Yesterday we drove down the Coast on various errands, our last opportunity to shop in preparation for a family visit on Saturday, followed by a family wedding in Victoria next weekend, followed by a few days, all of us, on a beach near Campbell River. Oyster Bay. I’ve been thinking about it with some excitement and some anxiety. In these later years, I’m realizing that I am truly an introvert. And it seems I have a flawed history. So yes, anxiety. But also, again, excitement.
We stopped at our local Oyster Bay on the way down to Sechelt, to drop something off at a friend’s home. It’s one of the locations I think of as old coast — two shingled houses, one of them formerly a logging camp floating kitchen, and there’s a shucking shed from the business my friend’s parents ran in the last century.
We sometimes talked about having a dance in the shed, under its red roof, with the waters of the bay swirling underneath at high tide, and phosphorescence spangling the tide. Once we swam late at night in the bay and spread the phosphorescence from our hands like stars. My friend and I once canoed to the little creeks feeding into the bay, searching for the house Elizabeth Smart had lived in the second time she came to our area, not the one with the wooden board over the door, inscribed with The cut worm forgives the plough, where she wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but a later house, owned in those years by someone we know. It was demolished when it became too derelict to safely enter. Today we pulled in just behind the shucking shed and the view was what you can see in the top photograph: shallow water, moss, the most beautiful light. I didn’t want those years to end.
On our way home today, the trunk of the car filled with food — spot prawns, sausages, watermelon, cheeses, buttermilk for pancakes, wine, Persephone beer, cider from a stop at Bricker’s — I felt drowsy with nostalgia. How many times we drove this highway with our young family, on our way to the Interior, on our way to Emergency with infections of one sort or another, asthma, labour (that was me), to basketball camp or for a meal out and concerts, once a movie (Baz Luhmann’s Romeo and Juliet), swims at Snickett Park or Porpoise Bay, how many times we stopped at the bookstore or the chocolate shop, how many times. The radio kept fading in and out and anyway the music was terrible so I put on Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars.
I lie awake in the middle of the nightMakin’ a list of things that I didn’t do rightWith you at the top of a long page filled…
I do. I lie awake in the middle of the night and oh, my lists are long and regretful. What would my life had been if I knew then what I know now? I’d like to have been a better person. A better mother, a more generous friend.
We woke each morning with hearts filledBluebird of love on the windowsillNow the heart’s unsteady, and the night is still…
Every morning I wake with the best person in the world in my bed and he listens to me with patience and love. What would I have done differently? Everything, and maybe nothing. The Steller’s jays are back, loud for peanuts when I come down to make coffee. You again, I say, taking them their breakfast. And you again, I say to the cat as I put food in his dish. None of them are bluebirds of love but they are reliable. My heart’s unsteady as I think of the past, what I know about it, and unsteady as I think of what’s to come. The nights are still, quiet, but in Oyster Bay, the one on this part of the coast, you can follow the phosphorescence like a pathway of stars. Where to? That’s the question.
Note: the lines are from Bruce Springsteen’s “Somewhere North of Nashville”
...Theresa Kishkan 