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Think of the houses in their clearing on the inlet, goats behind fences of wire and branches, broken sticks, think of hens pecking in the gardens put to bed for winter, only the cabbages left, the tall stems of brussels sprouts. Smoke rising from each chimney, a dog barking. Think of the children racing across the ground from the schoolhouse, racing home to warm biscuits, chores, homework at a kitchen table lit by kerosene lamps. In winter, they walked to school on dark mornings with candles carefully placed in perforated soup cans. Think of the mothers in their kitchens, making soup. Think of the eggs in bowls on the sills. Think of fish strung on a line in a grey board smokehouse, nets laid out on the rocks. The boats knocking against the docks. The sound of birds. Think of the rain. Could you paint that, do you think? She was asking herself and she knew the answer had to be yes.

I’d spent the day lugging pots of soil in and out of the greenhouse. My arms were tired. The sun kept sliding behind clouds but when it was out, the day felt like a June day. So when John asked if I wanted to try the lake, I said, Why not? Two winters ago I tried to swim once a week in the lake, just to maintain my relationship with its water. I know that might sound strange but it’s living water. Swimming in it is like love, a relationship. During the darkest days of the pandemic, when we were isolated and John was recovering from a surgery gone sideways, I wanted the solace of lake water, even though I knew it would be cold. This winter I didn’t feel the same need for it. Three times a week I swam in the pool and although it’s not the same as lake swimming, it was enough. Enough for the cold days, the long weeks of wet days, the days after nights when I hardly slept. In February, when my Ottawa family was here, we went down to the lake for a quick swim. An immersion. The little boys played in the big pile of sand left on the shore and John and Manon talked at one of the picnic tables while Forrest and I plunged into the lake’s dreamy water. When we came out, we stood in sun that was almost warm.

But sure, I said yesterday. Why not? A couple from Washington State was there with their son and the son and his mum had quick dips. John had a brief swim. I swam out beyond the rope you can see in the first photograph, and did a couple of laps, the ones I do in summer, my body so alive in the green water. And what is it? What is it about this living water that I am immediately home in it? A woman at the pool confessed that she is nervous about swimming in lakes or the ocean because of what she can’t see. But what you can’t see is the huge living body of water that holds you up, allows you its currents, its riffles, its history of trout, of kingfishers dipping their beaks, of mergansers and loons in the distance, of crayfish and sticklebacks, of freshwater clams, wild mint in the shallows, the shadows of swallows on the surface as they take insects in flight. Like a river or the ocean, it allows you a place in its living water, and now having entered again, my arms propelling me forward, hands meeting in front of me, then pushing out, a gesture of arrival, in sunlight and rain, I am home in my body within it.

The rivers of this country are sweet
as a troubadour’s song,
the heavy sun wanders westward
on yellow circus wagons.
Little village churches
hold a fabric of silence so fine
and old that even a breath
could tear it.
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he’s been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.

                 –Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh

Sometimes I stop in the middle of a chore, in this case bringing up a planter of soil to transplant arugula thinnings into for the salad area around the corner from this photograph, and I see a moment that I need to soak up. A moment of calm, of beauty, two red chairs and a green one without its cushion, as though waiting for me to notice them, to sit for a while at the table and forget the troubled world. The troubled planet. A pot of scented geranium on the table, Prince of Orange, to replace the big one that didn’t overwinter well in the new greenhouse. Many roses just in bud.

The corner I am calling Greece, for its tin of rosemary, its anemones, its Desert King fig (because the huge Brown Turkey growing up the side of the house produces figs that don’t reliably ripen here on the B.C. coast), its rose scented geraniums,

and cistus dropping its bright petals. Mostly instead of sitting there I am planting squash, hunting slugs, preparing teepees for the beans (5 planted, one tray of seedlings just hardening off), filling big pots with soil for the peppers and eggplants in the greenhouse still. I am writing a novel. I am worrying about Ukraine. This morning photographs arrived of the family garden in my grandfather’s village where my newly-discovered relatives say, “We planted a garden in the spring, and now we hope to harvest in the fall. That’s how we live.” Their tomatoes are huge. Cherry trees and black currant bushes laden with fruit. Roses. And my cousin also said, “We have already finished the school year. The children completed it online because there is no bomb shelter in our school. There will be vacations soon.” My heart broke a little when I read that.

Sometimes I stop and sit in a red chair and just listen. Bees in the tomato flowers, the Madame Alfred Carriere roses, the tiny grape flowers. A robin ardently singing in the woods. Hummingbirds in the wisteria. The Fraser River is rising, rising. Russia is pulverizing whole cities. Along the highway below me, the Ministry of Transportation is still applying glyphosates to the orange hawkweed that the butterflies hover in. American families are posting photographs of their gun collections, vast arsenals set out on sundecks like mine, on kitchen floors, children proudly holding assault rifles and pistols. Today is the day I will tie up columbines, hoe the garlic and give the rows a drink of comfrey tea. There is sunlight this morning, the sound of loons, a brown and yellow garter snake sunning itself on the garden path.

When I woke at 6:30, there was a robin singing in the wisteria over the patio beam. For years a pair nested on the beam, under the eaves by the porch door, but then the weasel discovered them and stole the eggs due to hatch. And now we have Winter, a cat who likes to crouch on the beam, surveying the known world. This morning the robin was singing the long salmonberry song, beautiful passages ringing out into the morning, and what was that, a tapping by the cucumber boxes? A pileated woodpecker excavating the stump of the old cedar, the one we had taken down more than a decade ago, the one with the pumpkin seed tucked into its inner core. I stood under the wisteria, blooming late this year, and it was every spring morning, birdsong and flowers and the paving stones cool under my bare feet. And now, looking out my study window, I see a doe browsing the long grass.

After a period away from my novel-in-progress, I’ve returned to it with a kind of strange and fierce excitement. There were things I needed to find out about, marine engines among them, and a morning in a shed filled with them, guided by a fisherman friend who’d grown up with Easthopes and Vivians, was a wonderful inspiration. There were water pumps, gears, huge hooks, a small bell from a trolling line. The scent of old paint and diesel, in a shed on the edge of the ocean, was a palimpsest, in a way. Remember this, I kept saying to myself, remember the rust, the cold metal, the flaking green paint.

I went out on the deck and the deer stepped towards me. She is there still, looking at the house as though she expects the doors to open, music to drift out. In the night Winter woke me with the gift of a shrew and I took it outside, standing for a few moments in the dark to listen to whatever it was rustling in the woods right about where the deer is standing. It could have been a coyote or a bear, something making its nightly rounds. There were stars, a very bright planet that I think must have been Venus, and the astonishing quiet of the night, apart from the rustling that moved farther away.

This morning I’ll spend a few hours in the pages of my novel, where the old engines stand on their worn benches, and big wrenches hang on bent nails on a post. After a period away, I want to be there again, in Easthope, rain on the Doriston Highway, the scent of woodsmoke. In the night the rustling might have been an owl, a coyote, a bear. There was something I knew as I held my hands up to frame the little cluster of stars, something I need to find out.

Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads   

with the loud rustling of endless grief.   

Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.   

And who will you become, who will you be   

when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.

 

Night is a cistern. The last pairs dance at a country ball.   

High waves cry from the sea, the wind rocks pines.   

An unknown hand draws the dawn’s first stroke.   

Lamps fade, a motor chokes.   

Before us, life’s path, and instants of astronomy.
                       –Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanagh

It was at Bukovets—a mountain village in the Carpathians—where I received the phone call that distant relatives had learned of my visit to my grandfather’s village a few days earlier and were driving to my hotel to meet me later that day. In Bukovets, there was a celebration, a huge meal, dancing, and then the school teacher, who spoke English, told us, You are Ukrainian. This is your country, your land. Come again, bring your children, your grandchildren. Although I was in Ukraine and although I had a Ukrainian grandfather, I didn’t—couldn’t—think of myself as Ukrainian. Could I? My daughter? My husband, born in Yorkshire? A man pounded the table and said, You are married to a Ukrainian woman so you are Ukrainian! He toasted us with the fiery horilka flavoured with mountain ginseng.

I’ve thought of that afternoon in sunlight, at a table high on a mountain slope, so often in the past 100 days. The beautiful music, food enough to feed an entire village, glasses replenished over and over again. I loved the cornmeal banosh, made with salo, salty cheese, and sour cream. Loved the cucumber salad with handsful of ferny dill strewn over the slices, the varenyky filled with cherries, sprinkled with sugar, and served with more of that rich sour cream. Women kept streaming out of a summer kitchen with platters and bowls, refilling our plates, pushing away our hands because why would anyone refused another helping of this food? Eat, eat! These are your people!

Today in the Guardian, Volodymyr Zelenskiy says that Russian forces are occupying about 20% of Ukraine’s territory. Children are being removed to Russia. New sanctions are announced and new weapons packages are being offered. Breaches of international law are discussed as though anyone at this point has the will or the ability to enforce these.

Here on the very edge of the Pacific, with a blue sky and birdsong, I am again wondering what to do. The bowl of dill in my greenhouse is green and ferny and tonight I’ll snip it over buttered noodles, try my hand at banosh. Looking out at the morning, I am reading poetry, which Auden told us makes nothing happen but survives in the valley of its making. I am thinking of the green valley below Bukovets, sheep with their long fleeces carrying wildflower seeds from one field to another.

Every hut in our beloved country is on the edge.
And to be honest, I’m on the edge, too.
I feel sorry for the ones at the center, but really I’m especially sorry for the ones in the camp towers, watching the frosty distance.
           —Boris Khersonsky, trans. by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk

—

Last night I was looking through photo files on John’s computer. I was looking for something specific, which I didn’t find. But in a group of photos taken in the summer of 2007, 15 years ago, I was taken back to that time. I remember that Brendan came from Toronto where he was working on his PhD and we went with him to Powell River to collect his sister and brother from the Comox ferry. They’d been in Victoria and I believe they’d gone up to Comox by train to have lunch with their Aunty Jennie and Uncle Jack. After we collected them from the ferry, we had supper at the wonderful Mexican restaurant La Casita, which doesn’t exist in that particular incarnation any longer.

We came home on the Earls Cove ferry at twilight, the vessel moving in the dark water and little lights from remote homesteads piercing the evening. We were glad to be together as a family again and I know there would have been laughter.

Angelica had just finished her first degree, a double major in Greek and Roman Studies and Medieval Studies, and her brothers were at work on PhDs, in History and Mathematics. Brendan’s partner Cristen—this was before the weddings in 2012, before Forrest had met Manon—was up on Ellesmere Island where she was doing research for her PhD in atmospheric physics. I loved hearing about their work, the areas they were studying, so far from home. So far! And far from what John and I have spent our lives doing—poetry, essays, novels…

We all look so much younger in these photographs. Well, we were, weren’t we? I was 52. John would turn 60 later that year. There were books unwritten, jobs for the children undreamed of, marriages, houses, babies, travel. There were deaths in our futures—our parents, too many friends. When I showed John one of the photos this morning, he said, in a kind of wonder, “There’s Cloudy!” She was the cat we gave to Angie for her birthday, maybe her 10th?, and that cat had more lives than any I’ve known.

I know there are many theories of time. The two that interest me the most are the Newtonian view, that time is dependent upon sequence and events, and another, perhaps more specific to Kant, who said, “Time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, of the intuitions of self of our internal state.” I think he means an intellectual structure that we use in ways to sequence our own lives but is not measurable or quantifiable. That summer of 2007, we were caught in a meander, the current winding and turning back on itself, not measurable as the crow flies, but singular. In another version of the story, the river erodes the banks, turns, finds another route. In river systems, old meanders are sometimes abandoned and become lakes. That summer is a lake in my memory, forgotten by the river’s flow.

This morning I heard a Swainson’s thrush. I was both grateful and sad. Yesterday a thrush hit the living room window, hard, and I raced out to see if I could help it. It was lying on its back, its beak opening and closing, its tongue surprisingly red, and its feet moving quite strongly. I picked it up in a tea towel and cradled it. The eyes, so bright, the beak opening, closing, until its feet stopped moving and the eyes dimmed, then closed too. So many summers I’ve listened to the Swainson’s thrushes sing the morning into being. Mornings when my children were young, when they were gone, or back, when I hoped they were also lying in their beds downstairs, listening. In my new book, Blue Portugal and Other Essays, there’s an essay I wrote about these summers. “Love Song” opens with the song of the Swainson’s thrush and concludes with a few lines of “You Can’t Hurry Love”. It’s a day that is all the summer days (including the ones of 2007). A sun dial reminds us the passing of time and the garden reminds us of the accumulation of time, and although I wasn’t aware I was bowing to both Newton and Kant, I think I was.

The light is our clock. We talk quietly in bed, listening to the birds. In the night there were loons and we’re glad they’ve chosen the bay below us for nesting. One of us remembers a summer when the house was filled with children. Another remembers waking in the tent to face a day of house-building, framing and lifting walls, running out of nails, measuring and measuring again the bird’s mouth notches so that the rafters would rest snugly on the wall plates. One baby slept in a basket on the sleeping bag in the blue tent. (The others were still unborn, waiting to be dreamed into being.) One baby slept in a crib in the new wing of the house, in a room next to the one with bunk beds, while I walked in the garden in a cotton nightdress, coaxing the peas to attach themselves to wire. Three children didn’t sleep as the sun set later and later, long past bedtime, and we made campfires in rings of stones, sat on a cedar plank while the smoke rose to the stars. In the garden, the sundial (Grow Old With Me, The Best is Yet to Come) was smothered by lemon balm.

We move through time. We are in it, we see it in the soft lights of the houses on Nelson Island as the ferry passes at twilight, the remnants of old river beds, the rings of the cedar logs waiting beyond the house for milling. I see it in the faces of these beautiful people who are my family and in my own face, 15 years ago, when I didn’t know what was ahead but was eager all the same.

Lately I’ve been wishing I had certain people to talk to again. There are conversations I miss. The writer Edith Iglauer was one of the first people I got to know when we first moved to the Coast. We had a small writing group. Edith, Howard White, Bryan Carson, Frank White, John, and me. I remember the first gathering we had, at our house (because I had 2 children then, soon to be 3, and there were no local babysitters), and how Edith brought the opening passage of what became her book, Fishing With John. Mr. Shawn wanted her to work on the first two sentences a bit. She wanted it to be perfect, though in truth I’d almost never heard a better piece of writing:

Each year, from spring through fall, a number of small vessels with tall poles stretched out on either side appear, like large birds, on the coastal waters of British Columbia. They seem to sit motionless on the surface, but they are moving gently at a speed of around two knots. They are trollers–with a lacework of lines and hooks hanging into the sea from their poles–searching for salmon.

In those years I was writing almost nothing because I had the children and John taught most of his classes in North Vancouver. There wasn’t time to sit at my desk and think. But I hoped I’d return to writing and Edith was so encouraging. She offered me the corner of the machine shed she’d turned into a writing space when her late husband John Daly was alive. He’d be on his side and she’d be near him but doing her own work. I was grateful for the offer though in truth it wasn’t space I needed but time. And eventually I had that. I have it still and never lose the sense that I am lucky.

For some reason I’ve wanted to talk to Edith lately. To sit with her as I did in the nook that was her dining area, looking out into Garden Bay, or at my table, with some papers spread out, her current work or mine, and to talk about writing. Which usually turned fairly quickly to talk of food, local issues (we were both involved with a ratepayers’ group, taking on one thing after another), children, and a hundred other things. But if I needed advice, she was very happy to offer it.

Last week I couldn’t sleep and came downstairs to find a book to read. I took The Strangers Next Door from the shelf in my study and went back to bed, turning on my small reading lamp, and there was Edith’s voice again. She was talking about Pierre Trudeau, whom she’d profiled for the New Yorker, and she was up in the North, attending a meeting with Don Snowden, who was kind of a hero to her, and she was on the Bella Coola hill with Tom Gee,

…his elbows on the wheel, steering with them while he lit a cigarette. It was a horrifying sight. “You’d be surprised at the number of people who come in and don’t drive out again,” he said casually. “They put their cars on a barge instead and fly home. The road was just a goat trail when I came over it in 1956, and pretty tough here in the beginning; not the way it is now, with lots of turnbacks and turnarounds. Hello there!” he exclaimed, as a boulder hit the truck and rolled over the embankment.

I remember having tea with her after John and I had driven to Bella Coola and back with our children and we laughed about the hill. She’d gone to Bella Coola with John Daly by boat with the idea of relocating but after her one trip up the hill, she told John, “If you move to Bella Coola, I’ll come and visit you. Maybe.” (My thoughts exactly.) A lovely place but the road and the grizzlies were just enough to make me feel out of my comfort zone. Her too.

Over two nights, I read The Strangers Next Door and when I’d finished, I missed her more than ever. I missed her enthusiasm, her single-minded focus when something interested or troubled her (politics for example), her generosity. Her profiles of Bill Reid, Hubert Evans, Arthur Erickson, and Trudeau the Elder: I wonder if they felt she was giving them as much as they were giving her? When my son Brendan was finishing his first degree (in mathematics and physics), the university he was attending recommended him for a Rhodes Scholarship. He had to put together an application package and he needed character references. He asked Edith, whom he’d known all his life, if she’d write one for him. She was excited and invited him to her house where she interviewed him and then wrote a profile, not unlike the ones in this book. I remember she faxed it to me to see if I thought it was ok and it was just so amazing. She described him at one point leaning forward, his elbow on his knee, as he explained an idea to her, and now I am hoping he saved a copy of it. My point in that she gave the same attention and courtesy to her subjects whether they were Canada’s Prime Minister or a young man from her community whom she’d known since he was an infant and who’d played hide and seek in her basement at the Halloween party she gave every year. I missed her but I also felt we’d been talking. Her work is lively with her voice, her curiosity, her care.

This morning John and I went with a friend to see his late uncle’s collection of boat engines, water pumps, a springboard from an early logging operation (my friend’s grandparents settled in this area in the early part of the 20th century), and every possible (and impossible) artefact imaginable. They are all on shelves, the floors, and any other surface in a building called Bert M’s Museum. What are these, I asked, pointing at boxes stacked on end in a larger box. Oh, those are player piano rolls, he replied. He showed me the Easthopes I ‘d come to see–they figure in a novel I’m writing– and showed us the huge Garry oaks his uncle had planted decades ago (which delighted me as I hadn’t known my favourite tree was growing so near to me, other than the small seedlings I started with acorns from Vancouver Island), and the little house by the water that had been his grandparents’, then his uncle’s, and I felt a little the way I felt when I closed Edith’s book. Where does the past go? It doesn’t go away, exactly. Some of it is in books, Edith’s for certain, and some of it is in Bert M’s Museum.  Over on Oyster Bay, a friend is still growing Bert’s beans, his engines will have pride of place in my novel, and I know that Edith’s spirit is alive and curious enough to make me want to get the details right.

1.
A single tiny plant I step over, going from the back door to the greenhouse. A single tiny heartsease growing from a pocket of rough soil on the rock face. “now purple with love’s wound”, a love charm, the lines of its face a way to read one’s fortune.

2.
This morning I would read its face for solace as children are buried in Texas, as Russian shells flatten Maryinka, Mykilske, Poltavka and Orikhiv.

3.
Wild Pansy. Love-Lies-Bleeding. Love-in-Idleness. Live-in-Idleness. Loving Idol. Love Idol. Cull Me. Cuddle Me. Call-me-to-you. Jack=jump-up-and-kiss-me. Meet-me-in-the-Entry. Kiss-her-in-the-Buttery. Three-Faces-under-a-Hood.

4.
“There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts.” My thoughts are dark with bloodshed, horror, a silenced classroom.

5.
And yet. Yet.

6.
Kit-run-in-the-Fields. Pink-o’-the-Eye. Kit-run-about. Godfathers and Godmothers. Stepmother. Herb Trinitatis. Herb Constancy. Pink-eyed-John. Bouncing Bet. Flower o’luce. Bird’s Eye. Bullweed.
Banwort, Banewort. Pensée.

7.
“The fairest flower that ever bloomed,
Or garden ever blest,
Looks cold to care, and ne’er was doomed
To ease the heart’s unrest.”

8.
“Stony Heartsease is a base and low plant: the leaves are rounder, and not so much cut about the edges as the others: the branches are weak and feeble, trailing upon the ground: the flowers are likewise of three colours, that is to say, white, blue, and yellow, void of smell. The root perisheth when it hath perfected his seed.”

9.
Houses turned to rubble in Maryinka, Mykilske, Poltavka and Orikhiv , graves in fields of spring grass, children who will never slam the door on their return from school, eager for summer, backpacks dropped on the floor, faces alight with Texas sun.

10.
“THERE is a flower I wish to wear,
But not until first worn by you—
Heartsease—of all earth’s flowers most rare;
Bring it; and bring enough for two.”

11.
And yet it blooms this morning in rocky soil.

(Passages from Shakespeare, Mrs. Grieve, John Clare, Walter Savage Landor.)