| time remaining 3 part 4 - 2016 january-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 January 2016 Bleak midwinter - house arrest - snow and muddy slush, dirty slush - nowhere to go nothing to do - eat and try not to eat anything I like a lot - empty of feeling and thought - clumsy sometimes, dropping things, staggering - Greg writes, Rob doesn't reply, Tom doesn't reply, Louie sends notes I junk immediately - overwhelmed when I look at houses online, exhausted by considerations - no books in the libraries! - no books! - and now I'm making money helping a woman who reads and writes brokenly - which is none of my business and a poor use of me - but $600 a month for a while - still don't know where to live - have no impulse toward writing my life - is that the worst, the way the journal has died - I'm writing here because I might scare something up, no not scare - I might labour something up, some shred of interest - is it loss of energy - sigh - loss of friendship - flattened despair of friendship or loving moments ever again anywhere - even for place and time - tapering out - What I dreamed - there have been too many dreams written down without point - dreamed I looked in the mirror and saw short hair very thick and wide that felt so soft and lively and healthy. Was walking with Don who kept saying things I couldn't hear - we looked in a market stall and I saw an old quilt, large pale thing intricately pieced by hand mostly white with some bits of turquoise and orange. I thought it would suit him, with his red hair. He bought it and carried it home rolled under his arm. His wife had got fat - Kristin Lavransdotter - the medieval landscape without industrial construction - nothing but land, animals, plants, weather, light - she makes me see the beauty of church order - cathedrals like mountains, bells giving sacred which is to say significant order to the day - convents beautifully made, a strong feeling of the peril and marvel of being alive - not trivial - service to peril and marvel - Maybe if I can't write journal in the old direct way I can do it this way with prewriting - accommodating a handicap of old age to keep going with some kind of life. Sigh. This life is so cornered and empty - cornered into emptiness - that the only way I can redeem it is to work in my best furthest way - knowing the work won't make anything in my personal life, my love woman life, better, it will stay empty, but the days will not be wasted. I think of California with sad yearning. Was remembering what it was like to drive to Palm Springs - the feeling of being interested - driving in wide light - interested to see the small date farms on the side road - interested. It's what I wanted here and don't have. I don't know where to live! I haven't had luck. My luck has not been with me. My magic instinct hasn't. Is it gone for good? Am so much laboring at this house hunting. Don't know where to look even. Ashcroft house. Merritt house. Oliver house. 325, 225, 211. I don't know, haven't known, how to think about where to live. What's the most beautiful place - Bale Rd - but it's too isolated and already sold and too expensive to run. What's the second most beautiful place - potentially Ashcroft but Ashcroft has no amenities and the reno wd be very expensive. What's the best house - Merritt but the garden is small and the town is ugly. What's the best landscape - Nicola Valley? But in Merritt one isn't in it. The best access is Merritt. What's the best town - Oliver. So far three houses none of which is heart-felt ideal. If it's between Merritt and Oliver, Merritt is more central to everything and less driving to Van. The house is a good deal but the garden isn't very big. Oliver warmer and better for gardening but farther away. 1000 square feet more of garden space. NPR! Closer to the US. 18 Chukars picking their way on soft snow below the window. I could hear their murmured clucking from the kitchen. Louie says a royalty check for $800. Trying to figure out IRS paperwork, disbursements. Bit more than halfway through Kristin Lavransdotter. [Sketch of possible Merritt house layout and possible garden plan] The G4 is refusing to start. Kept fiddling with it. Got it backed up but afraid to shut it down now. When I opened the narrow cardboard box with cords and batteries I found myself gaping at a fibrous round button and then a whole heap of them among the cords lower down. Dog food. Packrat? A couple of mornings ago I did see the rear end of some little animal vanishing discretely under the fridge. I like Titania's gash but it's The school. 20 Lavransdotter - more than I've ever known or felt about Norway - reading about the Norwegians in La Glace - ancient familiar names - Torggeirsson. My landscape too, the kinds of light and season. And mostly the way it was for Kristin with Erlend, which is me with Tom and Mary with Ed. It was true that all this time she had remembered, year after year, every wound he had ever caused her - even though she had always known that he never wounded her in the way a grown person intends harm to another .... Each time he offended her she had tended to the memory the way one tends to a venomous sore. She knew she wasn't usually narrow-minded, but with him even the smallest scratch on her soul would continue to sting and bleed and swell and ache if he was the one to cause it. About him she would never be wiser or stronger. Always, always there was the yearning lament inside her. The kind of man Erlend is, impulsive, winning, but unreliable. Careless father and manager. In Undset's light even my contempt for Tom seems a posture of love. Did Mary love Ed in that way? It says yes. In Tom but not Ed a gift for happiness. It's 61-63 N latitude, GP is only 55. The way I was afraid of his incompetence. I wouldn't step near the edge of the cliff at the Cove when I was with him. I wouldn't let him take me past my depth. Something else I see is how our ways in La Glace six hundred years after 1330 were still medieval. The way Ed said "It has taken me years to live you down" and instead of saying "What are you thinking, I put this family on the map" I said "I didn't do it under your roof." Much is made of the quality of people's children - are they handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, intelligent, witty, do they have lush bosoms, glossy hair, large eyes. Are they malformed. Do they have small eyes. Are they small and weak, plain-featured. This book 1124 pages never read, so substantial, found in Ashcroft where there's nothing to read, in the second-hand store next to the barber shop and across from the credit union. [page of renovation notes] 22 Undset 1882-1947, Kristin L 1920-22. Cather 1873-1947, O pioneers, The song of the lark, My Antonia 1913-1918. She reminds me of Cather in her sense of landscape and light and her sense of whole lives, wholeness of lives. Dorothy R 1873-1957, Pilgrimage 1915-1946. If I think of the two of them in relation to DR I see they were looking backwards at the long medieval life that was ending in their time, also my life as a child and my family's life until that time - and DR was writing forward into the new time. New power post planted in the middle of my view. It's warmer. The air has a scent. 24 Am I ashamed to say I like noticing that Indra who was a marvelously sophisticated gold-skinned goddess at 16 now seems to be more ordinary than I am. She married and had kids and has grandkids she features on FB. Her kids are not as good-looking as mine! Her language is more conventional. She is more conventional: successful, ensconced. I'm gloating this way because it's like that, a long race and I want to pass everyone in the home stretch. Someone who hadn't begun behind wouldn't have to care. So caring is a way of still being behind, I suppose that's the uneasiness. Sunday morning. There was moonlight last night. I hadn't seen moonlight in months. Why am I disappointed too. I don't want young marvelousness to have been crushed in her or Olivia or in me - I'm disappointed that age is failure. 25 Dorothy Beach died Saturday. David told me with a photo of a rocking chair next to a wheelchair. "Rockers ahead by a length." [Dorothy in 1915 on River Drive] 27 He heard her breathing stop he said. We laughed on the phone for an hour, he alone in the house. Have just spoken to Janis at Century 21 in Merritt. The graceful house at 1986 Douglas. Might have to move fast on it. I do like it. Rob maybe also does not mind the thought of spending more money for the river house though he's timid about reno, which I'm confident I could bring off. 28 Have been accumulating what today I'm thinking I could call a hope chest. Yesterday a little brandy glass that rang true in the goodwill. Books. Woodworking wisdom and know-how and How to make bookshelves and cabinets. A new copy of the Reader's Digest encyclopedia of garden plants and flowers. Mrs Dalloway, Master and commander and Kristin Lavransdotter - counting these last because I'm not going to pass them on as usual but will keep them for a guestroom. Small straight-sided glass olive jars for spices or eventual preserving. A tall handsome crystal vase I've already cracked. A seven-inch straight-sided glass vase for small flowers. A large set of wrenches in a case. A bottle of Triple Sec. Have so much energy for the thought of a house and so little for anything else. Master and commander is it for the third time if I count the Naxos reading that has let me hear Maturin's accent in my head. I laugh aloud. I cry. I rejoice the way I actually do in the experience of command. Pounced on it in the Village Office's basement goodwill - scanned the O's and there it was though I've seen no O'Brians anywhere in Canada so far. That and Mrs Dalloway in the goodwill next to the barbershop. They have the same quality of fullness of being, joyful embodied aliveness missing in all the dreary little social anxiety novels publishers seem to think they can sell, and do, I guess, since the libraries are full of nothing else. The snow has been slowly evaporating away. Today the cliff is bare except for little dabs though shaded regions near the house are still pied with ice patches. There's a man I like where I buy water in Irly's Hardware. He looks mild and smart. Kindly. Fifties, something like that. Wire-rims. I asked him yesterday whether he'd heard anything about the condition of the road from Ashcroft to Merritt. He said he hadn't but then raised his voice and asked the room, half a dozen customers and another counterman. No one knew and I was on my way out the door when he came out of the office and called after me that his driver said it was clear. 29 Dames rocket. The writing is better than I thought - gets better not long after I begin with T and C. 30 I get fastened to each house I consider, am yearning for 1986 Douglas, for its garden. Rob has the upstairs rooms or Airbnb is bringing in money. etc. Shy off thinking about it too much but it has so pretty a kitchen and good windows. It's gracious. Rob doesn't have money yet and is saying he'll find it hard to pull the trigger and it's so good a house it may be gone fast. But, but - High and dry: gardening with cold-hardy dryland plants. Found it in the library and was in a tizzy with it yesterday. Sent for it from Amazon. The tizzy was the garden I could make for 1986 Douglas. Have fenced the big yard, planted it corner to corner. Roses, paeonies, iris, phlox, poppies, grape soda lupins. A dry garden, a vegetable garden, an orchard meadow, a paved little terrace with a trickle for birds. Rob comes up on the Greyhound and helps plan it. It's famous in the town. I go to surrounding cities and shop - Kelowna has a garden collection. I visit gardeners and make friends. I overwinter figs. Could I manage manzanita? A locust tree. A few kinds of agave and salvia he says. A little greenhouse against the back fence with an end for the wheelbarrow and tools. Apricot, pear, peach, sour cherry, cherry, plum, plum, plum, hazelnut, currants red and black, raspberry. I find furniture in second-hand stores and restore it in the garage. Advertise writing holidays, quiet room under the eaves, desk, chair and wifi provided. It's headquarters for Ant Bear. David, Louie, Sue, Leah? I WANT it. - 1986 Douglas. Trouble falling asleep, having to think of other things to calm down. Afraid to show it to people and yet I have, Luke yesterday and Dave Carter when he arrived on email this morning. A rowan, a quicken Claire Keegan called it. "Believed to be a tree of formidable magical and protective powers. The Irish name, caorthann, derives from caor which means both a berry and a blazing flame." A dry garden in the NW corner with its tall hedge. Gravel and rocks spread with clumps of cold-hardy little things. Needs a hedge or fence across the north - not really north, approximate north, 22 degrees off because the old town was laid parallel to the little Coldwater River. Feb 1 Luke said
I said
6 Merritt tomorrow with Bruce -
7
I'd been in a fever of wanting but last evening I was noticing that the layout of the back end of the house is a tight maze, that there's a light post outside the garden as well as a bus stop and a letter box. I knew but was forgetting what a thrown-down haphazard redneck town it is.
10 I've said nothing about Merritt last Sunday. My describing goes into sketchup now. I had with me a man who loves houses. He was a skinny man in a plaid jacket and old work boots, who was jonesing for a cigarette as we drove up and up through dreary winter forest. Bruce Bevan whose grandfather came from Wales, who gave away his carpentry tools when his wife died, whose daughter said at our lesson on Saturday You should take my dad, he knows everything about houses. We walked around 1986 Douglas. He said "The siding is asbestos" and that was as much as we needed to know, though yes the ground floor was charming. I said to young nice Janis the realtor, "I know you need twenty four hours but could we see the house on Granite?" Mountain ash berries on the sidewalk. That fat bland pale blue would have to go. Bruce is in love immediately. 193l. Which is Mrs Dalloway. Classical front bedroom just big enough for a bed. High ceiling, nine and a half or ten. Above the closet doors varnished square hatches Janis says might be storage. Bruce says no they are air conditioning in summer. Very small middle room, too small for a bed really. Radiators under the windows. Bedroom floors are a pale tight lino tile, a pinkish buff in perfect condition. Bathroom: they've tiled the bathroom floor beautifully but their eye for paint color is not good. Clawfoot tub. Bruce says look at that - a '30s toilet, lower, with ridges on the pedestal. (Crowdfund renos by offering holidays?) The kitchen - all of that counter wall wd have to come down. I know what to do, pull out the counters, open a window, new bottom counters under it, my usual design with stovetop and wall oven in a 3' pull-out. Small south bedroom with built-in bed and built-in closet. That's my room. East window. Parlour has the fireplace boarded off but it's a nice little fireplace. Wide large central dining room core. Nook with east window and a door onto the verandah. North light from the parlour, east from the nook, south from the kitchen, west from the bathroom. The nook's for my desk maybe. Dining room paneling is Mission style. Door into the parlour and French door into the corridor suggest it might have been the priest's little house - it's across from St Michael's - I mean designed to funnel visitors into privacy. Janis opened another door in the kitchen onto a black hole with a ladder into the cellar. Bruce went down to check systems - boiler, gas, water heater, plumbing, electrics. Called me down to look. Washer and dryer. Paint cans, shelves of jam jars, raw concrete and what's almost a dirt floor. Those people aren't gardeners. Boards laid down to the garage, horrendous pergola, patches of gravel, pile of boards in the far corner, cheap badly installed bit of fence, but all easy to clear. Verandah - stucco needing repair and then paint. Nice tongue and groove ceiling needing to be washed and painted. Screened sliding windows. East-facing windows for plants. Furniture needed:
Appliances needed
Repaint
Mend, build, upgrade
Garden
12 The question is whether the inside of the mind in both Mrs D and SS can be made luminous - that is to say the stuff of the book 14 Rob after a week says the house doesn't speak to him but he'll consider it - sometime. Meantime I've painted and furnished it, installed a better kitchen, planted 9 fruit trees and a ponderosa pine, set up a compost system, made a laundry room in the little space next to the bathroom, set red current bushes along the shady north end of the house and a raspberry row along the western fence, invited two black cats to live with me, bought an Indian cookbook and another gardening book online, collected a casserole dish and more spice jars, got rid of some of the brown wood, met the old couple to the west on Granite, tried fitting the Cherokee through the narrow garage door, prioritized tasks, read up on all the kinds of fruit trees and berry bushes, made notes on growing vegetables, scanned kitchen reno books for how-to instructions, looked for BC sources of windows, costed appliances, brought home a book on electric codes. The sketchup is done, no more details to work out, which leaves me with no way to work off this impatient avidity - 17 House
Have been wondering why I don't want to talk to myself here. I'm setting up my next ten years - trying to - without thinking about it, it seems. There's just headlong need for settled home. Is it true need? It says large yes. 1890 Granite: I'd be settling alone in a ranching-lumbering town in the interior. Is that how I want to live? It'd be like Sexsmith, a bit. That makes a sort of sense.
Went and found that in May 24 1963. I lie in bed liking the presence of past moments - my own private me - my moments I've won in time, that no one can see, that will be gone when I am. So it doesn't need discussion? It's clear? It says yes. There won't be work during the day in some busy, important place but could work be my busy important place, maybe - will I work when I have a home to return to and look after? I move around this ugly little kitchen feeling I'd like to keep house intelligently, impeccably, do all things intelligently, impeccably, live right. Is it the Interior with a cap? Granite Ave in Merritt is a good address. 1890 adds up to a 9, does that mean something? - Aimée writes from CFMDC that here will play in the Images Festival April 19! Glad it's here, which no one seemed to notice in TO before. Ashcroft yesterday afternoon, recycling depot, Irly's for water, trash into a barrel on the street, the town office goodwill, the goodwill by the barber shop, the credit union to deposit tutor money, the post office to check at general delivery and then the grocery store. A train chundered through. All the parked cars were dirty. Dull overcast. I was wearing my bomber jacket and silver Chucks and when my jeans fit I feel young. More glass dishes. Two little pink bowls, a black plant pot and a little tea kettle surprisingly well designed. Buying this stuff in faith. 19 70 to 18
20 The marriage of Lieut. Fairfax and Miss Jane Bates had had its day of fame and pleasure, hope and interest, but nothing now remained of it save the melancholy remembrance of .... 21 I hear a dove. There's a whole flock in the nearest tree and on the new power line. Binocs say they are larger and plumper than mourning doves. A pink-fawn fluffy look with a black crescent at the nape. Eurasian collared-dove Sibley says. There have been no birds and now there are, strings in the sky flying north too high to recognize, was it a kettle of hawks yesterday above the dump as I was driving to Cache Creek, crows on business above the Bonaparte's cleft. 22 Yesterday I took the camera when I went to the store and on the way home stopped where I could pull off the road. Took some photos and posted three. "Winter's dun" I thought. Pale shades of grey, tan, buff, sage, minimal as to color and complex as to form. There's one I stare at for the compositional hold it has on a series of spatial ranks that go back for miles with overall dotty grain given by bunchgrass clumps. It seems a bit superb. It has strong large curves and as if hidden in them - I mean it's as if I have to go down and find them - are little places, a north-facing slope with a few live pines, an outcropping of castle rock. Something else is that since Anne has joined my FB cohort I'm getting notices from other relatives - so far three cousins and Aunt Lillian. I don't like it, why. It's as if my horizon feels less open. I try out saying it's good if they know more about who I am - etc - I use FB as a showcase so why not - but I'm not sure they can't cramp me psychically somehow. It feels like that. It's surprising how strongly it feels like that. They're all free to read everything in my journal and maybe they do but if I don't know they're doing it I don't mind. It's seeing their names on my page. 23 Gillian Slovo's book about her parents. I've just thrown it across the room. There are chapters about Joe near the end that made me weep but it's framed and padded-out by so much of her own little feelings. It's a style of journalism - I understand that - but geez, just write a book about Joe already, you don't matter, or you might if you were a better writer, but you're a plodding chronicler of hurt feelings and insignificant misgivings. Joe himself lifts his chapters - his vividness in commitment and engagement - but you're just somebody with a publishing contract, you're not properly alive. Reading it seeing Joe at Ros's party when I was about to leave London and the one other time I met him, an afternoon when I dropped in at her place on Highgate Road and she introduced him. "This is Joe. He's a lawyer." Ruth in her house in Camden Town when Ros had sent me to talk about a painting job and I gave her Tony's number. I googled photos of Joe and then tried again to find photos of Ros. There was just one, taken in front of a wall of books in her Women's Press office in 1983, but Google also brought up a page of some woman's blog about women in science fiction. Suddenly there was my name: "According to the journal of Canadian poet Ellie Epp, Ros was 'sacked' from her position at The Women's Press in 1991. This is unfortunately true." The word sacked is linked to In America 15-3, April 2008, which goes on to talk about inventing Ant Bear, sphinx moths and camping with Tom above Indian Flats for his birthday. I like having been an access to Ros's story but it's odd that it shd've been my journal rather than a public source. Ros was so fine a being and there's so little public notice of her. It gives me a sense of what sort of work the journal may have been doing - what the statcounter hits have been documenting - that I have had no clue of. It could go on doing that after I die. A note from Don today. We've both been thinking ahead to his birthday a week from today. And who was that other SA woman I cleaned for and discovered was an operative. Phyllis Altman. There's also only one photo of her online. None of Buddy Hardy, and I'm her only mention. The marvel is that I met Buddy Hardy and Altman independently though Ros knew them both. Ros and Lessing through Roy, who knew Ros through David Cooper. Roy knew Cooper because he'd read about Laing and jumped over the sea to find him, and I Roy because I liked something in the language of his room-for-rent card in the little Parliament Hill Fields post office. Altman because she lived in the building where I cleaned for an American family - a Wallace Stevens scholar - and gardened for a woman from Mike Dunford's film class at the Camden Institute. Anastasia Hoffman with her feeble husband Charles. Phyllis Altman would bring me tea and biscuits on a tray when I was working in the garden. What I remember about her flat is that everything in the kitchen was covered with many years' accumulation of the sort of sticky fur that came off old gas cookers. I took down and washed even all of her tea boxes, all her spice jars, all her cups and plates. She was the woman with the hole in her head - she had a mole on her left temple the size of a coin, that I remembered later. What I've learned about what to do with 1890 Granite if I ever own it - I'll say it that way though I know better - since I've been working at it these many days - new realizations still, one even today, that the back bedroom needs another window. It's a room that kept looking bad or uninteresting in my screengrabs. I tried it different ways. It wasn't right. Then I opened the south wall and there it was, a small room with charm of light, no longer blind. What else I've learned. The small rooms need their brown wood covered in some light color. All the small rooms except the bathroom need picture rails or just picture rail lines. Very pale shades of green, sage, pinkish-buff or blue-grey below those lines. A few blocks of very strong color look good against the dining room's overwhelming wainscoting. Yellow on the kitchen cabinets with a stronger blue on the walls, and deep Etruscan red in the bathroom above silver on all the wood - that is such a stroke, there's a corner where yellow, red and silver come together so handsomely I squirm with pleasure looking at the jpg. - Money, though, money for all that reno. 25 I met a young woman who interested me at some sort of event, a lecture or conference, I don't know what, but it was public and there were other people around. She was a slight thin-faced woman but the way she talked was thoughtful. We were speaking to each other across a small space and then we both moved to sit together against the other wall. When she saw me walk she said something about my leg. I was startled but then she lifted her right hand with her left to show me the palm. She said her right arm was so completely paralyzed she could do nothing with it. There was more I don't remember. A couple of weeks ago in the Cache Creek library there was a slight thin-faced woman on shift that I don't think I'd seen before. After Gina had gone I was checking out books and talking to the librarian about working with Gina on quizzes. She said something about dreams about exams and I said I have a PhD but I still dream about high school exams. She wanted to know a PhD in what. I was describing cognitive science as an interdiscipline of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science ... oh, and neuroscience. She said "How do you manage mating?" I said "How do I manage mating?!" She said "With that kind of intellect." I said something like one way to manage is when they don't quite realize what I am. Then she told me that when she was younger she'd been working in Lillooet and a cowboy had chased her. I said "Are you still together?" She said yes for thirty years. If she wants intellectual conversation she talks to someone else. 26 Second foundation showed up on the book exchange shelves of the supermarket in Ashcroft. 1953. Here's a precursor to Le Guin's psychoscope. First Foundation physics, Second Foundation he calls mathematics but it's statistical analysis based on - ? He sites them on opposite ends of the universe - as if there could be such a thing. I'm wondering whether it's an intuition of lateralized function. Watching the '50s dominance of males in him. Men do everything everywhere is assumed though he mentions one famous woman and has a super-smart girl character who is kept safely at 14 years old and derided as unloveable. whose brain shows what Kleise used to call the tamper plateau Thinking of Trump and Limbaugh having prepared the way - democracy without education - what tamper plateau is it in them all, who did the tampering - Trump is tribal, the election is going to be between a tight competent postmenopausal female and a rampaging patriarch strongman - wow. 8 years of our rational graceful Obama have set off a tidal wave of reaction. It's still the '60s working themselves out isn't it, marijuana culture's releases from '40s and '50s what to call it - pervading falsity, hats, gloves, girdles. Whiskey, the posed voices of movie actors and radio announcers, women at home, children hit as a matter of course, male experts on every question, sexual secrecy, religious terrorism - etc. Dissociation in a word. People of the lie. He's very clanky in exposition, characters and conversations exist only to summarize background. No interest in place or person. 1919-1992. Jewish male whose immigrant parents ran a news kiosk in New York. Ideological not perceptual. Le Guin so profoundly better because she's both. Being both her large constant theme. Paranoia - male fantasies of doublecross cleverness - he's Tom Clancy with a few tech concepts - how is Dune better - better written, imagined, though it has intrigue too - Azimov's characters are all men of 1940 someone says. Wartime men. I didn't know Ros was publishing sci fi when I sent Daphne to meet her carrying a copy of From the legend of Biel. Daphne when I gave her Le Guin said oh science fiction was just about earth and got her novel published with Women's Press after the meeting. Her uninteresting novel. And Ros didn't reprint Mary Staton. Phone with Rob: notes o Reno money - I said give me a budget and I'll stick to it and if I want to go over I'll find ways to fund it. He said and we can discuss - o He's rightly concerned we'll have power battles over what's done with it. o He'll come to Merrit on March 4th. o He doesn't like the bathroom, pedestal sink and clawfoot tub. o He doesn't like it not having a basement. o Said it could be painted later - I said it shd be before planting. o Talked about sheet mulching and understory planting and cats. 29 A cold wind yesterday in Ashcroft cemetery. It's above the river. Short grass, large bare trees, few monuments widely spaced and the stone on most so badly weathered they can hardly be read. Old-country Anglo-Saxon names. A short iron-railing fence. Roar of the river and wind in the bare trees. This is the week there'll be a decision I think. Rob coming on the Greyhound Friday morning. I've realized the middle room can be a gallery, is a gallery. 2 March It was Don's birthday yesterday and I wrote him a note. He replied this morning. He keeps away from me because he's competitive and so am I. I brag. He doesn't. Am I in fact more than he is? It says no.
On the way home from Cache Creek yesterday I stopped at the pig farm's driveway and took a photo of the abrupt hill above the hayfield. It was swathed in mist and mottled with the morning's new snow. I framed it it so the steep bulk of the hill on the left is balanced by an equal space of luminous emptiness on the right: really balanced. The other thing about the photo is the small sharp presence of human detail, a cluster of little power posts against the mist and the fine shallow loops of hayfield irrigation stitching across the stubble at the base of it all. Grey, white and pale straw-yellow. What I've learned about competition making people shun me is that people will love me if I used my size in their service. Is there any other way? No. Is that as it should be? No. I expected you to say yes.
- Peter V T phoned - he has a CC grant after all - 5000 for the book project he says. I've decided to drive to Merritt tomorrow and stay overnight. Wednesday shopping in Ashcroft - a Wearever cooking pot, needed a bigger one - a vase and a canner, a teaspoon. Long talk with Luke. A good day, so. He sent a photo of his window. 3 Don's letter this morning. He came clean I think. I'm thinking what it is about him and Tom too - maybe Roy though Roy's mostly in a sealed vault in me. Don said he hid and yet he wasn't hidden. The mix of realness and falseness was always there to see. Aspiration and humiliation, seductive intent and disaffection. I liked him - I felt for him - but I knew I couldn't handle him or myself with him - I wasn't developed enough, I didn't know enough. I didn't know enough to say it this way. I wasn't clear enough. What did I want in him. His sore true heart. What was devotion in these Catholic boys. He was ten and eleven and knelt at the feet of the Virgin. The church gave him access to early love. It was early love appropriated by the patriarchy but nevertheless. Is that the answer to what he had that Greg didn't. Greg has smothered devotion in himself. It was smothered in his family. I'm thinking of Agee too. He kept access to Catholic devotion by means of booze. Hello day. The standing clumps of grass below lit sideways suddenly. 4 Bramble Café Merritt. Rose in pink flannel pyjamas at the Copper Valley Motel counter yesterday morning. Bright face making what she can of her work, talking. She grew up in a village in Canton Province, Prince George with her parents, 6 children, when she was a teen. Until she was forty she didn't pay attention she said, but now she thinks growing up in a village was good. "Is slow, is good foundation." What I think too, growing up on the farm was a slowly-made base. She was pretty, ageless the way a Chinese woman can be, pink and eager. My host. "Are you a teacher" she said. I went first to the house, measured. Did I stop to feel out whether it's right. I'm past that it seems, was taking possession though in a shallow not very felt way. Intention is carrying me. I notice it's not what I've drawn. The fascia are rotted. There are a lot of mountain ash trees and I guess an actual ash? Old lilacs and a large flock of new ones. Some hollyhock stalks and that's it. - The old tree is an Italian plum said Doug - Doug leaning on his side of the fence and I on mine. Retired heavy equipment operator and trucker. A pair of teachers who live in White Rock. He's a perfectionist said Doug looking at the cedar shingle siding which is in fact perfect. [Page of measurements and realtor notes] At night in the motel two phone calls, Janis answering the questions I'd asked, and then Rowen calling from a skytrain on his long way home. Michael has a new daughter. The road yesterday morning. Rough, narrow, tightly winding, all beautiful. Willow switches coral, orange, bright straw yellow. Sagebrush quite lush. Small swift green river. There was a higher pass. Rained a bit, then one of the fingers of Merritt's valley opened, homesteads, a res, then a few hobby farm manors, then the gravel tower, then wide bare unpretty Nicola Ave. I drove up Voght, ate at KFC which looks a long way south from a freeway off-road shelf. Wide valley, widespread incoherent town except for a few streets of the old core. Found the credit union. The library and supermarket were dazzling me with weath. Furniture store with expensive appliances. Do I like it is irrelevant is how it feels. This is going to be it, I can make something of it. Librarian said it's a friendly town. "The crime is mostly on the res." Natives a third of the population, Indo-Canadians another third, working at the mill but they're thinning out, moving to the coast to help their kids go to university. Stepping out of the motel I could smell new lumber. [More measurements.] Nicole writes that 3 of my 5 will be at her program called Here/Ici at FIFA in Montreal on the 12th. - Depressed feeling the costs of dependency involved. What were the bad moments. He didn't like my sense of kitchen, wanted something less smooth, modern. He asked "So how long" and I said I expected to die at 82. He's wanting to consult even on what I pay for. 5 I'd be paying rent and doing a massive amount of work for nothing AND I'm offering to pay for some of the reno. I'm crushed that I can't own it. He's personally so oblivious, natters on, wearies me nattering on.
6 Tia in Toronto said happy birthday before I remembered. The adventure was earlier, yesterday morning. Have been staring at its image, so much to see, a bit like a Gordon Smith painting, so many colors and all meaning something. patches of dark blue, streaks of putty, rust, sand, a purplish grey, cream knots of rock, a pale olive green, mauve slopes in the upper right corner, all of that mineral, and then the complete difference of the trees, a few dead, black, like fragments of calligraphy Greg said, others displayed vertically against that vivid mineral canvas looking so alive and singular, keeping a perilous hold. It's not a good photo like winter not dun, not perfectly framed, but it has a lot to see, it's rich and it looks like mortal lives, a cohort in time. Tom sent his one word. I have no way to know even whether he still lives where he did. He liked Michael's Read Island drawing. His name is all I get and rarely that. 8 LUX in London says Deke is programming Trapline in May. Co-op's 50 year celebration. They paid 65k for it and are asking 225, is 160k profit. "Uninhabitable, couldn't get insurance - no insulation, electricity, plumbing." Assessed value of the house in a year went up 6210. 9 It's Wednesday so I was in Ashcroft going my round - bank, goodwill by the barber shop, post office, hardware store, thrift store at the town hall, library, supermarket. When I left the thrift store I stepped across to listen to the river then drove straight up the alley instead of turning into the street. I came to the top end of the alley after three blocks. A thin old man was on the corner in shirtsleeves and suspenders by an old pickup I think mending a tire. I had to drive over his hose. I lifted my hand hello and he did too. Right then another pickup turned into the alley from the street. We were nose to nose. We both stopped. He backed up. As I came past him I waved one small wipe of a hand toward him to say thanks. He waved back the same way. I saw just a flash of someone I could hardly have liked more. He was wearing a dark hat with a wide brim and under it was a long narrow face alight with interest and kindness. What a beautiful guy I said. Someone just like that. Brought home white hyacinths that cost ten dollars. When I smell them in a room I think of Jean Morrison. The flowers have bright green tips and aren't tight on their long stalks. Each stalk has a juvenile coming up next to it. In the barbershop goodwill when I bought a pair of dalmation-spotted well-washed flannel pyjamas for four dollars the old lady at the counter said "They look like you. I can see you wearing them." In the post office the stocky clerk with an Orphan Annie bob rushed to my cubicle and said "Nothing for you today Ellie." She'd been talking over the counter to someone. There's a wind bashing the house tonight. Am starting to take leave of Ashcroft it seems, feeling the ways it's a good place. There are few enough people so they register on one another. Many tattered remnants of hard lives. Sixty year old married men with loud voices like the farmers where I come from. Many women older than that, short-haired and small. Sometimes in the grocery store a really bad young couple, genetically bad, fat, sullen and torpid. The other day standing in the aisles a woman exceptional for her look of well-dressed city consciousness, educated, a bit sad. The teller in the Interior Savings Credit Union seems to enjoy it when I deposit money. Both the bank and the supermarket have book-exchange shelves at their exits. 10 I replied to Luke's note at 8 in the evening. He'd be sleeping I thought, 4am in London. He was awake. He'd gone with Roy to a prostate biopsy-report appointment. He was crying, he said because of Jack. We were talking for more than two hours. He laughed and cried. Cried hard. At the same time there's Don writing real letters at last, sore-hearted too, crucial. Is it that we women were in crisis about our gender in the first half of our lives and these best of men are having to be in crisis about their gender in the last half of theirs? Both of them were hard, calculating, entitled, and though still entitled in ways they don't completely realize aren't hard anymore. It scares me for them, I know my own resiliency but not theirs. Can they survive it. Luke says he worries about me and I always feel, WHAT?? What's to worry about. 11
It's 8:30 in the morning and there is nothing to do. Yesterday waiting for it to be 3pm and time to go to Gina I just lay down and slept because there was nothing else. I've done what I can with 1890 Granite, now I just have to wait for Rob to move and will he, I don't know. I was in high joyful energy about it going to Merritt and came back slackened by his nebbish tightness. There was the lovely morning on the road and photos to show and then my birthday and then the day after nothing more. I know there have to be slack stretches between moments with hold to them but when has it ever been this blank. The sky is covered today, even silver, the cliff even dull brown. Still penned in this dark room with its miser's slit windows, nowhere to go on a Friday morning. The fridge is motoring diligently, smell of burnt apple from the oven. Have nothing to read and don't want to read what I have, is it less strength to make something of anything or is it less patience with irrelevance, a stronger sense of irrelevance. My head has been tired with Gina since I got back from Merritt, I look at the clock, which I never did, because I feel myself having to push my brain. 13 I'm frightened about the house. When I think of it my heart shakes. I hadn't heard from Rob for a week though I'd sent him this and that. Phoned him last night. "What are we thinking? By which I mean what are you thinking." He had been thinking no. That first part of the conversation dropped me into a well of fear. I seem to really want this, I'm not in balance, I'm set on it. Should I be?
A mathematician at the beginning of a difficult problem is trying to maneuver his way into a maze. I am thinking, where is the door? Then, on July 3, 2012, in the middle of the afternoon, Within five or ten minutes, the way is open. Zhang is willing to be stuck much longer. 14
15 Often when I've turned off the light to sleep and have wandered in unwatched fading thoughts I'll be braked hard by a sensation of fear as if my heart has stopped. I give it three or four hard kicks with my diaphragm and then it's alright. I've learned now to give it those kicks before I begin to drift. It's 7 after the time change. Open sky showing pale blue over the cliff. This room looks so much better with flowers in it. White primroses with yellow centres, white hyacinths. Tuesday, Gina at 10. The good wife at night. It's so well made. Short scenes. Good casting. Sense of watching actual people talking to each other. Margulies, Panjabi, Baranski walking around in wonderful clothes. Margulies' face always holds. Highly effective women. Women effective by being smart in a supple way. A culture where women actually have equal clout. High end soaps have been doing that - Rimes, Downton. It's moved forward since West wing. 17 There is difficulty involved in going from the basic sentence that's headed in the right direction to making a fine sentence. Sez Proulx.
time remaining volume 3: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project
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