John was looking out the south window by our bed and I asked, What’s the day like? Clear, I think, was what he replied, because I can see just the thinnest fingernail of a moon in the big trees. He went downstairs to make coffee and I looked for myself, just as the cat jumped onto the bed for his morning snuggle. Just the thinnest fingernail, silver in the trees.
Last evening we went to the Backeddy for an early supper. We’d been down the Coast all day, on errands, and how nice it was to sit by the windows, looking out at the Inlet where the light was fading. Ruby said there’d been whales earlier in the day which reminded me that the last time we were here, Saoirse said there’d been whales that day as well. Instead of whales, we saw gulls on the dock, so many of them, gossiping as the light fell. Ruby brought a sample of the dessert special for us to try, a crepe, with gorgeous compote made of plums from old Egmont, across the Inlet.
It reminded me of Iris Griffith phoning me nearly 4 decades ago to come and pick pie cherries from an ancient tree in front of her house, just down the road from the Backeddy. Get them before the bears, she advised. Iris has been dead now for years but she is everywhere in Egmont, her memory alive in the Museum, the community hall, the taste of fruit from trees planted in the last century, maybe closer to its beginning than its conclusion. She would have known who planted the plum tree.
These are fall days. We’ve been moving plants into the sunroom and the greenhouse for winter–the bougainvilleas, the scented geraniums, the jade trees and other succulents, a Meyer lemon I’ve had for 40 years and a calamondin orange I’ve had for 20. I planted garlic. While I arranged tubs of newly-seeded arugula on the floor of the greenhouse, a tree frog jumped over my wrist.
I keep looking up for a glimpse of geese heading south.So many years I’ve looked up from working outside, often hearing them first, then following the sound, high and lovely, and seeing the long strand of them against the mountain. They are like a string, one that tightens and closes the year. I’m ready for that, the sound and the closure.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
What we need is here, mostly. Lemons, garlic, plums from old trees, that tiny moon in the dark arms of the firs.
Note: the poem is Wendell Berry’s ‘The Wild Geese”, from his Selected Poems.
...Theresa Kishkan 