Tag: Michelle Shocked

redux: the days are beautiful

theresakishkanLeave a comment

*The more things change, the more they stay the same. Children still locked up, a vulgarian (with small hands) wreaking havoc. Still, the other day, driving to Egmont, I saw the white waterlilies blooming on North Lake and my little bentwood box, made by Shain Jackson, still smells beautiful.

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Last night I had trouble sleeping. The ugly events in the country to the south of my own filled my mind. Imagine even considering that it would be appropriate to take children from their parents, no matter how legal or illegal the parents’ attempts to cross the Mexico-US border might be. No one leaves a home country unless they are desperate. So imagine the difficulty and pain those parents have experienced already (and the stories are beyond terrible) and then imagine removing the children from their parents and putting them in cages. Imagine believing that somehow the Bible has decreed that this is just fine. Listening to privileged men and women suggest that it is within the realm of what’s humane to do this has made me so angry I could eat rocks. Spit fire.

And this only one event, one awful moment in a country’s devolution.

This morning John was outside deconstructing the little deck and two sets of stairs leading to our printshop, the home of our High Ground Press. He likes building projects and these steps and the deck are the last things that need replacing. He’s been pulling usable wood from storage under the printshop—some 2x6s used in a treehouse that was taken down years ago; some other bits and pieces. I was working at my desk when I thought it might be nice to have a cinnamon bun from the bakeshop on the Skookumchuck Trail. For years it was run by Lynn and Martin Mees and the baking was just wonderful. The cinnamon buns, brioche with blue cheese, small pizzas, huge cookies. And really good coffee. Lynn and Martin moved on to a new chapter and a young couple bought the bakeshop. I thought we could also go to the museum in Egmont where you’d find the best collection of chain saws and Easthope engines anywhere. And a scribbler from the old school at Doriston containing a child’s report on his or her own community, a place still remembered by some, including my friend Andrew Scott who wrote this about Doriston some years back. (He’s been to Doriston but I haven’t. Lucky him.)

The bakeshop was closed, still on spring hours (weekends only until July 1 when it opens 7 days a week). We crossed the road to the museum, mostly so John could ask about donating an old chain saw, and I saw the most beautiful small bentwood cedar boxes made by Shain Jackson. I bought one because I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. It smells so rich and resiny and the abalone is soft to the thumb.

cedar frog

I wanted to take a photograph of the Egmont Community Hall for the project I am most emphatically not doing (a history of B.C.’s community halls). I’ll add it to the collection of materials I’ve been gathering about the halls in case someone else wants to take the project on. We’ve danced at weddings here, eaten small salmon sandwiches at funerals, and wandered in and out on Egmont Daze when hotdogs are free for kids and huge urns of coffee are steaming and the Thrift store upstairs is open for business.

Egmont Hall

What now, I asked, because I was hungry. Let’s see if the West Coast Wilderness Lodge is open, John replied. And it was, just. We were the first people there for lunch and we had the best seats in the room that is a wonder of the world. Old fir floors and a view of Jervis Inlet:

west coast wilderness lodge

Driving back along the Egmont Road, I stopped the car by North Lake to look at the beaver lodge right by the shore. A pair of yellow warblers must’ve had a nest in the hardhack growing beside the lodge because they kept darting in and out of the green depths and another male was singing in a snag nearby. And all over the surface of the lake along the road, white waterlilies—Nymphaea tetragona?—in bloom, like a moment out of Monet.

lilies on north lake

So sometimes the days are beautiful. You wake from broken sleep, you feel helpless and angry, you wonder how you can go on in a world that values lives so little that children would cry from cages while their parents were imprisoned elsewhere, and then you drive to Egmont where small wonders reveal themselves unexpectedly. Warblers, lilies, a frog with abalone eyes. If there was to be a soundtrack for the morning, it would be Michelle Shocked singing “Blackberry Blossom” because all along the Egmont Road the long thorny canes were holding blossoms up to the sun.

Can you tell me what happened to the blossom
Blackberry blossom when the summertime came?
The blackberry blossom, oh the last time I saw one
Was down in the bramble where I rambled in the spring.

blackberry blossom

the days are beautiful

theresakishkan2 Comments

Last night I had trouble sleeping. The ugly events in the country to the south of my own filled my mind. Imagine even considering that it would be appropriate to take children from their parents, no matter how legal or illegal the parents’ attempts to cross the Mexico-US border might be. No one leaves a home country unless they are desperate. So imagine the difficulty and pain those parents have experienced already (and the stories are beyond terrible) and then imagine removing the children from their parents and putting them in cages. Imagine believing that somehow the Bible has decreed that this is just fine. Listening to privileged men and women suggest that it is within the realm of what’s humane to do this has made me so angry I could eat rocks. Spit fire.

And this only one event, one awful moment in a country’s devolution.

This morning John was outside deconstructing the little deck and two sets of stairs leading to our printshop, the home of our High Ground Press. He likes building projects and these steps and the deck are the last things that need replacing. He’s been pulling usable wood from storage under the printshop—some 2x6s used in a treehouse that was taken down years ago; some other bits and pieces. I was working at my desk when I thought it might be nice to have a cinnamon bun from the bakeshop on the Skookumchuck Trail. For years it was run by Lynn and Martin Mees and the baking was just wonderful. The cinnamon buns, brioche with blue cheese, small pizzas, huge cookies. And really good coffee. Lynn and Martin moved on to a new chapter and a young couple bought the bakeshop. I thought we could also go to the museum in Egmont where you’d find the best collection of chain saws and Easthope engines anywhere. And a scribbler from the old school at Doriston containing a child’s report on his or her own community, a place still remembered by some, including my friend Andrew Scott who wrote this about Doriston some years back. (He’s been to Doriston but I haven’t. Lucky him.)

The bakeshop was closed, still on spring hours (weekends only until July 1 when it opens 7 days a week). We crossed the road to the museum, mostly so John could ask about donating an old chain saw, and I saw the most beautiful small bentwood cedar boxes made by Shain Jackson. I bought one because I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. It smells so rich and resiny and the abalone is soft to the thumb.

cedar frog

I wanted to take a photograph of the Egmont Community Hall for the project I am most emphatically not doing (a history of B.C.’s community halls). I’ll add it to the collection of materials I’ve been gathering about the halls in case someone else wants to take the project on. We’ve danced at weddings here, eaten small salmon sandwiches at funerals, and wandered in and out on Egmont Daze when hotdogs are free for kids and huge urns of coffee are steaming and the Thrift store upstairs is open for business.

Egmont Hall

What now, I asked, because I was hungry. Let’s see if the West Coast Wilderness Lodge is open, John replied. And it was, just. We were the first people there for lunch and we had the best seats in the room that is a wonder of the world. Old fir floors and a view of Jervis Inlet:

west coast wilderness lodge

Driving back along the Egmont Road, I stopped the car by North Lake to look at the beaver lodge right by the shore. A pair of yellow warblers must’ve had a nest in the hardhack growing beside the lodge because they kept darting in and out of the green depths and another male was singing in a snag nearby. And all over the surface of the lake along the road, white waterlilies—Nymphaea tetragona?—in bloom, like a moment out of Monet.

lilies on north lake

So sometimes the days are beautiful. You wake from broken sleep, you feel helpless and angry, you wonder how you can go on in a world that values lives so little that children would cry from cages while their parents were imprisoned elsewhere, and then you drive to Egmont where small wonders reveal themselves unexpectedly. Warblers, lilies, a frog with abalone eyes. If there was to be a soundtrack for the morning, it would be Michelle Shocked singing “Blackberry Blossom” because all along the Egmont Road the long thorny canes were holding blossoms up to the sun.

Can you tell me what happened to the blossom
Blackberry blossom when the summertime came?
The blackberry blossom, oh the last time I saw one
Was down in the bramble where I rambled in the spring.

blackberry blossom

 

 

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postcard from the Surf Motel

theresakishkanLeave a comment

Down Vancouver Island this morning after a terrific reading event last evening in Nanaimo, Wordstorm, with a generous audience (and a delicious Goan prawn dish first at the host restaurant, the Tandoori Junction). I said, as we drove, that I always know when I’m on the Island (where I spent most of the first twenty five years of my life, apart from some years in Halifax, Matsqui, Greece, and Ireland) because my skin feels as though it’s come home. I know where I am by scent. By the air. And approaching Goldstream River, I knew the salmon were there. We stopped and in pouring rain I walked out to see them, the chum (or dog) salmon my father used to take us to see each autumn. The salmon I’m used to watching now are sockeye and coho, both more colourful when they spawn, so it took my eyes a few minutes to see the silver bodies in the grey water. But I could smell them, a fresh smell, water and fish and rain. There were a few dead ones

finished

and gulls whirling above, a kingfisher rattling in a cedar, and walking back, I was surprised to see blossom:

blackberry-blossom

I thought of Michelle Shocked’s song “Blackberry Blossom” and it seemed so right to be humming it as I returned to the car where John was listening to jazz:

Can you tell me what happened to the blossom
Blackberry blossom when the summertime came?
The blackberry blossom, oh the last time I saw one
Was down in the bramble where I rambled in the spring.

Everything a piece, a part of my history, my memory, even stopping in to see the Mammoth exhibit at the Museum with Angelica and being reminded, among the mastadon jaws and the mammoth tusks and even Lyuba herself, 42,000 years old,

lyuba

that one of my sons, aged about 4, used to say that he wanted to be Early Man when he grew up, having been entranced by drawings of hominini in my old anthropology textbooks, hairy people around campfires with mammoths lurking in the background. So time passes, rivers run, salmon spawn, boys grow up to be mathematicians rather than Australopithicus, and the breakwater at Ogden Point is now fenced for our safety. Still, the sealions pass in joy, a heron fishes from a clump of bull kelp, and the sea, oh the sea, is the same sea I loved as a child, the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula barely visible through cloud.

And now back at the Surf Motel where we stayed when one son (that son) was married to his sweetheart on Beacon Hill and where I walked on the breakwater very early on the morning of his wedding, remembering everything.

Early man, wish you were here.