towns you drove through, the rivers you crossed, the mountain passes, the long run down from the Rockies into Radium Hot Springs where one tire developed a slow leak which meant waiting, waiting for the repair. Wild turkeys and bighorn sheep grazed on roadsides.

2.

There was the week of illness (yes, that one) where most mornings you could hardly lift yourself out of your bed. You pegged sheets on the clothesline, made a vat of soup.

3.

Weeks of heat and no rain. Where are those low clouds that huddle against the mountain, the dark ones, heavy with water? And the sound of rain on our blue metal roof, the scent of woodsmoke in damp air, the rainsong of the tree frogs in the grapevines.

4.

In the night, sleepless, you read Joseph Brodsky’s “In a Room and a Half”, an essay about growing up in Saint Petersburg, how he was shaped by the apartment shared with his parents, how he can imagine and remember each square meter (9 per person, though his family was lucky because of how the grand building was compartmentalized into tiny rooms for Soviet citizens and received a little bit more space), and in the dark, reading, you realize that the essay is an elegy, every sentence threnodic, Brodsky’s parents growing old in a room and a half, wanting only to see their son again. Every isolation is its own elegy, you think, as moonlight fills your bedroom and a barred owl calls.

5.

You won’t wait for the rain, you won’t wait for the fall days to begin with cool air and the scent of damp leaves, woodsmoke, the sound of geese against the mountain. You will bake the bread today and every week ahead.

Note: I wrote a little about the road trip we took to Edmonton and back, arriving home last Thursday, but I realize now how so much of that trip followed paths taken so many times over the years. I could almost have used these photographs from last September: I walked into Nicola Lake in almost exactly the same place; on every fence the traveller’s joy (Clematis vitalba) still foamed over the rough wood, climbing up into power lines, the yellow rabbit-brush (Chrysothamnus nauseosus) was bright on every road side through the Nicola Valley and along Highway 3 coming home. And the world seen through the lattice of Ponderosa pine needles is as lovely as ever.

In Kamloops this morning it was sunny and warm as we walked along the river. We have two days and thought we’d go down to Nicola Lake tomorrow for a picnic and to swim. But why not today, we said, because tomorrow it might rain. By the time we drove down into the valley, it was grey, and thunderheads were forming closer to the hills.

The water was very cold. When I glided out for a quick swim, I remembered last year when we came with Brendan and Cristen and the kids, bluets on every float. This year it was only us, and only me in the water. When I came out, I looked up at the sky through the pine tree right near the water’s edge, and it was every summer I saw in the lattice.

We stopped on the road to collect some rabbit-brush and sage. Traveller’s joy foamed over the fencelines and a hawk landed on a grizzled old pine. In every field, under every tree, a story, some of them ours, dried with sage to hang from the rearview mirror, placed on windowsills to shed their seeds.

Turn the page quickly. Remember the rivers you have walked along, and into, and how you were held by water green and lovely. How your grown sons still remember the Nicola River, your grown daughter the ride you took by horseback to Salmon River and its memory of the sockeye runs before the Hell’s Gate slide, a river you have also driven along on your way to Salmon Arm, its silvery riffles so beautiful in sunlight. Before the slide and before bank erosion and flooding, agricultural run-off and the heavy feet of cattle making their way to water. So many fish on this page, its wide waters. How you stop at Lytton each trip to marvel again at the marriage of rivers, your husband’s arm around your shoulders.

               –from “How Rivers Break Away and Meet Again”, part of the forthcoming Blue Portugal, University of Alberta Press, 2022.

Second note: and a year later, Blue Portugal & Other Essays is not forthcoming; it was beautifully published in late spring and is available in bookstores or by ordering.

This morning I read an interview with Tim Maudlin, a professor of the philosophy of physics at New York University, in which he talks about time. What interested me is how he sort of builds his ideas on topology, an area of mathematics I know so little about but find fascinating, in part because of my son Brendan. Topology comes from the yoking of two Greek words, the first, τόπος, meaning location, and the second, λόγος, meaning study. In mathematics, topology is concerned with geometric objects and how they are preserved under continuous deformation. Think of a Mobius strip or even a square, which can be stretched and pulled into a circle without breaking it. Topology is important in string theory and also in considerations of time-space.

For time to pass means for events to be linearly ordered, by earlier and later. The causal structure of the world depends on its temporal structure. The present state of the universe produces the successive states. To understand the later states, you look at the earlier states and not the other way around. Of course, the later states can give you all kinds of information about the earlier states, and, from the later states and the laws of physics, you can infer the earlier states. But you normally wouldn’t say that the later states explain the earlier states. The direction of causation is also the direction of explanation.

This morning I am also paying obsessive attention to the situation in Ukraine and although a country is not a geometry, it is a kind of topology. Over time, a country might be pulled one way or another, it might be temporally or spatially altered due to human interference or what used to called acts of God. But is there a moment when it is complete, the iconic version of itself, through time and in time? I’m thinking of a video I saw earlier today of Ukrainians singing their national anthem in the subway as Russian missiles struck Kyiv. I remember the subways of Kyiv, the long descent as though to the underworld, but sometimes the most beautiful mosaics (Zoloti Vorota, for example), and I could imagine, this morning, listening,  how the walls would hold the sound, shape it.

I’ve never been able to quite understand what the emergence of time, in its deeper sense, is supposed to be. The laws are usually differential equations in time. They talk about how things evolve. So if there’s no time, then things can’t evolve. How do we understand — and is the emergence a temporal emergence? It’s like, in a certain phase of the universe, there was no time; and then in other phases, there is time, where it seems as though time emerges temporally out of non-time, which then seems incoherent.

In time, in time. I am waiting for time to catch up to itself, like a Mobius strip. I am listening to the anthem in the underground of Kyiv, the glory of Ukraine echoing in time, each voice in time.

It was after my second sleep that I woke from the dream. After waking at 4 in panic to realize I hadn’t closed the greenhouse door last evening–yesterday morning I went out for kindling and smelled a bear, maybe the same one that came two nights earlier to tear apart one of the compost boxes; and most mornings there’s evidence of deer–in panic, I went out in the dark in my nightdress to make my bare-footed way to close it up. (I don’t think anything found it because a bushy tomato plant was still filling part of the threshold.) So after the second sleep, the brief one, when I woke in tears because of the dream. Everyone was here, all the children, their parents, and it was today, the day I’m making a feast for friends we haven’t seen for months. But in the dream I was making the meal for them. Two were racing out to the mossy area they called The Field, still in their pyjamas, and I told them to go in and put on warmer clothes if they were going to roll around on the ground. I was looking for something. Firewood maybe. And I came up on to the deck, standing for a minute in the quiet to plan pancakes for breakfast, when Friday came up behind me. Friday was the dog John had when we met in 1979, an English sheepdog X, and she became the dog of our children’s early childhoods. She died when Angelica was an infant. I have always regretted the way her death was a little too perfunctory. A year earlier a vet had given her vitamin shots and told us it would give her a good year. It did. And then everything seemed to go at once but mostly her bladder. She was on a course of antibiotics. Then another. Then her entire backend collapsed. It was a loss of proprioception, the vet said. She no longer knew where her limbs were in space. Every morning I’d come downstairs with a baby over my shoulder, two small boys needing breakfast, John getting ready to drive down the Coast to work (he was teaching in those years), and the kitchen would be flooded in pee. Before anything else, the floor had to be washed. Before the fire, before coffee, before breakfast. One morning, John just said, Boys, say goodbye to Friday, because we knew this day was coming but didn’t expect its arrival. So suddenly, so soon. There were tears. Goodbyes. She was carried out to the car. For the next year, Brendan, who was 3, said he could hear her barking underground. So she came up behind me in the dream, joyous to be home, a chain attached to her collar and wrapped around her back legs, but still she had found her way to us, through the woods, her curly hair tangled with sticks and bramble. Can I tell you my dream, I said to John, and afterwards he said, You want the dead back. I do. It’s true. I want them all back. The parents, the friends, the dogs, the cats. I want them all here for the turkey I will be roasting this afternoon, dense with dried-fruit stuffing, the caramelized brussels sprouts, the salad of garden tomatoes and basil, the vanilla and maple ice cream I made last night to have with Amy’s dessert. I want them all home. John brought me strong coffee to drink in my bed and I opened Double Shadow, by Carl Phillips, and wept again as I read these lines:

                                      I keep meaning to stop,
to wait for you.

Coffee in my green cup, face damp, the scent of the fire either coming in the open window or else drifting up the stairs. I want them all back.

_______________________________

Note: this post was written this day last fall. And everything is still the same.

Yesterday morning, we woke in Grand Forks in what was the worst motel room I’ve ever slept in. (Long story in which the unhappy ending was because of delays due to tire problems in Radium Hot Springs so that by the time we arrived in Grand Forks, the better places were full.) Let’s just go, we said to each other, packing up quickly, so that we were back on the highway at 5:20 a.m. No coffee.

It was too much to hope that the Copper Eagle bakery and cafe in Greenwood would be open so early but at 3 minutes to 6, we were driving slowly on the town’s main street and what was that, a sign on the sidewalk in front of the bakery and an open sign on the door? It was still dark outside but inside the place was warm, the scent of something delicious in the air, and golden oldies playing on the sound system.

Fresh hot muffins, delicious espresso for me, rich French roast for John, and the morning breaking over the beautiful old buildings of Greenwood, one of our favourite small towns. (It has an excellent museum and I hold the thought that my grandfather shows up on the census in the ghost town of nearby Phoenix in 1911 and may have known Greenwood, maybe have told someone of his experiences though the one post card he received there was not from home, not about hopes and dreams, but a reminder that he owned someone money.)

I love the Boundary country. We’ve driven through it in all weathers, most memorably this time. And there’s a section in my book, Mnemonic: A Book of Trees, about the drive over Phoenix Mountain in search of my grandfather. I love the Kettle River as it winds alongside the highway, then falls away, appearing later in Midway and Rock Creek. We saw the school bus stopping for children along the way, parents waving goodbye from gravel roads leading back up into the soft hills. Horses grazed in golden grass, a man in faded blue overalls pulled fence-wire tight while a dog waited patiently beside him.

The blurry photograph at the top of this post is the Lawless farmhouse at Anarchist Mountain, one of those places that you see over time and realize forms part of your own personal landscape, your archive of beloved places. Could I drive through Boundary country without thinking about it, imagining its past occupants, a woman making the harvest lunches for the workers taking hay from the fields, a dog waiting for children to return from school, hawks gliding over the draws in search of marmots or mice? I dreamed of the house last night, what might have happened that no one remains, its history our history somehow. This morning, thinking about its roof, its porch, I watched this beautiful video and was able to enter the rooms, smell the tamarack beams, hear very faintly the voices of generations of families who called this home–this house, this soft landscape, the air shimmering with the passing of time.

Warning drums have ended all travel.
A lone goose cries across autumn

borderlands. White Dew begins tonight,
this bright moon bright there, over

my old village. My scattered brothers—
and no home to ask Are they alive or dead?

Letters never arrive. War comes
and goes— then comes like this again.

                       –Du Fu, trans. David Hinton

It had been a long day. We’d gone for a walk through the ravine to see the trees our grandchildren like to climb. We spent some time doing stuff — chess with Henry, an attempt at origami with Kelly. I’d brought her origami paper and I thought, How hard can it be? It turns out I have no gift for paper folding. We kept searching for YouTube videos for the very simplest of things. We tried a bunny. We tried a hopping frog (considered basic, requiring little or no skill) and ended up with something that couldn’t have hopped if its life depended upon it. There was frustration on the part of a granddaughter who imagined (I think) that I could do anything. There were tears. We tried the crane that everyone is supposed to be able to make.

On the other hand, the chess tournament was wonderful. Henry turned 6 a month ago and has been playing chess for that month. John said in wonder, He is amazing. The two of them sat at a little table in the back yard and moved the pieces around the little Radio Shack computer board (computer turned off) that Brendan received for Christmas when he was about 9. Kelly watched and advised and sometimes we tried just one more origami creation with absolutely terrible results.

For dinner we ate lamb burgers under the Manitoba maple on the deck we helped to built in 2017. The light was fading. And what was that? A noise like the squeaking of wooden wagon wheels. Look up, look up! Sandhill cranes flying south! So many of them, very high in the darkening sky. We watched them move in and out of formation, we watched in wonder, and then we heard another flock (or construction or dance or siege, all collective nouns for cranes) slightly to the west of the first group. How high? 6 or 7 thousand feet, or 13 thousand (I’ve read). They can fly 400-500 miles a day during the migration. We heard them calling back and forth, one of the oldest species of birds on earth. (Fossils of the species date back 2 million years and 6 million year old relatives of the sandhill crane appear in the fossil record.)

Our rumpled attempts at folded cranes were nothing in comparison to the beauty above us in the falling light. Before the stars came out, before the waxing moon appeared in the sky to the south of us, the one that guided John and me back to our room a few blocks away, before the reply to my earlier desperate email to my friend Amy who can fold paper into the most beautiful intricate creatures, anyway, before her reply arrived:

Yes, I will show you. I learned in Miss Pollack’s grade 5 class. She was really mean. Which probably explains how she managed to teach 25 kids to crank out 1000 paper cranes! Tell Kelly you’ve got this.

Driving east to Smoky Lake, I was taken by the abandoned houses, tucked into their groves of trees, surrounded by fields. Winter was in the air, even though it had been warm in Edmonton. In Smoky Lake, the pumpkin festival crowds were warmly dressed, there were line-ups for the food trucks, children were straddling the concrete pumpkins near the train station, and overhead, geese were loud in their formations. Before we parked in the town itself, we drove out to the Victoria Settlement. The site was closed but we drove to a place just above the river and tried to locate our friend’s property, one of the river lots. His has a creek running through it, Smoky Creek, and remnants of a grist mill. We called him from the river bank and after he got over his initial surprise — “You’re calling from where?”– he explained how to find his place where decades ago he and his late wife had built a stackwall cabin. There were roads to take, a farmer to talk to, and although we tried, we couldn’t find it, though we were close. Close enough to feel the softness of the place, to hear geese gabbling on the river below, the fields along the road shorn for winter. We stopped at Pakan Church, beautiful in the grey light, and then continued back to Smoky Lake where our family was arriving to eat pierogies, visit the museum, watch a crane drop a giant pumpkin onto an old car, followed by a scrabble for seeds for next year’s garden.

I thought of the Ukrainian folk songs I’d become so fond of in the past few years, the ones about fields, the ones about leaving.

O MY field, my field!
Ploughed with bones,
Harrowed with my breast,
Watered with blood
From the heart, from the bosom!
Tell me, my field,
When will better days be?