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Some things don’t change and some do. When we drove into the Nicola Valley on Tuesday afternoon, I couldn’t wait to slip into the lake for a cool swim. The pines were still grand on the way in and the way out. A Clark’s nutcracker scolded up by the parking area. When I came out of the water, the warm dry dried my skin in about 3 minutes, leaving it the way it felt in the old days when I’d have to brush pollen off my arms when I got into my bed in the tent. I’d sleep with the scent of sage on my hands.

There was one woman in a chair at the very edge of the water and a child’s bucket left in the sand. It wasn’t until we’d driven back to Highway 5A to head north to Kamloops that I noticed the changes. More recreational vehicles parked in a field near Quilchena — and at Quilchena itself, the old hotel (a bathroom on every floor! When we stayed there, I’d peek out from the door of my room to make sure the hall was empty before I tiptoed to the bathroom in my nightdress) closed with a sign saying it was available for lease. The golf course was gone back to rushes and tall grass, nothing left of the groomed greens, the golfers pulling their gear behind them under the slope of hill.

What happens? Times change. No one wants to come to a hotel in the middle of sage-scented hills to ride horses and drink cold beer in the pub with a bullet hole in the bar? We didn’t come because there was a pandemic, though we tried to contact the Nicola Ranch a few times to see if we could still book the Courthouse for a family gathering. We looked forward to a few nights at Quilchena again or at the very least, lunch at the pub as we drove north to Kamloops. We didn’t care about golf but we were sure others did. To see the course abandoned was strange.

We didn’t drive up the Pennask Lake road to look for flammulated owls (we once saw 5 or 6 on the gravel road, feeding on moths at dusk) or to commune with horses. The landscape was as beautiful as ever but our own opportunities felt diminished. We stayed on the highway, intent on seeing everything again, everything that was left. It was never ours anyway, though we loved it. Love it still, the suede hills, the pines, the view going on forever, a few sumacs red on the gravel shoulders. My own shoulders remembered the dry air as I came out of the lake and a little sprig of sage on the rear-view mirror filled the car with the old familiar scent.

At the edge of heaven, tatters of autumn
Cloud. After ten thousand miles of clear
Lovely morning, the west wind arrives. Here,
Long rains haven’t slowed farmers.
                   –Du Fu (translated by David Hinton)

The Fraser River, between its source and Tete Jaune Cache, its colour otherworldly, a single wild rose in bloom on canes dense with hips. Wish, wish, wish you were here.

It was as though I was seeing things twice, once as I saw them 20 years ago, 30. Trapp Lake, where Margaret Stuart rode the new mare home from Cherry Creek Ranch in my novel, Sisters of Grass, dust rising from the mare’s shod feet, the late spring air redolent with new sage. Twice, the hills above the lake, the reflection in the lake, twinned so precisely that I couldn’t tell where the actual shore line was, where the water began. Take me back, take me back, the years when I was a young mother, the van filled with voices, the dog panting in the back, on our way to Kamloops to wander its streets, to walk along the Thompson River, join me at the point where the road descends from Knutsford, the old buildings twinned with their newer versions. Join me? I wish you were here.

When we arrived at Nicola Lake around 4, I put my bathing suit on in the small change room and walked directly into water. It was cold but have I ever felt that alive? I felt that alive 20 years ago, or 30, when I walked down to the shore with my children from our campsite, our black dog Lily on a leash. I’d sit at the picnic table and scribble into a notebook. I wanted to write everything at once–the sound of the Clark’s Nutcrackers, the astringent scent of sage, the yellow of rabbitbrush. Once we saw a calf being born in the field beside the road to the campsite. This was in February. We weren’t camping but we went to the shore for a picnic and it was so warm and dry that we all reclined in the grass under the pines. Once we saw a black bear running up the hill where a volcano left its pitted rocks behind. Have I ever felt that alive? I wish you were here.

1.

Chardonnay grapes on the south side of the house, not enough for wine, bear scat at the foot of the vine, taste of sun on the tongue, of green gooseberries and unripe plums, dreaming of their origins in Gouais blanc from the Dalmatian coast, carried by the Romans to France, shaded here on their north shoulders by bougainvillea, a Desert Fire fig, rosemary in a blue Krinos tin, long canes of Félicité et Perpétue waiting in a celadon pot to be planted somewhere permanent, the grapes, cut from their vine, boiled to juice, flavoured with rosemary, sugar, jelly for winter’s toast.

2.

Bring in the sheets, soft yellow (your favourites), bring in the towels, fold them, the scent of sunlight and early fall air (on the mountain trail the other day, you both noticed the change), bring in your bathing suit for this afternoon’s swim, pack it damp for a road trip tomorrow, when you will drive up Highway 5A, stopping at Nicola Lake to enter its cold familiar waters, stopping by the pine as you return to your towel, crushing its familiar needles in your hand.

3.

Will there be time, will there be time to roast the purple tomatillos from the seed library, a few of them producing such abundance? Will there be time to add Anaheim peppers from the greenhouse, the zest of a lime, a shallot or two from the garden, for salsa verde? You have your suitcase to pack, gifts for the family you will visit over the mountains, if you make it that far. Maybe you will disappear into folds in the Nicola hills (the crushed Ponderosa pine needles your entrance), golden grass dry on your skin, the horses you have always loved gathering around you. Where have you been?

That house you can see in the centre of this image is the house grandmother grew up in. Or so I thought. I’ve since learned that the original house, in a small village in the Beskydy Mountains in what’s now the Czech Republic, was taken down in the 1950s and a new one, on the same footprint, and in the same vernacular style, was built to replace it. The fields around it were my great-grandfather’s. He farmed. My grandmother left in 1913 and she never returned.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be reading from my new book, Blue Portugal & Other Essays at the Arts Centre in Sechelt. (If you are on the Coast, please come! I’d love to see you and there will be cake and keepsakes printed on our Chandler and Price platen press, embellished with hand-dyed cotton and shell buttons.) I’ve been looking through the pages, wondering what to read that might offer an accurate sampling of the book itself. And I’m listening — this is a coincidence — to a recording of Janáček’s “On An Overgrown Path” and “In the Mists”. These are such fine and poignant pieces, exactly the musical correlative of the photograph, fields soft with mist, leaves falling from the trees, because it must be October. So I’ve chosen one piece to read tomorrow night that follows my own hearing of these pieces for the first time, an encounter with an aspect of my grandmother’s background, because the small town where Leoš Janáček was born is just over the mountain from my grandmother’s village and the folk songs he based these piano cycles on were songs she must have been familiar with.

This here is the narrow path
as winds through the vineyards
that I would tread along…

                                                  Listening to the young pianist playing Janáček’s “In the Mists,” I close my eyes and imagine the landscape where you were born. Foothills of the Beskids, near Janáček’s home village. He was a folklorist as well as a musician and gathered the songs and spoken tales of Moravia-Silesia. Did you sing? Did your family have its own musicians? Did you listen to the bells on the sheep and imagine them into simple tunes? Listening, I am in Moravia, I am in a village of white buildings painted with ultramarine flowers by Anežka Kašpárková, I am myself a babička, stitching blue cloth in long red stitches, my four grandchildren running in the tall grass.
Listening to the young pianist playing “In the Mists,” I hear birdsong, the brittle canes of winter roses brushing against my house, the sounds you would not have noticed in your daily work (a house without roses), feeding chickens, washing the laundry of a family of ten, then nine, then eight, then rising again, the deaths and births echoing the seasons, the river freezing, thawing, the return of green leaves on the cottonwoods in Drumheller, on the beeches of your childhood home in Moravia-Silesia, all of it hidden in mist, morning mist coming down off the Beskydy Mountains, frozen mist in your final years in Beverly, a stone’s throw from the North Saskatchewan River.
Listening to the young pianist playing “The Madonna of Frydek,” I am in the fields of barley, soft grasses, poppies. A blown-away leaf, the composer said, could be heard as a love song. The children are running ahead, a bag of apples slung over the back of the oldest.
Listening to the young pianist playing “The Madonna of Frydek”, I remember the sign for Frydek as we drove to your village. We drove on, past the sign, past the coat of arms for Horni Lomná, drove on, through snow, past the church with the spring of eternal waters (said to have cured those suffering cholera), past the graveyard inaccessible in snow, the miracles of Mary, and a road ghosted by the footsteps of my grandmother’s family, her two sisters, the brother who no one remembers, who died in his dugout house in a squatters’ camp in Drumheller during another epidemic, hearing them somehow in the snow, the light wind, and now in the penultimate chord as the pianist completes his encore. Now, now, now. I am applauding and I am brushing tears from my eyes in the dark hall.

I’d just woken up when John said, There’s a bear in the crab apple tree. He was standing by the window I now think of as the wildlife window because every few days I pause in front of it and see a bear or elk or deer where our driveway meets the track we call Wood Lane.

I’d been dreaming of a meeting, some sort of planning meeting, where developers were talking about the lake where we swim. They wanted access to more waterfront for houses. Our local government people were asking for questions and I stood up to ask if they’d begun creating an archive of human and non-human history of the lake. The planners looked puzzled. I detailed our own family’s experiences over 40 years: the time John and I camped where the little park is now, deciding whether we wanted to try to buy land in the area; the big jugs we’d fill with drinking water while we were building our house; the summers of swimming, picnics on the little island we call White Pine (though the pines fell in storms decades ago), the winter fishing, the weeks of regular visits to take a census of the fall-spawning cutthroat trout in the creek leading from one lake to another (a science fair project), later visits to the same creek to sample aquatic insects to test for water quality (another science fair project); and so on. The planners didn’t know what to say so I explained I would make a motion to create such an archive—summer students could be hired—and that was when I woke up. To John, saying there was a bear in the crab apple.

It was the same bear I saw the week before last, just standing by the tree. Maybe it had tasted an apple and decided they needed a week or two more to ripen to its taste. But it remembered the tree and this morning it was up on a branch, feasting. John called out to it and by the time I’d gone out with my camera, it was ambling down the driveway. Not running, not in a hurry, but also not bold enough to stay once it knew we were wise to it. There wasn’t enough light to take a photograph. But it was big, with a good black coat.

Each year there’s a bear. Some years we see one (or more), some years we wake to broken branches and piles of scat, dark with salal and shredded apple. I know that bears have very good spatial memory and I’ve also read that they pass information about food sources from generation to generation. (They are quick learners as a species too and once one has figured out how to open a garbage can or car door, the information is quickly passed to others.) We’ve had bears in the past who were so accustomed to eating their fill from the crab apple tree that they would never have climbed down at the sound of our voices. This one for example who ate and then slumbered in the warm grass for hours afterwards:

It might have been one of the young I think of as the orchard family because we’d see the sow with 3, then 2 cubs, crossing our old orchard in spring two years ago.

You might be wondering why we don’t pick the crab apples and it’s because they’re small and scabby. We have enough fruit as it is and these are not easily accessible for picking. Not for us, at least. The tree is one given us by John’s mother nearly 40 years ago. There are two actually and I think of them as the bride trees for their beauty in spring, their pink blossoms loud with bees:

Maybe it wasn’t an archive I was suggesting to the planners and developers in my dream. Maybe it was a psychogeography: “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.” The bears remember and return. They’ve been doing this forever. I remember them and look forward to seeing that they’ve survived (some nights in late fall I hear gunshot in the area), that their young have grown, that they sometimes come to me in dreams in a place up the mountain that I approach with both fear and careless courage. That I look out a window and see them, all the years present in that moment of recognition.

Note: this was posted two years ago. Yesterday morning, I woke to bears. At dawn this morning, the cat was spooked by something moving around outside. “That I look out a window and see them, all the years present in that moment of recognition.”

…from the Carpathian Mountains on our way to Lviv, the loveliest of cities.

Note: this is from September 16, 2019, the day after distant members of my family tracked me down and visited me up the mountain behind the man and his horse. They drove up this road and the next day we drove down it on our way to Lviv for the last few days of our time in Ukraine. Those days are so vivid. I dream of them, the scent of woodsmoke and the pears and apples drying in sheds for uzvar, the sun, the sound of water as the rivers threaded their way through the mountains, the Tisza, the white and black Cheremosh, the Rybnitsa.

Almost every morning begins the same. I come downstairs (if it’s my morning to get up first), put the kettle on for the dark French roast coffee that is my mainstay, feed the cat, and sit in the rocking chair between the sliding doors and the woodstove. And almost immediately one or two or (this morning) three Steller’s jays come to the deck railings right outside the kitchen. For forty years they’ve come. I guess the current jays are great-great-great grandchildren of the original morning birds. They know when to come and they know what they’ll get: black sunflower seeds and peanuts.

This morning, John called down to say a bear was at the top of the stairs leading to the deck just outside his study window. He shouted at it and it ambled back down, not in a rush, and a minute or two later I saw the branches of the crabapple tree swaying. There’s hardly any fruit this year but the bears too have been coming for more than 40 years and the crabapple is on their memory maps. The back gate to the garden, the one they can pull apart if they put enough effort into it? That’s on the maps too. In a few minutes we’ll go out to pick the green grapes over the pergola on the front deck. They’re not quite ripe but that’s never mattered to bears and raccoons. Once I was sitting in the living room and I saw something big and black falling past the window. It was a young bear, tumbling off the pergola onto the cart where I keep kitchen herbs. It wasn’t hurt but pots holding thyme and winter savoury were broken and scattered.

Almost every morning is the same. Coffee, the company of jays who were particularly scrappy today, one kicking the others away from the seeds, squawking, charging at the more timid bird that waited, waited in the stray apple. Almost every morning.

The morning we unwrapped the cloth we’d soaked in indigo, my granddaughter, my daughter, and I, talking quietly as we stirred the bundles with a long stick, bundles tied with string, pebbles, some clamped with small squares of wood, the morning we unwrapped them to spread on the dry grass, each length like a scrap of sky.

The book of mornings would hold these things. The scent of coffee, the blue of the jays as they glide to the railing, the smudge of brown on the black bear’s nose. Was he coming for tomatoes when John saw him at the top of the stairs? Basil? Did he just want to explore the table where we sit after our swim, a cerise bougainvillea to one side, a Desert King fig to the other, a tin from Greek olive oil holding a rosemary at its roots?

These are notes I am making towards a book. The book after the novel I am writing, taking time each morning to imagine my protagonist painting the ancient stumps on Egmont Road, preparing for a boat trip up the inlet I was lucky enough to see the week before last, the book after, and after. When I read Virginia Woolf, I want to write about mornings, about thinking, about climbing the aluminum ladder into the wide grape leaves to cut the clumps of green fruit from the shaggy vines, the jays arriving like a blue clock, and everything, all of it, held in the golden light of September, every September, the bear pushing his face into the crabapple leaves for the tiny bitter fruit.

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outline of things.

                           — Virginia Woolf, from “Reading”

1.

There’s a large basket of apples in one corner of the kitchen. I smelled them last night as I lay in the darkness. What will I do, what will I do? I used to make apple butter, apple sauce, chutney, jam; now they are the last things to leave the shelves. What will I do, I wondered in the dark. It was something to think about other than tanks and guns, new graves in the burned fields, and the politics of resentment filling the airwaves all weekend.

2.

Eve’s knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching gravity
happen. The history
of apples in each starry core

3.

Measure out flour, butter, ice-water. Listen to news of war in your grandfather’s country, retreats, revenge (a small man in your own country announcing victory and eager for an election). Cut the butter into the flour, mix to a shaggy dough.

4.

                  The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

5.

Peeled, trimmed of their bruises (the wind-fallen, the overripe), cored, sliced, drizzled with lemon juice, sprinkled with cinnamon, ginger, a grating of nutmeg. Brown sugar. A little vanilla to round out the flavour. Let them sit while you roll out the pastry, let the scent of ginger overwhelm the bitter smoke from fires in Hope, the Interior, Washington State. Let them sit.

5.

Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives

7.

Roll out the pastry on the wooden board given to you 45 Christmases ago. Line the pans with the pliant rounds. Try not to think of your missed swim (the particulates, the haze). Keep your hands busy.

8.

Some of the apples were green-shouldered, some were golden beauties. Fallen or picked, they were perfection, tart-fleshed. Their scent filled the darkness last night and now in the freezer, pies wait for winter. Keep the bitter men from power, hide the sharp knives at the back of a drawer, mend the gate the bear broke in eagerness to feast on apples the day after they were picked.

(Note: the lines of poetry are from Dorianne Laux’s “A Short History of the Apple”.)