Tag: ballast

a rose is a rose is a rose

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american pillar.JPG

This past week, I finished the final proofs of Euclid’s Orchard and now it’s gone to the printer. Publisher Mona Fertig is so diligent, asking about tiny details that I’d overlooked, questioning dates on photographs, spacing. It’s a book of essays and each essay tries something different so there’s no standard format. Individual essays use epigraphs as starting points, or conversational ploys, or simply homages. Sometimes they need to be part of the actual text and sometimes set off more formally. Mona’s questions helped me clarify my own intentions. Some essays have endnotes, though the work is anything but scholarly. I wanted to remove too much extraneous material from the actual text but of course I also want to cite sources and identify the various voices that enter to speak at various points.

Today I’ve been watering and doing other chores with the thought of the book in my mind. Standing on the west deck just now, I looked at the beautiful old “American Pillar” rose that is pondered and finally identified in an essay called “Ballast”. It’s not the rose mentioned in this brief passage but it might as well have been. It can be found in settings just like this one.

In the woods between Elk Lake and Beaver Lake, I remember an abandoned house completely knitted into place by honeysuckle and roses. Knitted into my memory by roses of a kind I’ve never seen since, apple-scented, white, and humming with bees. On my black horse, I approached with the sense that here was an ancient fairy tale hidden in the woods. Which were not wild exactly but remnant—a few forgotten apple trees, pruned by deer, beaked hazelnut, even laburnum. I entered the tale, as a girl will, with a sense of wonder and expectation. I tied my horse to a tree and tried to peer in the window…

–from “Ballast”

a few more hours

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The hours pass. The days. I spend time with my sons and their families and I work on the copyedits of my forthcoming book (Euclid’s Orchard) in the quiet hours in between. I hear cars on 99th Street and magpies in the trees right outside the window. The hours pass. A soccer practice—

in the moment

Time at the splash park—

cooling off

And lots of time for reading—

reading

I respond to the copyeditor’s queries about commas and the use of italic and my mind is both in this collection of essays (which is itself rooted in my family’s history in this province, among others) and in the lives of these beautiful children.

What I took home: the memory of all of them laughing, baby Kelly crawling on the grass, the sound of glasses clinking, the excitement of waking in the morning with the knowledge that I could be among them for another two days, another day, a few more hours. A few more hours. (from “Ballast”)

“the long roots of her mother’s mint”

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great grandmother's mint

First thing tomorrow, we’re heading off into the wild blue yonder. First stop: Word on the Lake in Salmon Arm for a weekend of readings, workshops, and editorial sessions with aspiring writers. From there, to Edmonton where most of our tribe (we’ll miss Angelica!) is gathering for a week-long building project at Brendan and Cristen’s house. The lumber’s been delivered, the sand for settling foundations, John has filled the trunk of our car with tools (because most mathematicians don’t have power saws, assorted levels, a plumb-bob, crow-bars for prying an old porch off the side of a house, and various other implements collected and used in the long process of building a home here on the Sechelt peninsula). Forrest, Manon, and Arthur are coming from Ottawa so it will be a week of animated conversation, many bottles of wine (we’re bringing some of those too), and, for some, mojitos. I think of cocktails as Mother’s Ruin (it doesn’t take much) so won’t partake* but my contribution will be 2 pots of mint. As I’ve weeded this spring, I’ve kept the volunteer mint to take to Edmonton. Some of it already travelled to Ottawa and is part of a garden there where a small boy will be told one day, “Your grandma brought this and guess where it came from originally?” John’s mother used to visit and in the trunk (or boot, as she called it) would be many cuttings and roots of plants from her garden. I’ve written about this in “Ballast”, one of the essays in Euclid’s Orchard.

She carried rooted shoots of the original family wisteria in turn from her mother’s garden in Suffolk, wrapped in damp paper in her suitcase after one of her annual summer visits to her mum. Have you anything to declare, I imagine her being asked, and like me (who carries acorns and interesting cones and seeds from everywhere I visit), she took a deep breath, keeping inside every important reason for children to continue their parents’ gardens, and said no. In her suitcase, the long roots of her mother’s mint, the perennial geraniums.

And it will be a week of little trips too to places that speak to me — to us — of our family connections. Two springs ago, John, Brendan, baby Kelly, and I drove out to the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, east of Edmonton. I don’t know many details about my grandfather’s life in Bukovyna but somehow seeing the Nazar Yurko house gave me some insights into the domestic culture of his village (Ivankivtsi).

house

We’re planning to drive out the open-air museum again this trip, with all the grandchildren strapped into their car-seats. They’ll see the house with its adjacent garden, where I remember drifts of ferny dill that the young woman weeding told me self-sowed everywhere. (I wanted to lift a little clump and tuck it into my pack. Maybe this time I’ll be bolder.) They’ll see the church

church at Ukrainian Village Museum

and I’ll show them a photograph of the church in their great-great-grandfather’s village and they might hear the echoes that I hear when I enter these buildings.

church in my grandfather's village

And then their fathers can muddle the mint that came from their great-great-grandmother’s English garden (via their great-grandmother, and then their grandmother) and make a jug of mojitos. So the world is remembered, mint and rum and the bells of old churches.

*I mean cocktails, not wine. I’ll drink more than my share of the Wild Goose Pinot Gris but mixed drinks catch up on me sooner than I’d care to admit.

“It was a tale I entered…”

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In the darkest days of winter, we eat our supper on chairs in front of the woodstove, plates balanced on our knees. Looking into fire is preferable to looking out to darkness through the large uncurtained window in our little dining area. But last night the sky was more like a February sky, a deepening blue after the sun set, with the pinky-gold of its setting still glowing beyond the horizon; so we cleared off the long pine table and sat there, candles lit, and the first stars appearing.

The day before yesterday I pruned two unruly roses and heard tree frogs somewhere in the garden. It’s too soon, I called to them, and was surprised at how quickly they went silent! But the garlic is growing well, crowns of columbine are emerging from the clutter of their dead stems, and a few broadbeans (which must have self-sown) are showing every sign of continuing to flourish.

Inside today (because of rain), I’ve been working on finishing up some essays. I think I have a book’s worth. A few still need a fair bit of revising but there’s a body of work there, always a surprise to see even though it’s what I am — was– working towards. Here’s a little passage from a piece about the ballast, known and unknown, carried by those who came before us — my own grandparents, neighbours, the early residents of the neighbourhood where I spent my teenaged years.

In small communities or the old neighbourhoods of larger ones – towns, cities, even the places where rural areas have been absorbed by suburban sprawl — it’s not uncommon to find sturdy plantings which have survived many decades. Lilacs in cold climates often bloom exuberantly without any care at all. Delphiniums send up their tall spires, blue as the sky, though in well-tended gardens they are routinely eaten by slugs. And roses – well, you can tell where homestead gardens were located by the profuse canes of old species ramblers and rugosas – Dr. Van Fleet, Blanc Double de Coubert. Unpruned, unwatered, they cascade over whatever supports might be nearby: a wire fence, a tree (sometimes even a lilac), the remains of a staircase leading nowhere.

I’ve taken my share of cuttings. My 3 New Dawn roses come from the garden of my parents’ neighbour. When she was in her 80s, she told me how her mother had started the roses from a slip given her by the Ferry sisters, a duo who lived nearby in one of the oldest houses in Saanich. The New Dawns, the palest pink (the colour of my baby daughter’s shoulders when Daisy Harknett gave me cuttings), tangled themselves in the limbs of an equally ancient pear. When the property was subdivided and the back part sold, with an old stable, the pear tree with its cargo of roses, and other perennials I never thought to ask for, a man pulled out the rose with a backhoe. I don’t know where he took it.

Some old wood, some new wood, said Daisy Harknett. So I cut pieces with both. I dipped the lower part of the wood in rooting hormone (though I could have used a tea of willow bark) and stuck them into little pots of soil. And now my New Dawns tumble over (respectively) a beam, a pergola, the front door of my house.

In the woods between Elk Lake and Beaver Lake, there was an abandoned house (sometimes I think I dreamed this because no one else I’ve spoken to remembers it) completed knitted into place by honeysuckle and roses. Knitted into memory by roses of a kind I’ve never seen since, apple-scented, white, and humming with bees. On my black horse, I approached with the sense that here was an ancient fairy tale hidden in the woods. Which were not wild exactly but remnant – a few forgotten apple trees, pruned by deer, beaked hazelnut, even laburnum. It was a tale I entered, as a girl will, with a sense of wonder and expectation. I tied my horse to a tree and tried to peer in the windows laced every which way with canes. And though there might have been a prince sleeping within, he didn’t wake.

blanc double de coubert