Tag: Calabogie Lake

redux: “The blues were annual…”

theresakishkanLeave a comment

Note: In Ottawa a few days ago, I was conscious of all our earlier visits, the one where we helped to build a deck for Forrest and Manon, then the next year a pergola. The year we ate prime rib at their table with the rest of our family, all tucked into rooms in the house in Vanier, and how each year there was a new baby, a new paragraph in the family story. Sometimes a new chapter entire. Three years ago on this day we were building that pergola and hoping that the wisteria I’d brought (from John’s grandmother’s garden in Suffolk) would thrive there. (It didn’t. But grapes have!)

reading

Sometimes memory plays its own strange tricks, so that a moment like this brings back all the times I read books to my children, all the books (even this book, Curious George) , all the weight of their bodies on my knees, in my heart. How can the years have gone so quickly, how is it that I hardly noticed them passing? I think of that beautiful Kate Wolf song, “Across the Great Divide”, appropriate to where I am now (Ottawa, far from home):

I’ve been walking in my sleep
counting troubles instead of counting sheep,
where the years went, I can’t say.
I just turned, and they’ve gone away.

I’ve been sifting through the layers
of dusty books and faded papers.
They tell a story I used to know
and it was one that happened so long ago.

 

And yesterday, hiking the Eagle Nest Trail above Calabogie Lake, the scent of pines (though not Ponderosas), the sound of chipmunks, and I was back in the Nicola Valley with my children, my husband, on one of our family camping trips, the dry air and pollen making our skin mysterious to the touch. Passing the little graveyard in Burnstown, I thought of the Murray churchyard in the old Nicola townsite, the stories I could almost understand as I wrote down the inscriptions, the epitaphs. They were tangled up with my own family stories, the houses we’d lived in, my mother’s attempts to make each one a home as quickly as possible.

In my notebook, “Morning glory” and the date, July 10, 1989. In later gardens, my mother planted a cultivar of morning glory called Heavenly Blue, perhaps forgetting what the white form had done to the roses and peonies. The blues were annual and I don’t remember if they were invasive. Seeds of wild flowers come in the droppings of birds and mammals, hair and fur, the clothing of those passing through. In one corner of the graveyard at Nicola, a tendril of pink field bindweed among the small stinging cacti. In an enclosure of while 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 gentle cover of traveller’s joy. God speed them all.

–from “Morning Glory”, in Red Laredo Boots (New Star Books, 1996)

the blues were annual

theresakishkanLeave a comment

reading

Sometimes memory plays its own strange tricks, so that a moment like this brings back all the times I read books to my children, all the books (even this book, Curious George) , all the weight of their bodies on my knees, in my heart. How can the years have gone so quickly, how is it that I hardly noticed them passing? I think of that beautiful Kate Wolff song, “Across the Great Divide”, appropriate to where I am now (Ottawa, far from home):

I’ve been walking in my sleep

counting troubles instead of counting sheep,

where the years went, I can’t say.

I just turned, and they’ve gone away.

 

I’ve been sifting through the layers

of dusty books and faded papers.

They tell a story I used to know

and it was one that happened so long ago.

 

And yesterday, hiking the Eagle Nest Trail above Calabogie Lake, the scent of pines (though not Ponderosas), the sound of chipmunks, and I was back in the Nicola Valley with my children, my husband, on one of our family camping trips, the dry air and pollen making our skin mysterious to the touch. Passing the little graveyard in Burnstown, I thought of the Murray churchyard in the old Nicola townsite, the stories I could almost understand as I wrote down the inscriptions, the epitaphs. They were tangled up with my own family stories, the houses we’d lived in, my mother’s attempts to make each one a home as quickly as possible.

In my notebook, “Morning glory” and the date, July 10, 1989. In later gardens, my mother planted a cultivar of morning glory called Heavenly Blue, perhaps forgetting what the white form had done to the roses and peonies. The blues were annual and I don’t remember if they were invasive. Seeds of wild flowers come in the droppings of birds and mammals, hair and fur, the clothing of those passing through. In one corner of the graveyard at Nicola, a tendril of pink field bindweed among the small stinging cacti. In an enclosure of while 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 gentle cover of traveller’s joy. God speed them all. –from “Morning Glory”, in Red Laredo Boots (New Star Books, 1996)

waiting at home

theresakishkan2 Comments

Yesterday we returned home from a week in Ottawa, a week during which a deck was built, many walks were taken, large meals were indulged in, and some explorations were conducted at the Museum of Civilization. I kept seeing wildflowers I wasn’t familiar with (near Calabogie Lake), and trees. A pine with very long soft leaves. Oaks just coming into leaf, the leaves themselves almost frilly, with red margins. (I brought back an acorn and will try to grow one for myself.) On the Eagle Nest trail, there was a small toadlet and amazing views and I brought back memories of those stored in a safe place.

Coming up the driveway, we were so thrilled to see that the wisteria framing our patio (on a long cedar beam taken from a tree we took down years ago and had milled into lumber, a process described in Mnemonic: A Book of Trees) was in full bloom. When we left last week, it was in bud, the leaves opening but not yet fully out. Friend Jeffrey, who stayed here for a couple of nights while we were away, took this photograph:

wisteriaThere are two more of these beauties around the house and I took a root to Forrest and Manon for their garden. (John has already been booked for next spring to help them to build a pergola over one end of the new deck.) The wisterias came from John’s mother who brought them in turn from her mother’s garden in Felixstowe, along with mint, perennial geranium, honeysuckle, tucked into her suitcase after summer visits. I took kale to Ottawa and a tiny mountain ash; and I brought back violets, the ones growing like weeds in the grass and which I carefully dug up from the place where the deck was going to be built.

And it looks like one of my novellas has found a home. A publisher who is enthusiastic about the form has written to say she would love to publish Patrin in the spring of 2016! More on this as things develop but this news is too good to keep to myself!