Hi all,
First, a note about the Sidney Library drop-ins: our next three dates are booked. They used to be all on the third Saturday of the month, but because of scheduling conflicts etc. they will now be sort of random Saturdays. The dates are: September 16, October 28 and November 18 at 1pm. For more information about what we do, look here.
Also, I will be doing a reading at the Salt Spring Library on September 7 at 7pm. If any of you live on Salt Spring, I’d love to see you there.
I recently got back from a trip to the Okanagan, beautiful country beside a huge lake which makes me think of the lack and having of water. Without irrigation it would be a very different place. A place like the deserty hills way up above the lake, where you can sit among arid ponderosa pines and look down at that blue expanse and be thirsty. It made me think of how I appreciate something more if it’s lacking.
For example, I grew up in northern Alberta on land that was fairly flat. I didn’t realize how much I needed flatness until I moved to Vancouver. Once I got there, I spent a while trammelled in cityscape and mountains before I found the sea and could let my gaze out. There on the edge of things, my chest relaxed, ribs opening as if I’d been let go by a giant boa constrictor. In the open I understood how beautiful the coast was. Now that there was a direction my eyes could run themselves out, squint as far as possible and see nothing restricting their view, now I could see the beauty in the mountains like stone bolsters, cozying me in.
The lack of a long distance made it more precious to me.
Similar to sky. My mum, who was born in Vancouver, said the weather was simple on the Coast. If you couldn’t see The Lions (by which she meant the perky ears that peaked like a cat was peeking over the mountains in the northern skyline)… If you couldn’t see The Lions, it was raining. If you could see them, it was about to rain.
I didn’t understand the import of this wisdom until my first winter in Vancouver. When it very rarely wasn’t raining, I’d know it soon would be. I stopped mentioning the weather, too debilitated by boredom even to be angry. My mum had tried to warn me, but coming from Grande Prairie I had no ability to comprehend.
I had taken sky for granted in Alberta, where it stretched from one horizontal horizon to another. Horizontal meaning flat, like the horizon in those parts. Now, in Vancouver, sky became a treasure, something found between clouds to be tucked away in a music box. I could almost hear the tinkling of the box’s tune whenever the sun uncovered itself in some small corner to be hoarded in memory. It became precious, something to carry with me into the day.
What am I lacking now, on Vancouver Island? What am I taking for granted? I suppose part of taking something for granted is not knowing it, so I’ll have to wait until I move again (perish the thought!) to know.
FROM THE SPIRAL NOTEBOOK
I was staying in a little cottage in the Okanagan, and they painted the door to my cottage blue on the same day there were wasps hanging around. This resulted in a sort of monologue thingy, which I will now share with you. I don’t know how the teenage daughter got in there, but I like her. She’s feisty.
The wasps were swarming at the doorway this afternoon before lunch. Maybe not swarming, not enough for a swarm, but many more than felt comfortable right outside the door. I just painted it, the door, a dark blue with a little marine green mixed in. It sticks now because I didn’t leave enough time in between coats. That’s what my daughter said after looking in her phone. I should have been more patient. The paint is dry to the touch but a little sticky, and you have to put your shoulder into it to open it now. My daughter put dish soap on the lintels, read about this “hack”, as she called it, on her phone.
Like in the Bible, with the blood on the lintels so God would pass over the house when he killed the firstborn in Egypt. I don’t even remember when I heard that story. I wonder, what will we be passed over for, what kind of disaster can be avoided with dish soap?
Perhaps wasps pass over lintels anointed with dish soap, because after they whirled and boiled around for a while, licking the white stucco here and there with their black tongues—perhaps they were not black. I could not see from my station at the kitchen sink—they moved on. They will build their small grey bomb of a pinata somewhere else, runnelled with tunnels and seeded throughout with cells for new life, like a papery pomegranate.
Perhaps the meaning is more metaphorical. Perhaps the dish soap means the people in my house will not grow apart. That would be a very good protection as my daughter is growing older, looking at me like some artefact from a history museum, the kind of exhibit where you aren’t interested enough to read the little white card tacked to the wall with explanations of how the old thing was once useful.
I bought a book when she was nine with the hopeful title “How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen and Listen So Your Kids Will Talk”. There were a few good ideas in there, as in all parenting books. But the miracle I was hoping for was missing, as in all parenting books. I kept it on my shelf like an icon. It’s still there. It makes no mention of how to be more interesting than an iPhone.
If it was really useful, the dish soap would catch the Wi-Fi rays in its lemon-scented stickiness one night a week. Maybe Tuesday. Not Sunday or Friday, I just want a quiet Tuesday night when she’d be forced to put her phone down and make eye contact. I don’t even ask for deep conversation or for her to tell me about the boys she likes as she once did. Just a little eye contact on a Tuesday night. Surely dish soap could perform such a miracle? Thicker than blood, after all.
NOTES
Please feel free to reply to this email, either by hitting reply (it will only go to me), or by commenting on the Substack website (there are little speech bubble things at the top and bottom of the letter) if you’d like to be part of a larger discussion. You can also “like” the post if you want.
Also feel free to pass this along to any friends who might be interested. They can subscribe, if they like, by hitting the big blue button that says “subscribe”.
And thanks, as always, for reading.
Yours,
Kelsey
“…my eyes could run themselves out…”. Your words never fail to surprise me, delight me, and leave me feeling wistful all at the same time. Thank you Kelsey. Beautiful.
"I could almost hear the tinkling of the box’s tune whenever the sun uncovered itself in some small corner to be hoarded in memory." -- such a beautiful, delicate and accurate way to describe west coast weather. A delightful newsletter, as always. Thank you, Kelsey. :)