The last guests of summer have just headed down the driveway on their way to the ferry, then Edmonton. In July, two groups visited. In August, family arrived on the 5th and they left two weeks later, another group arriving a day later, and then another overlapping for a week, and staying until this morning. School starts on Tuesday so that’s their signal to head home. The washing machine is whirring with towels and sheets. I put the summer plates into the cupboard, the stack of 15 ready for next summer. We set them on the table for every meal, along with the silver we use for larger groups because there’s lots of it and why wouldn’t you use the best cutlery for your family?
It was a summer of daily swims (and those will continue for me into October when I’ll reluctantly begin my pool swims 4 mornings a week), large meals–prawns, halibut, salmon, platters of lamb kebabs, garden salad, and last night the traditional send-off meal for Brendan and Cristen: prime rib with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes with rosemary, and nectarine upside-down cake with homemade strawberry ice-cream–outings to Francis Point where the kids explored tide-pools and saw a pod of orcas passing, visits to the thrift stores by everyone who came this summer, family dinners at the Backeddy Pub where I walked grandchildren down to look at the boats and seastars on the rocks while we waited for our food to arrive. We had our archery lessons from Grandpa John, the Gatineau kids hung their drawings outside in a grand gallery, they hung their painted halibut on a piece of driftwood from the pergola over the outside table, and the Victoria and Edmonton girls organized many plays on the mossy area they called Big Rock Field. Aunty Angie showed the kids how to make beaded lizards and that was the craft of summer, 20 or more tucked into the car this morning to drive to Edmonton.
Somehow in the midst of the wild rumpus that is family life, I wrote the first draft of an essay. It’s 4000 words at present but I think it will be longer once I’ve figured out the gaps. It’s something that kept me up at night, working at my desk in a dark sleeping house, trying to find a way to tease out strands of a very complicated tangle of thinking: the war in Ukraine, the morning kingfishers at my swimming hole, the horror I feel at the local signs of climate change, and the the Cave of the Swimmers at Wadi Sura in the Egyptian Sahara (which sort of straddles two of the other strands, swimming and climatic shift). I printed out the draft and set it up at the dining table (which of course won’t be used for a bit) in order to see how the fragments cohere, or don’t. This will be an essay that I physically cut and paste to find the best arrangement of its parts. Sometimes I write like this, though not always, and I love the physicality of “editing” with scissors and tape.
So the summer plates are put away. The seasonal shift is in the air. The Steller’s jays have become accustomed to more seeds than usual because the children loved to feed them and 3 are haunting the posts on the deck, calling loudly, one with a peculiar whistle I’ve heard this summer for the first time. A bucket of crabapples waits for me to figure out what to do with it, a basket holding a quilt in progress will come out to the kitchen and another basket of fabric asks for something to be done with it (blues, of course), and I’m thinking of a quilt to remind me of 4 months of daily swims under a sky that was almost always clear.
...Theresa Kishkan 