Work and Days: Time remaining vol 4

time remaining 4 part 1 - may-july work & days: a lifetime journal project

April 30 2016 1890 Granite Ave, Merritt

I was desperate to have it and now I'm here. It's as if I've made an arranged marriage: whatever it is here I stay. There's ugly furniture. There are a lot of scars. The boiler when I turned up the thermostat last night made the whole house purr. I'm in the guest room and it's in a far corner. I'm still a guest until I've got rid of a lot of junk and changed colors everywhere and made my own spaces.

When I woke the moon stood at waning half to the south above the church's yard. Hills at either end of the street, nearby. Sky lightening to the north. It's clear after rain.

Yesterday and Thursday cleaning and packing and hauling downstairs, pushing myself every moment, too old to be doing what I was doing. After I'd got here and pushed some more to get the kitchen useable and a bed made lying here with my legs aching to the hip, fiery pain. Slept and woke better and went to the store.

Hello Tom's birthday. You're 70.

Daylight at 5:30. White lilacs thick in the front yard.

Gina helped. That was right. Gina and her big cranky Robie and tiny child heavy as iron. Earned love with Gina, earned on both sides. We conspired to cheat her way through her English competency exam.

Saturday. Lilacs all over town. Five months of summer ahead. Beautiful October. By then it'll be a house ready to be mine.

1st May

I went through my garden files, looked at everything again and threw out all the California pages. Bitterly: I'll never be able to make those kinds of gardens again. Then I went through the house files and threw out all the California houses, all the houses full of light. I threw out my house designs on graph paper. My beautiful possibilities have shrunk to this dark house with too many rooms. It's what I have. Everything I do to like it more will make me ache all over.

Meantime I'm sitting in the shade of my own plum tree hearing a single dove. There's the rowan, there's the white lilac hedge. A lot of little plums forming, size of an apple seed. Sky perfectly clear blue, pale blue. It's a quiet town. I'm sleeping in the guest room next to Granite Avenue and nothing wakes me. Sunday afternoon in a town that's not up to much. Those aren't pretty hills. Some dark conifer - they're pines.

2nd

Looking at my reflection in the kitchen window saying my wide shoulders will be there to the end. I'll be an old woman with considerable shoulders.

Rob last night said he dreams sometimes that he opens a door into a basement he hadn't known was there, many rooms, a living room. The form of the dream I used to have was always a small room higher up. His dream is correct about him, he stays out of his depth and that eliminates him though he's smart and sweet. I'm thinking of Tom who barges around in his depth and can imagine it, more than imagine, feel it, in me and anyone. What Joyce meant when she said he had integrity. Oh Tom. I'm married to this house instead of you.

I'm thinking of the bench on Bancroft St too - I could have had a bright small cabin on the river in a small town where they liked me already.

It's 5:30, the sky to the south is tinted white. I woke aching. The yard is a shambles of old wood, gravel, little piles of stones and bricks, round lumps of hollyhock.

Can you tell me why this is better than the river ready, early love, love woman, slow growth
I need this difficulty and banality yes
The Lillouet house would have been better no
Physically I need the effort YES
Can I solve the pain yes
Should I live on painkillers yes

-

It's a good fence. I can hear the neighbours but not see them. Stupid children yelling.

Strong scent of mountain ash flowers. Across the street little white anemones.

What have I done today - brought another load from storage, sold the bunk bed for $100, met a weasel-eyed neighbour called Kevin who stopped when I was pulling boxes from the hatch of the jeep, started to sort bits and tools in the garage, had a nap in the back bedroom, phoned a landscaper who said he'd come look at the pergola but didn't or did and drove on past, took a couple of measurements, wrote email in the coffee shop, asked for a boiler inspection, repotted the fig. Wondering how to grid the fruit trees. Wondering how to get planting soil out of this hard lawn. Wondering whether I'll get stronger and find a way not to hurt so much after work.

3rd

At a table looking south over the yard. It's 8 at night, there's a dark grey sky moving west. Trees tossing - Tom would know how many knots. The plum. There are tall trees in the neighbourhood, two doors west a large willow I can see from the kitchen window, others along the alley I'll go look at to name. In this grey light they have ways of moving but I can't make them out. There's the cone of the steeple. Wires east-west.

What I did today:

Made a lot of work lists
Baillie's House came and got the pile of junk
Took the TV and toaster over to recycling - found it
Brought a load of boxes from storage
Got a post box
Changed my BCDL and auto insurance address
Got a SAFER change of address package
Deposited a check and gave the credit union my address
Talked to Luke on FB messaging
Stopped at the goodwill and bought a double sheet, a shirt, pj bottoms I'm wearing and a little tray to dry eggshells
Copied phone numbers for painters, drywaller, garden help etc

There was a moment coming out of the goodwill, fat drops of water hitting hot concrete, the scent of. Scent of leaves. Thick rank smell of mountain ash flowers.

An old woman in the goodwill came and put her frail hands on my hands to show me how cold they were. Yesterday a young woman standing next to me by the apple bins in Cooper's looked me straight in the face - she had a quite dark open face - and said "What kind of apples do you like?"

Now I'll have benchmarks for the seasons, I'll begin to. What May is like, this boiling-out of trees in flower, lilacs everywhere, other trees too, across the road in St Michael's yard two trees impressively pink against a Russian olive.

There's water in the air - the hill to the south has whited out. The kitchen window is a good window I'm realizing.

4th

Took an egg out of my bra - was swimming in small pools with some others, stood looking over the wrinkling sea asking why no one was swimming there.

Grey batten sky today.

Daphne's The given was on the library shelf. 2008 McLelland & Stewart. While I was away. It holds.
It begins with waking. There's a you.
There's the Strathcona house, the park, the synagogue, Commercial Drive, the Woodwards occupation.
Paragraph scenes.
She with Briget getting out of bed.
She with her husband? Roy? and Kit at five.
Her father calls to say her mother's dead.
Birds either past or present.

She brings in authors - Ethel Wilson, Duras, Woolf, Richardson, Pauline Johnson, HD.
Ads and news stories.
Comments on process.
She's lower case except for proper names and book functions like acknowledgements and notes.
Her middle-class childhood with its '50s clichés.
The drama of a dead body sustained for 126 pages.
There was always money to buy good clothes, to buy houses and cars.

She does things with language I don't like, common phrases used with significance, "Mum's the word" etc. Why don't I like them. They're from her language poem phase and they're a self-conscious habit.

The home of the moment writing returned to.
Her city earned with most of her life.
Her mother's letters. Her child diary.
How the '50s saw the city.
Shrines to ghosts.
Plot of the Second Narrows bridge.
Anxious bliss, that's her.
Some recapitulation of styles.
Her characteristic widening generalizing move and a time-collecting move.
The calf girl scribbler - I wdn't have mentioned that because I never liked it.
Paragraphs of her mother's sentences.
Then the darkening, her mom slides into madness - voices?

something to burn for those who have left, who go on burning in us

the tin-can glassy sound of someone rifling through recycling boxes

in that huge and unfamiliar light

- When she rushes out and feels the freedom of her mother gone.

I've gone through again reading for structure, mostly, not needing to reread the paragraphs.

What do I take from it. Immediately want to do it myself but won't, arrangement of the personal; deepening, widening of the personal isn't what I do. I could but I haven't. I let it be.

She really is about home in the sense that she anchors to the personal and builds out into large structures like the city around the house. She wants it all pegged down. She has an anxiety about home and I must too but I don't expect to be anchored? I'm not middle class, I'm scrappy. I don't have an old lover or two dogs and a cat. The lover I had was a bad man not a devoted old woman. There's always been something too domestic about D but it has given her a solid anchored career, steady achievement recognizable by anyone. Steady development, I see in this piece which is maybe her best?

Last evening when I was reading in the south bedroom there came a moment of white light blazing on the white curtain beside me. It was the sun due west sunk horizontal through the kitchen window.

6:39 another lidded day in another new exile. Discontinuous. I'm comparatively discontinuous.

-

Moved loose wood to the free wood piles - Doug helped.
Started to dig around the rhubarb.
Moved some of the bricks.
Boiler inspector.
Ate some of my own rhubarb.
Bought rosemary, pineapple sage, winter savory, oregano.

Found some wild roses along the back fence of the RV park, very strong with dark shiny rough small leaves and elegantly crossed buds - lots of buds. The leaves smell good. I'll start some of those.

- Look! A patch of lit sky next to the willow, which is drifting its long strands.

Followed Voght around past the storage yard and came to a narrow gravel track winding high up into the hills, past a rock quarry. Far across the valley tiny cars and trucks streaming along the Coque, a line like a wire sweeping in broad curves.

The house cracks suddenly.

This room's bad pink the color of sugared almonds. Something much more subtle - all white and then a thin glaze or speckle of pale grey-green maybe.

I was timid digging, afraid of pain later, but I did enough to love the soil, which is light and fine-grained without rocks. Alluvial silt. I'm happy having started the garden, seeing it a bit clearer.

-

Dante
Cavalcanti - Boulogna and Arab science, autopsy - soul dies with the body, Tuscany 1240
Late 1200s Averroes deriving from Aristotle
Guido who spoke of paradise as a career for the visionary - widening experiences of beauty
stil nuovo 'eyes and heart and soul have separate voices and converse together'

Can one produce a soul worthy of -

aim was to be rich, full and complete

Memory palaces and writing - network evocation

Dante in exile was on the road able to see for instance birds rising from a bank.

When I saw myself come to that time
of my age when one should lower
sails and gather in one's ropes

She's a pretentious enthusiast sycophant of a Dante she blandly presumes to understand. I won't mention her name. I revile her but am reading her bad book to think my own thoughts. It's simply wrong to read Dante uncritically.

the Zohar 1290 'the sensuous soulful Shekhina'
transport, zeal, liquefaction, longing in absence, fervor and fruition
in pursuit of a larger, brighter and more dangerous world
churches to Mary, Cistercians
praised as Marrah (brine) and Mor (myrrh)
Stilla Maris. Stella Maris. Stilla is drop of water.
Purgatory as birth
In paradise he learns about light.

6

Reading Dante by light of the moon lamp, and there sunrise imprinted on the wall.

The awakening to Aristotle in the 13th century was the work of generations.
Love was there until misfortune turned it into theology. Said Carlyle.
Enwombs himself in love, m'inventro

as babies stretch up their arms to their mothers

-

Can I mend my nervous system yes
Will kum nye help yes
Should I be eating differently no
Can I make it more creamy yes
Is it okay to take aspirin yes
Something stronger no
Alkalinity YES
Give up tea for a while no
Will you guide me to mend pain YES

7

Dante, Shakespeare, Romantics, modernists

A Protestant Canadian farm girl making a path through vast miscellany.

Modernism was found not given, I was educated in an earlier time than that past time. I'm still finding it though living later in certain ways.

Saturday -

Got rid of the woodbox full
Got the alley gates open
Got rid of most of the wood on the gravel
Washed the black sweater
Ironed everything that needed it
Figured out how to turn on the water outside
Watered the rhubarb and the plum tree
Posted light and house
Got accepted to Sell & Swap and the Merritt Grapevine
Looked at stuff in the second hand furniture store
Went to the pitiful local art show
Read metaphysics of modernism

This aft a hot wind from the south, flag lined up straight north, scent of lumber. In the yard lumber and lilac.

Posted the lilac house photo.

'Spiritual' is a word that betrays such a blank.

We have about us only the unseen country road,
The unseen twigs, breaking their tips with blossom.

The question of consolation - whether or not - is an ethical question - character in the writer - but it seems old-fashioned, why. - Come back to it. There are more kinds of ethical temptation and refusal implicit in any art. Is it about what they assume consoles. A work can satisfy something, get something in Gendlin's sense. That's not wrong, it's what needs to happen.

8

Church bell at 10, not showy, brief.

I look nice in these bathroom mirrors.

Have unpacked the five collages I made in 1975 reading Helen in Egypt.

Denise Jones who also is 71 sorted the wood pile and took away most of the old boards including some of the 1x6 siding so I can see what's in the two big boxes.

Then tonight I drew the little works yard behind the lattice, figuring out how to lay the concrete pads and how many more I need - size of the compost box to leave a bit of space for a tree.

Started to look at masonry books.

9

Did less, hurt less.
Denise Jones took more wood and I gave her the orchid.
Late in the day I pulled up and stacked all the firebrick.
2 hours for Gina.
Mail from PO box 381 for the first time, Rob sent seeds.
Futzed with messages to people who failed to take the pergola, waited around.
Cleared counter space, plates too chipped to sell into the jeep.
Rethought the works yard.
Cooked delicious basa fish.
Read a good stone building book.

It seems I'm satisfied just to have a place to be.

Look how perkier the cyclamen is with a south window.

'Spiritual' 'attempt to discover a reality behind surface appearance'

- What kind of metaphor is that? When science does it it's not called that. The metaphor has a prebirth feel. Kandinsky meant something else, self-construction.

10

Claude has taken down all of the pergola but the top and sides.
Isaiah and Dennis gave me a $200 estimate for painting the workroom and the center room white.
Claude carried away all the junk wood next to the garage.
I got rid of the dishes at the thrift store.
Found a bedside table at the antique store that could match the bookshelf at the strange man's.
Began to arrange delivery of the Bombay cabinets after the room's painted.
Said I'd go to Kamloops for the red armchair on Thursday.
Showed Claude all the future projects.
Cooked chicken stew.
Gave someone $10 for not buying her rickety sawhorses.

- And it's still just a bit after 2.

-

So now the parlour-workroom is painted and bookshelves coming.

I'm on the sofa in the verandah. West light blasting onto the lilacs, which are starting to rust. Traffic on Chapman more at this time - bit after 7 - than usual. Spotlight on the ash tree [Manitoba maple]. - There are some high hills to the north - too thick with pines, a weak green on the slopes between them, grass that'll be yellow later. It's a rugged hill, unused.

Claude laughed when I showed him the sketchup jpgs of the laundry room. Claude Desy. I was awake before 5 and very early had posted a call for a handyman on the Merritt Grapevine. He'd replied before 8 and wanted to be here by 10. I took him through the whole house and had him sitting beside me in front of the monitor. He laughed to see it made as if by magic.

He's a find. Old and rickety, has a belly, bad knees, bad hips, hobbles around, but so strong, big hard handshake, and such a worker. He immediately got interested in the pergola, said he'd take it down, but before he did had to carry away all the junk wood so he could back in on the gravel strip - all of it. "You need to have a clean work site." "Yes you do" I said. Big bald head running with sweat, wide sweet smile, a large natural spirit. I like his voice. He has barrel legs.

Smell of latex paint in the house. It's not really non-toxic, I can feel it in my muscles, but it's done. Isaiah and Dennis - Native brothers. They were ready to work this afternoon and they worked in silence, got three coats on, not perfectly as Tom would have done it. I rode them a bit because I didn't know them. Will see in the morning whether it's good.

Neighbours walking past.

Is there room for a ponderosa?

Those thick yellow roses across the front where the lilacs are?

I can ask Claude to make the compost bin first. Thinking of chipping the lilacs, where to put them.

11

Jennifer beautifully digging the fenceline strip.
Robert is not a worker but has made a patch 4x8 for $42.
Claude still banging at the pergola.
Jane at Harris is sending the brass lamp, says she doesn't have batwing shades for the sconces. $645 and tax. O.C.White early 1900s.
Heather at Cal Coast says the fund can stay in IRA savings where I can withdraw it anytime.
Ordered cheques at Interior Savings and got counter checks for buying stuff.
Reminded Lois of the deposit.

Daisies, hosta, lilacs, cranesbill, iris, allium, purple fuzzy thing, 'wild celery', finer allium - heeled them in.

Jennifer Flower worked steadily, faultlessly for 6 hours. Plant person. She said there was more bloom this year than she's seen.

There's an evening wind - from the west maybe? - tossing the corner rowan and the Manitoba maple and what is that stately evergreen west on Granite? Willow north on Nicola?

Dragon-shaped cloud gliding north.

So far everyone likes the house -

I worked today. Three other people working in the yard helped my energy. It felt normal, as before. I dug around the rhubarb to pull grass, dug some along the fence before Jennifer arrived, cut back the saved perennials and heeled them in, watered them.

-

indigenous stone
ashlar
stone maul
reading the grain
moving stones - rolling on board and pipes, dragging on a tire, hand truck
recess the mortar, sponge it off right away
tie stones, cap stones
drystone stonework
pitching a stone - cutting near the edge
the stone foundation - Stonexus magazine
rake the joints

flatwork - sandstone, limestone, slate always set on concrete or deep-packed gravel base - set on a base of gravel to below frost level - dry laid - top dress with fine sand or rock dust
pitch 1" in 8' porch and terraces
mortar: lime, Portland cement and sand
masonry cement - just add sand

Footing concrete: 1 part Portland, 2 parts sand, 3 parts crushed gravel
1. sand in the wheelbarrow or mortar mixing box
2. add cement
3. mix dry
4. add water - how much depends on how wet the sand
5. mix in gravel bit at a time

In a mixer
1. start with a bit of water
2. add gravel to scour out
3. sand
4. cement
5. add more water till cement flows over the mixer tines but doesn't splash out - dry enough to hold peaks when shoveled out - wet enough to level out when you shake or smooth with a hoe

#4 rebar - pour half then lay down - overlap ends
Mortar: 1 part lime, 2 parts Portland, 9 parts sand - eg shovelful
1. dry mix
2. move dry to one end
3. pour water (some) and chop dry into it little by little
4. when you run out of water open a space beyond the mixed and add more
5. when you get to the end be v careful not to add too much water
6. go back and mix from the other end - not more water
7. use within 3 or 4 hours of mixing

1. set footing 2 days
2. lay out stones
3. lift individual stones and put a half to an inch of mortar under
4. fill cracks recessing half inch - don't have gaps more than an inch, fill with chips if necessary
5. when it's dry enough not to run spray it - wet it thoroughly 4 x that day or next and if it's hot cover with plastic

12

Sore night after digging.

Lying awake this morning thinking of the moments that register but aren't answered, subtle insults often. They aren't unconscious but they aren't connected in a way that allows action. It's as if they're little islands of structure. At the same time they have a lot of hold, come back over many years.

-

Quilchena - I'm so hungry - since 5 this morning I washed my hair, drove fast on a freeway - sat with elderly persons who try to be kind but don't know how to talk - groped through more fast roads to the pretentious rich houses on the north shore - bought an armchair - gassed up - walked bewildered in Art Knapp's aisles - bought a Cox's orange pippin and a spade - groped more fast roads to the 5a turnoff - and have been steering tight curves through grassland pale lime greens and celadon silvers desperately tired, and have turned in to this old-timey hotel dining room where I am hating their canned Sinatra which they must feel is of the period, close enough. Oh please hurry with my meatloaf and fries, young waitress who looks nice in an elastic pencil skirt and praises everyone's ordering.

-

Thinking about armchairs and sofas and my apple tree - where to put it in a bit of shade - and counting my money.

ceiling lights x 3
washer and dryer
desk chair
rugs for workroom, niche, dining room central rug
bedside table
bookshelf
compost bin
mushroom compost
paint dining room, back bedroom
lattice

13

Jennifer and Ben for 6 hours. She dug, he demolished the large box of 6x2's. I dug up the gate corner. Ben carried two big rocks into the alley. Claude levered the posts out of the ground and cut off their concrete boots with a chainsaw. Jenn helped me carry in the red chair. Ben brought his trolley and moved the wood box too so now the back corner except for some weeds is clear. Am waiting for the cabinets but they won't come tonight.

Miriam said: irises, paeonies, daylilies, lilacs because they're Russian, briar roses only, no David Austins, dry wind, 40 below.

14

Set up the cabinet-bookshelf in the workroom, cabinet in the center room, bookshelf in the guestroom
Moved in my books and CDs and placed them
Set up a beautiful thing: moonlamp and glass wave on the cabinet
Moved the dining-table desk and all its machines
Claytyn excavated most of the back corner
Had 5 yards of mushroom compost delivered
Delivery guy took away the woodbox
Bought filter cloth, pruning sealer and poppy seeds
Bought padded socks
Food-shopped

Jeans waistband is loose, have already worked off most of the winter blubber.

15

Advertised the headboard - no interest
Failed to sell the microwave
Claytyn finished digging the works area and carried over the concrete blocks
Sorted the garage
Brought three white plastic boxes in and distributed their stuff including hard drives and paperwork
Did a laundry
Repotted the pineapple sage and oregano

Is the house warping more? Bit seasick walking from the kitchen to the parlour.

I'm not as afraid of pain I want to say. If I work I hurt. I like to work.

16

Jenn dug in the morning.
I collected the pergola's sand base into buckets and filled the holes, lifted the plastic sheeting
Later half-dug that patch
Claude built a frame for the compost yard gravel
In the aft Ben and Jenn lifted gravel and filled the frame
Woke at 2, was reading Master and commander and laughing
We all quit at two in the aft
Redrew the orchard, tried it on the left half
Pruned and sealed plum branches that were broken
The brass lamp came

17

Ben and I laid the pavers in the works yard
Jenn raked up the gravel on the path and in front of the pergola pad
Jenn also dug to the ends of her second fence row and then dug a further strip moving south from the pergola's square - ran into ants
Went home with my marbles book and a piece of petrified wood

18

Jenn dug two hrs worth of strip
I mailed to Juna Gray and pd the boiler inspector

19

Jennifer noticed something had slept on the round grey patch of star-flower-thing next to the fence, a deer she thought.

The rose clump along the RV park's back fence is a stunningly graceful spill, the way it holds its branches with many stems curled up all tipped with yellow explosions. Further along the wire fence another tall shrub this one with small pink singles - wild-rose scented. The yellow are unscented but the leaves have a sharp green spice.

How are things. It's not my ideal house which would be single and full of light - a single open space not all these dark rooms. It strikes people as charming at first sight. The sloped floors physically bewilder me. I'm noticing them more than I did. The verandah is unuseably full of stuff. The cellar is a dirty hole. Most of the light fixtures are hideous. The kitchen is awkward, there's nowhere to put things when I take them off the stove. I do like sitting at the kitchen table looking out over the garden. The peaked cullet lit up by the moon lamp is magnificent. I've been dreaming of Tom these nights, not happily. The workroom is cozy but the desk seems to slope. I haven't worked there though it looks nice. Need a work chair.

What needs doing first:

Getting rid of the furniture
Moving the washer and dryer wdn't take long
Fixing the verandah is large and expensive
Back steps before snow and ice
Painting the middle room wdn't take long
Permission to paint the south bedroom all over - get rid of that bed - find a mirror
Take the doors off the kitchen cupboards
Replace ceiling fixtures and sell the existing
Don't like the door hardware - it should be brass
Replace these silly curtain ducks
Get venetians

Grey sky today, a subdued dull-hearted feeling. It's due to rain all week.

Choir program at the United Church. Is Merritt worse than La Glace was. Staring at faces, absorbed in faces, feeling there's no one for me, angry tonight at the women's shrill voices and defeated rat faces. I used to scan for one face and hang onto it if I found it, inscribe myself with it. There was a little girl with what kind of face was it, small, natural, easy, with dark bangs. She liked to sing but didn't make a show of it.

I like Jennifer. She's strong, curious, a bit formal, carefully spoken. Darby-shire she says, a grandfather she likes who came after the war. A Native man she used to lay bets against about for instance the coming winter, based on what the beaver were doing. I took her to see the yellow rose.

This aft looking for a rose garden I wandered into a lot of Natives taking pictures of each other in black graduation gowns. There was the mud-colored Nicola swirling in its low town banks. Nicola Valley Institute of Technology I think. The Native grads and their white classmates looked equally lumpen. Native elders were there in ceremonial gowns with red sashes saying "Elder".

It rained on my bare stirred earth.

The plums are the size of olives and seem to be larger every day.

Scent of wild rose in the kitchen now.

20

Oh I hate poetry. (Gioia's anthology.) I hate the look of it, its little boxes. I hate knowing about poets' personal moments. Then I like Duncan singing his lover's body.

Most beautiful! The red-flowering eucalyptus,
The madrone, the yew
Is he

So thou woulds't smile, and take me in thine arms
The sight of London to my exiled eyes
Is as Elysium to a new-come soul

I thought a Being more than vast, His body leading
into Paradise, his eyes
quickening a fire in me, a trembling

(This was long ago. It was another life)
and said

What do you want of me?
I do not know, I said. I have fallen in love. He
has brought me into heights and depths my heart
would fear without him. His look

It seems to me I've only been in love once and it was final: it will never undo. I began to be in love other times - Frank, Roy, Cheryl - but stopped myself or was stopped by having no way forward. Joyce unstopped me and then I went where maybe other people go in their 20s, I attached. It's going to be two years and I'm still holding onto Tom.

"You and Frank were lifers." I wasn't but maybe he was.

22

Merritt Starbucks on the ridge, directly opposite a darkly treed curve of mountain bisected by a hydro line, at its foot the smooth double curves of the Coque with pale dots sliding along them. Beyond the window two RCMP officers buckled into their heavy gear, one an unturbaned Sikh and the other a shaven-headed white, yellow stripes down their dark blue pant legs.

Work, I've begun many times and interrupted. Now I'm where I can start and not stop. I don't know how, don't know what to make, there's such a heap of twigs of preparation.

23

Reading Jam's description of my writing.
Such a pressure of extinction.

A lot of starlings in the yard. They peck at the wet grass and struggle with the stale peanuts I threw on my dug patch.

They call it May long weekend, which isn't pagan enough. What is it actually, seeding Monday.

24

Bought plant pots for $10 and found a woman called Harriet whose driveway had a chunk of granite with saw marks and whose husband is a Native carver. She had a good woman's soft face, led me into the house to see an urn carved in jasper I think, with an eagle spreading its wings back along its corners.

Monday morning. Two garden chairs set to face the house. Claude has gone home to work on the compost box. I was measuring for the trees' grid.

I seeded some short salad rows next to the house and it was so hard to do, getting down to the ground, getting up again, staggering back and forth fetching things. Am I arranging a life for someone I only wish I still were, will it get easier before it gets harder. I will so depend on money to do what will need doing.

27

It's raining very gently on my acres. Seeds in, now three days off, already less in pain. There stands the compost box all but the lid, peas and beans along the fence, lettuce - 6 kinds - radishes, beets, chard, three kinds of zucchini, 5 of cucumber, 3 of carrots, nasturtiums, Shirley poppies, basil, dill, parsley. 6 strawberry plants from the farmers' market. Plan for a raspberry frame. Space for the pear in the far corner - I think the pear because it will grow large.

Meantime it's Friday, satisfaction of putting the garbage on the curb: still clean-up garbage. Next Sunday a full month. Electric bill, gas bill. Jennifer and Claude my magically arrived helpers. Around town I'm joyfully easy and straightforward in needing and giving.

28

Phoned Rob last night, had to ask about two things: cutting back the old lilacs and the forsythia, and painting the woodwork in the south bedroom, and then about pulling out the built-in cupboard in that room rather than painting it. We were on the phone two hours. He had a glass of wine or maybe more than one and as time went by he got sweeter. "I've missed talking to you." "I had my head down getting things done." "That's what I thought." So then I thought, a man has bought me a house out of love. His mom has died, his brother bond is breaking up, has broken up, and he needs to tell the many thoughts of his lone fond life.

Walked two blocks west on Granite and back up the alley to see what's growing. Pure yellow iris, pure white iris, potatoes going for full size, carrots 3", white oriental poppies, a large cherry tree, many apple trees.

[kitchen May 28]

29

Sunday morning 7:16 raining steadily. I'm at the kitchen table eating fried eggs on toast looking out at my messy garden. Small birds, two, running along the top of the white fence. There's the compost box with its recycled boards, pile of grass pulled up. Iron cylinder lying on its side. Four concrete cylinders. Two garden chairs - I should bring their cushions in. Plum tree leaves full of green health. Garden patch Jennifer dug showing seeded rows - two lines showing babies. Buckets full of gravel. Cardboard boxes. Broken window frame. Dirt pile, compost pile on tarps. Soaked cardboard laid down under black plastic and carpet. Dirty plywood holding compost away from the garage wall. If I lean forward the edge of a mountain ash with rusted flower heads. White vapor closing in the ends of the streets. The United Church's good shape and bad color.

- There I needed to go for a walk. Alley after the church, philadelphus in full bloom, a pear, fine old trees, many.

Dreamed Mary. Looking at a garbled home-knit child's sweater. It seemed two or maybe one and a half separate sweaters knit into one, I wondered whether it would be worth visiting her.

30

Traveling with my family in a truck or bus. My father stops - we're in Paris - and says we're getting off. I do. He drives away with everyone else except a young man. Then one of the dreams in which I'm walking on and on and can't find my way back. I wake with wet pyjama top at 5:30. At the end I was with small Luke struggling through snow to my knees, crossing a wide plaza, looking down onto many lanes of traffic shooting into an underpass in the dusk, seeing across roofs to white cupolas of churches, searching for landmarks I know I hadn't seen well. I put my hand into my coat pocket for my phone. I could call the Canadian Embassy with a message for my parents. It won't light up. The battery must be dead. If I could get back to the room with the young man I'd been dropped off with I could use his or maybe he could charge mine. Just before I wake I had stopped in the small wooden room of a man who maybe was a shoe repair man and was telling him the story. - As always now when I tell dreams feeling the uselessness, nearly nothing is told. Moving in a vast complicated space of streets, buildings, directions, vistas. The emotional story is familiar, it's the story of my days now, but the scenery it wore is spectacular.

Days now: do I need to tell more of the struggle with pain and weakness and aloneness. Pain all day like someone in the house who comes and goes. I walked yesterday morning and then paid in sore mid-back and neck muscles. Weakness even in my head, studying pear trees and fading out of energy to focus. I lie down because sitting is uncomfortable, I read something and doze off. Aloneness the old familiar stoicism, a long day with no one but me in it scraping for something to do. At a distance the spectre of my zombie mother. Louie withdrawn, Tom closed away.

Colin's book Properties - read it feeling his entitlement. He is welcomed to publish this miscellaneous junk because he's a tall fine-looking well-bred male? I mean, I have so much hesitated to try to publish my own, knowing it would not be - and isn't - welcomed.

He has the fathers at his back, the many, of all recorded times. He's not ashamed to demand their support, not for his skill but for his lordly appearance. He's a man who in public told his wife she was being boring. And Daphne on the back cover calls it a major work. He borrows not to be boring. Better to be random and obscure, if those are the only choices.

- Look at the shrunken cardboard patches on the grass, news sheets flown to corners and edges of the yard. It'll have to be thorough coverage.

As I get older will I understand cognitive weaknesses and their effects that have been in front of me mysterious all my life. My brain didn't get tired, other people's have all along.

-

I'm forsaken when it's overcast.

Clean blue and white today, a sun chair by the doorstep. I'm tired like an old person wanting just to sit in the warmth. Afraid of effort.

Location pinned by trees, neighbours' adolescent blue spruce still with Christmas star; the broad willow; a fir? with two leaders. Then four of something in a row weighted with cones. Then my plum, old, thick, deformed, dense with shining leaves and hidden plums. Then a huge maple with pink keys. Then the church's back yard rowan shaped like an English tree. Then the steeple. Then my three fenceline rowans. Then St Michael's - what are they? - flowering crabs? - that were pink in front of silver.

I hear a dove, some little thing squeaking, traffic on Chapman and Quilchena. Bragging motorcycles pass. Planet Fitness on the corner.

Things to do:

See a chiropractor about my L shoulder
Move the compost box and shift grass and mushroom manure into it in layers
Roll the concrete bolsters into place
Invent something to do with the metal cylinder
Cardboard-carpet the orchard thickly
Find chips to hold it down
Sell the bricks
Dump run after compost moved
Gravel into the garage
Compost around the rhubarb
Dig a hole for the fig and plant it

I'm learning there's warming up. Began the day reluctant, tired. Started one small thing, forking a little almost bare patch behind the hollyhocks. Found a good green rock, pulled it into the corner, and then on. When Jennifer came after one she laid down cardboard and I planted a row of beans. Got a handful of seed potatoes from Purity Feeds, prepped holes for them. Then Jenn and I tackled the grass pile. It took two sides of the new compost box but that patch is clean. What'll I do with the steep drop there'll be under the trellis. A concrete pad the ground will drop behind. Meantime Claude is working on a raspberry support. I think the Cox's orange pippin in the sheltered corner and get a dwarfing pear - semi-dwarfing - for maybe the compost corner instead.

Here is a thrilling thing, Erin Wiebe coming tomorrow at 2pm to clean my house. Regular once a month or maybe twice. She said ten an hour. I said no, twelve, startled how cheap labor is.

31st

The house that's like 820A East Pender was stripped to its frame waiting to be demolished. I was walking in the neighbourhood when I noticed. Came nearer and looked at small remnant roses around it thinking I could maybe take cuttings. I was walking back when I met Luke about ten years old, said come and see the brown house. He wasn't interested, had somewhere to go, turned and walked north.

Is that house something specific no
It's a time yes
It says something is gone no
Something is stripped yes
It's about the work of the time no
The being of the time yes
My gifted period yes
Is this physical focus dangerous to my work no

Worked hard yesterday and didn't suffer last night -

June 2nd

I was going to be a prostitute with a young man. Oh he's going to wear his uniform, a white naval officer's. How do I begin. I touch his face little touches. Have my cheek laid against his. He says he doesn't like my cheek touching him. I instantly give up being a prostitute, say I don't like lying. "The touches were true." He's leaving but we'll likely see each other again. We could be friends.

Claude Desy had driven up in his grey work pickup yesterday and I had been digging the fence strip. He looked into my face and said, Do you ever take days off? He wondered whether I was overdoing. "You looked rough for a couple of days but you look fine this morning." He's just right-there and smart and true and loves a project. And Jennifer and I took care of her last fifteen minutes before two o'clock sitting on the steps drinking limonata and talking in the sun. She'd found a rock with tiny amethyst-looking crystals and wondered whether it was ore. I asked about snakes and she said there are three kinds of garter snakes and she'd seen a bullsnake out by Colletteville. She had found the hole near the tap where ground wasps go home.

Yesterday I was so keen to work I was out half an hour before Jenn arrived.

3

Plant the apple
Plant the fig
Spray both with soap
Plant the street edges
Soak the compost
Buy and plant raspberries
More rhubarb
More strawberries
Study the orchard book properly
Find chips
Figure out the lattice
Paint the rasp frame
Paint the trellis
Get rid of lilac and forsythia
Clean those edges
Find flagstone

4

Saturday morning, 5:30. I'm whiny today. It's June and it's cold. I woke aching. I hurt all over. I feel crummy. I feel crummy so much of the time. The house is wrong all over. The garden is messy. The town is ugly all over. Is it always going to be cold.

I've slept and slept today. Wanted to be gone.

It was hot later. I felt better but still wanted to be gone. Missing California, which is missing love, which is living wide open in pleasure at where I am.

The air is still. Plum leaves hanging relaxed, warm platinum sheen above the garden to the west. Spotlight on the middle rowan suddenly turned off. There it stands holding its feathers with precision. Wires all around, so many wires spoiling the sky.

I'm sitting with my back against the house scratching for something to like but it's all oh very ugly.

5

So I did a lot today. It was 104 degrees said the weather page. Really the house was cool. I cleared out as much of the verandah as I could, piled ugly junk for a dump run. Fred took down the forsythia and the ancient lilac trees. I hosed down the windows and walls that had been behind them. Sold the bricks, sent for a lap desk.

Writing in the verandah with my feet up. Western light on St Michael's and the grass hills east of town. Gail's roses and neat white fence over to the north. There's a neighbour waddling and glancing. Cottages across the road hidden among hedges and trees. Granite Avenue Sunday evening in June. Louie's birthday in Tuscany. Cherries from the Okanagan.

7

Deal with:

L shoulder
Source for books
Inflammation, soreness, stiffness

Nothing to read - sickened looking at the options - the library is exhausting and disgusting, fiction shelves miscellaneous junk end to end, have already read the two possible books in the literature section, Greg says Overdrive system for ebooks but it's the same there. SFU won't give alums access to online resources except from library computers. VPL shows most online resources not available. Hasn't publishing turned to mush in general. Appalled, appalled.

9

Trouble with the lattice. I was trusting Claude too much. The raspberry frame has made me see I can't leave him to it.

The deck blocks are a mistake yes
I should have caught that yes
He hadn't thought it through YES
I'm ill yes
Because I'm doing too much no
Yesterday morning was really bad yes
-
Is that a correct plan yes
Can he do it no
Can I hand it on and stay friendly with him yes
Can Billy do it yes

Monck wildflower meadow, Coyote Valley Road

Bright morning day off. I drove east as far as Monck, which isn't far and right away into grassland. Turned left onto what might be a street or else a ranch road and there a dry open place with barelegged ponderosa pines and flocks of blue flowers. Seen closer, white and yellow too. Shallow basin of gravelly soil, plants often single in their spaces. A bird's voice unusually beautiful, meadowlark? Open views in every direction. Walked slowly with the camera finding more kinds. Joyful, relieved. Was thinking of the little patch of meadow at my front door. Could I grow a few of these? Purple alfalfa, sparse gallardia, yarrow, butter-and-eggs. A short bright tap-rooted yellow thing. Oh - a buckwheat, cream-colored, salsifies looking right, a single mullein stalk, ah this radiating bright little aster-thing. A whole garden.

blue viper's bugloss
yellow figwort butter-and-eggs
cream parsnip-flowered buckwheat
yarrow
gallardia arristata
purple and blue alfalfa
mullein
low sundew thing
short pussytoes thing
salsify
low round aster
mustard
sagebrush
silver tasteless currant
small wild rose
single-headed grass

[Opposite page lattice planning]

10

Polcary Down and the cold sky over it; a searching air from the north breathing over the water-meadows, up across the plough land, up and up to this great sweep of open turf, the down, with the covert-called Rumbelt's gorse sprawling on the lower edge of it.

And then surely style and grace beyond a certain point take the place of virtue - are virtue, indeed?

Bike tuned and cleaned by Trevor.

11

First potato up.

13

I worked yesterday and had a community garden dream, realized happily that we were coming up to open house day. Billy has given me a price for the fence and lattice both for this week. Ben'll do a dump run. Then there won't be much left for Jenn to do unless I have her paint.

I should do something about ceiling lamps.

Frye on Blake because it's the only possible book in the lit section, suspiciously. He's a kind of man I'd find physically disgusting. I start there but still hope for good company because he's so praised and it's Blake.

'Imagination,' 'vision.' The tenor all so grandiose. Biblical loyalty in both - prophets, wish to be one. I can't read it, it's a jumble.

And then open Always coming home to 'The world dance' and there is someone imagining in the daylight without allegory very largely and without male pomp.

Blake was himself to the hilt it seems and that by itself is worth meeting but Frye is some kind of vile concoction.

15

Took photos of the street and house at cold 6am. [Granite Ave west] [Granite Ave east] [guest bedroom]
The Napopes came and I said yes to painting the middle room.
Decided to prep the south bedroom myself. Took down the cupboard, pulled nails off some of the boards.
Found i.d.'s for the rest of the Monck wildflowers.
Talked to Jenn who knocked.
Sold the pickets for $150.
JT finished the fence.
Billy got 4x4s for the lattice.

18

Saturday morning in the south bedroom eating Ranier cherries with the heater clicking.

What's worth saying.

I dug some yesterday, not a lot, and hurt all night. I'll keep doing it.

Grey overcast, rain forecast so I won't paint the fence. Will I talk to the plaster repair man. Will have to do something to be able to write better but not yet.

[Opposite: south bedroom painting prep plan]

Was lying awake trying to remember moments of happiness. Realized that isn't quite the question. Different kinds of moments exceptional but not happiness exactly. The moment golden pollen flew up from the spruce branch. Times in widest peace sitting in the chair above Mesa Grande. The moment lying in bed in the sun knowing I was about to leave home - that one was happiness, and so was the moment a few months later in the top of a fir tree after I'd got my exam results. The morning in Oxford after Luke had been conceived. The train journey London to Oxford when everything was beautiful. The moment on acid when I was securely and so interestedly myself. Some early hours with Tom. Poised over the Mary Tiles paper realizing it was the most creative work I'd done. A moment working on the first thesis when I realized I'd seen through. A hard late hour with Jam when we walked in ruby light. Sitting in the gas station café at 14 waiting for the bus to Edmonton. A moment in my last trip to San Diego when I realized I was contented just being with Tom. Times writing papers when I'd passed the threshold of struggle and was just steadily writing. The lake house when I was there alone. Mesa Grande for two years. Sexual happiness with Tony and Rob. Rose months in the community garden. Leaving Louie a bucket of roses at dawn on her birthday. Times completely satisfied in reading. Reading Richardson for the first time in the basement bedroom in Burghley Road, looking at my face in the mirror. Reading Emily of New Moon at 10 on the library floor. The moment trying on the dark red kimono in a secondhand shop in Gastown seeing astonishing beauty on the right side of my face. The moment in the Ridge Theatre bathroom seeing myself lit up at being loved by Louie. The moment I ducked behind an armchair when Cheryl mentioned the dream of the hidden room. Moments in first year with Olivia. Walking the streets of Rome in old clothes. Hours of utter focus drawing houses in Sketchup. Listening to Peter Manning's 8-channel piece. Sitting in front of Gordon Smith's painting at the VAG. The morning I first woke in Ban Righ 49 and stood looking at golden September on the playing field. Writing with tea and toast in the hour before going out to construction work. Reading Anna Karenina with tea and toast in Mrs O'Hare's boarding house. Walking down the driveway under the full moon and writing about it next morning when I was 13. The little hotel in Cannon Beach - that sort of travel when marvels open after hardship. The first real letter from Luke when he was in Scotland. Tiny moments when there's a waft of plant scent, not just flowers, pine, sage.

- There's nothing of my family in the list except for Luke who's central but was my exogamous child, I'm thinking, child apart from family. When I have a twinge of missing M it's her physical care I think of, rhubarb pie and a green dotted-organdy dress. I feel that about her knowing it's not what she'd want to be missed for. - Provision, emotional safety, care. The rows of vegetables in the garden. Canning jars. Him too, young as he was, that he knew how to farm.

19

Reading The children's book because it was there. Byatt's Fabian Wellworth family is reminding me of the Slater family I babysat and so pleasedly described in first year and from there I was thinking how rich a life I've given myself, compared to people I began with - Kingston and Strasbourg and Rome and Athens and Paris and London and California and all the little corners come upon through poverty - hitchhiking and treeplanting, Saturna Island, Goddard College - cooking, lecturing, garden-making, construction labour, therapy, meditation, pottery, fucking, LSD, driving - a girl ravenous for experience. Somewhere in the night I was thinking of satisfactions - the thesis, Tom, the herb garden - enterprises I took on and succeeded in and then left. I haven't been trapped by successes. Was thinking too that in one way Tom has been the only person who's understood me. He had a drive for experience too though he's never been to Europe. His way has been women and drugs and sin, and journalism and music and sometimes crime. He saw my boldness the moment he saw me running down the stairs. When Don said I went to New York and he to Ottawa he was right though wrong - he and Greg comparatively have stayed close to home. But there's my brother who now ranges further and more than I do, another child on the yard in La Glace who combed old issues of Reader's digest for places to go and things to know. And Judie ranges too though always accompanied and in do-gooder mode.

Byatt is a novelist actually interested in children. She begins with an orphan tale, an orphan brought into love and warmth, and that has solid immediate grip. Then all her energy of visual invention, the orphan boy taking a towel and lying in his stable bed stroking what he calls his member, which might be the best word for it. Bohemian children like the adolescents in Doris Lessing. Are they the only kind of children written about because they are the only children with enough freedom to be interesting. - I'm forgetting Victorian children, Maggie and David.

Jobs I've had: babysitter, strawberry and raspberry picker, broccoli topper, can-line worker, child-care worker, scholarship student, legal history researcher, TA and marker, gardener, house painter, roofer, artists' model, cleaner, steam-bath attendant, chambermaid, nanny, treeplanter, treeplanting cook, community garden activist, garden designer, construction laborer and supervisor, fence-builder, professor, English tutor, typist, receptionist, photographer, editor, book designer - is that it? Retired person, welfare mother, welfare non-mother, housekeeper, oil rig camp attendent.

20

Waking a bit grim from the lostness of a lot of random dreaming.

Her decorativeness. I don't like her excessiveness, her gnomes and toads etc, the burgeoning. It's foreign to me but what is it to her. A driver? It gives her energy and I have liked her energy sometimes. She researches. This book is social history of a time when so much was hatching, my modernists, but she's enamelling and embroidering, post-modernly I suppose. I skip the tales. What sort of person likes to read these irrelevancies, invented fairytales. And yet I read the novel equally invented. I suppose that's the postmodernness.

Compared to the turn of the century in Europe the hippies - the '70s - look ignorant and lightweight, which they were, as well as necessary.

-

Economic friendship. Do Jenn and Claude need the money or do they want to work with me on the project.

-

Realizing I have neighbours now. I'm used to talking to myself aloud and farting whenever I like and if I walk into the garden farting loudly, talking to myself and wearing any old rags with food stains from eating while I'm reading I will be seen as an old mad woman.

23

Is he as annoyed by that as I am? no
Did he think it was a good visit no
Does he feel okay about the finances yes
Did he like the house YES
He's miserly about acknowledgement yes
Did he feel he owned it YES

I fall in with his mode and then am exhausted by its rattling-on triviality. What do I miss. Language for one thing, and liking to look at his face. I like to see him from behind. He's a beanpole but he has slim wide shoulders with his narrowness, is light and straight. I should look at his face even when I don't like to see it. I shouldn't rattle along with him - nothing I say meets actual curiosity in him and so I shouldn't pretend it does. I should keep quietness and watch the disorderedness in his face to know it.

What he does well is work. He was in the basement with me hauling boards and junk being methodical and tidying away after we cleared two corners and started on others.

And I didn't have patience for Al, a large man who talked and talked never noticing where he was. - I am so missing actual company that when people in my house are blind capsules full of nothing but their own habits it wears me out.

Best time was walking up the alley and Chris calling out my name and standing at his fence in his full bright garden talking with kindly attention. One earring, I noticed, and a pile of pale flagstone he said can be picked up fifteen miles east on 8.

25

'Marine dynamics' - how meticulously O'Brian imagines the effect of wind on water and on the multitude of interacting geometries of sheets of canvas, and then how meticulously the intimate dynamics of persons observing each other.

This morning I posted a photo of the middle room glowing at 6am. Leslie noticed it and I thought quietly that I've landed on my feet.

[List of plants Rob brought]

Waiting for Claude to come and replace three of the ceiling fixtures with $100 lamps. What else - the garage door casings - the headboard - sanding woodwork in the south bedroom maybe. Ask about the laundry room casing gaps. Mirror. Drill.

-

No more smiles from Claude. He's lost face about the lattice and though I dealt fair and tried to soften it he won't forgive me: he went home with $90 but wdn't enjoy himself. I got a lot done though. Nice ceiling light in the bathroom, better ceiling light in the guestroom - but is it on crooked? The monster ceiling fan in the south bedroom gone, the glamorous headboard off, the big storm window mirror in the bathroom down, the garage door framed, all three ceiling fixtures posted online, the mirror-window posted for sale. Midmorning Ted Deane brought prebuilt sections of the trellis.

Garden report two months later:

It's still a mess though there are some rows now.
Concrete walkways between beds?
Alfalfa bales?
Grass coming up through the cardboard.
Plum takes a lot of space - holding area under.
Some way to cut grass, scythe is expensive.
Side beds are too wide and need paths.
Where and when to plant the currants.
Compost looks good as mulch.

26

The lattice was going up as I came out the door this morning and there it stands braced while the cement dries. Vegetable rows thickening in today's real heat. Low sun striking through hollyhock flowers like stained glass or pink lamps. Little meadow under the plum tree. I eat a radish now and then, pull a little bok choy plant to thin the row.

When I look at the far SW corner I see a plan that worked and worked fast. I had to find people to take a huge heavy mess of old wood - paint cans - large wooden boxes. Posting and replying and waiting for people who don't show up and being nice to people who do. Then dealing with twenty people who wanted the pergola but didn't show up to take it down. Then paying Claude to demolish it, he taking some of the wood home. Then Claude sweating and grunting building the pavers' frame. Filling it with gravel. Designing the pavers and laying them with Ben. Claude building the compost box. Measuring and remeasuring for the scale drawing. Lumber-buying trips. Struggling to set the deck blocks. Claude slipping and cursing with a heavy ladder in the mud. And now one corner ready to fill in and work out from.

27

Ekrem Serder wanting to take Notes in origin to Istanbul mid-July. Aimee says maybe EX-IS Festival in Seoul for last light. Hangyun Lee.

29

There's one swallowtail that cruises through briefly now and again. A little cabbage white flittering low stopping for nothing it finds here. It's between 9 and 10 in the shaded south edge, time of day with a lot of traffic I don't seem to mind. Rowanberries reddening. Someone wants to buy the storm window mirror. I'll need to hand water soon, it's Thursday. There stands the lattice painted up to its armpits waiting for its feet to dry so I can fill up its holes to have a base for the ladder. Plum branches starting to droop under weight. Lurid hollyhock flowers climbing their ladder. Grass seed is what has interested starlings and the white moths seem to stay with the plum's meadow too. Chinese vegetables are going up in skinny bloom. Walkers at this hour too. There's my swallowtail, a wavering zigzag through and back across Doug's fence. Breeze from the south.

July 1

Sorted projects on the G4 this morning. Where's the moon.

3

What is it today. The wind is blowing, blowing. It's Sunday. Am I lonely. A kind of anguish. Don't want to do anything I can do. Want something else. I went to bed in the afternoon and watched four hours of TV. Smart good-looking people with other smart good-looking people talking and acting. My lips are sore. Muscles hurt. The leaves of these mountain ash trees are blown sideways, tips of their branches weighed down with hard berries. It's an ordinary street, not a bad street but nothing to do with me. Traffic passes. The church stands solid and empty. I've missed my family, being in that house with people around me who were just there, who belonged there, who knew me as I was then. Judy and Paul and my mother. We were all in place. We were real to each other. Miles of fields were always there wide open around us and we when we looked out at them or stood and moved in them were wide open too without knowing. Church gave us a deep keel in devotion, mortality, aspiration, fantasy we could be together in. We were simple people, young bodies. Our dad was carrying us all but we didn't know it, we thought he was just doing what he did, because he was always the same age in those days. Everyone was always the same age except the children, whose ages slid forward between birthdays in mostly unnoticed ways. We were important because we were growing. There was someone whose job was to look after us. My mother was a good person. I felt she believed in me: she liked me best. I was confident. I invented and the others followed.

5

It rained most of the day. I drove to Coyote Valley Road and took pictures of wet pines and then drove further on and found a turn-off with piles of broken stone. When I got home the neighbours were gone and I picked cherries. Sat listening to the radio pitting two basins-full, froze some, boiled some into a thick sort of jam.

The Mac Pro got very slow, is it quitting. Chris Kennedy wrote to say Ex-Is Seoul wants me to come for their festival in July 2017 for a featured evening and to be a juror.

Someone says yes there are meadowlarks, lots of them, out in the grasslands.

6

What is it about wet pines. On FB the usual names but 4 people I've never heard of and three people on my list who rarely show up. I thought of it as subtly wrong, the top left corner doesn't hold strongly enough, but it's posted because it has something too: the streaks to left and right where tracks meet the road have a feeling of wet blur as if a finger had been run through watercolor and the tree in the foreground is so much more definite than anything else in the image that it seems a strongly present self - yes? - against a distant crowd. And the road wandering past it toward a little white dot of destination, the power post wires on the right held very firmly between the frame edge and the road, the white ridgeline's vapor glow as well - why didn't I see it until now. But the upper left corner is wrong nonetheless.

Last night at 10 Luke Cee appeared with a green dot. 6am where he is. "You on your way to work?" "Well met" he says, my graceful boy. He uses the word petrichor. I always like talking to him. We feel each other out courteously, are glad to, and then sometimes catch hold almost breathlessly. We were talking about early travels, he and Paul Williams as teenagers on an overnight couchette from Paris to Marseille.

Woken midnight, pulled the curtain to find roaring wildfire
Heat on the glass

The train just kept going?

Yes we roared through it

At every corner
Life throwing itself at us full force
Every door open
Such irresistible children

The sparkle of eagerness (I said).

Yes, sparkle is the word I had in mind

Back channels
Does it cross the sea and come in through the back of the head I mean

I understood
Quantum
T=O

Wuff
Are you drinking coffee

I kissed on Primrose Hill at sunset among long clover

White clover?

Yes

What kind of kiss was it?

9

R arrived on Thursday early - dug out forsythia masses, went to Mongo for supper. Yesterday we sanded woodwork together in the south bedroom because the fence was too wet to paint. I took him to the library to show him the train. We started out on Highway 8 and drove and drove slowly till we got to Spences Bridge, stopped at the Packing House Café and sat in a warm breeze under a Russian olive. Drove faster home, tired, but R said he'd paint the lattice's second coat. And did, until 9:30 and almost dark. Took his supper into his verandah bedroom. His light was still on when mine went off. This morning he was out in the rain with the ladder checking the rain gutters while I was making breakfast. The greyhound was arriving just as I'd let him off at the station. He'd been saying if I needed help with rocks he'd come again. "I like having things to do." Left me a lot of fine cheese and olives.

I was intermittently noticing what kind of man he is, how he's different from Tom. He works hard and smart and finishes jobs properly, puts things away, sweeps up. He likes engineering problems. He moves his feet automatically when I need to get past. He's good-natured. He doesn't flatter; underpraises, rather, doesn't acknowledge. Carries himself straight up and down when he walks. Is 59 and seems a teenager still in lightness and sweetness: has nothing of a bull or general about him. Likely is good at his job in various ways - friendly and informed with customers, interested; intelligent in buying; responsible in managing. Utterly undangerous. Chaste to a fault. His work has been good for him, he's more assured than he was thirty - ! - years ago. Isn't a writer, hardly ever uses an interesting word. Can be tedious in enthusiasm - I get up and go do something. Has very little ego; doesn't speak to impress, speaks to share oddities. Has a band-of-brothers habit of riffing playfully on nearly anything, a habit that doesn't interest me, that keeps it light, 'creative'. Driving back yesterday I was missing Tom's grokking silence of total presence to the place: his privacy. R's habit is inconsequential availability. His face at times has a look of neglected childhood as if compressed sideways, so his teeth have folded: his jaw didn't take its full space, the biting function some disabled.

Dreamed I was in bed with a young man. I'd been as if on the bed - we weren't intending sex, I was just there. But when he fell asleep I found myself under the covers next to him feeling his delicious young sexiness. Another dream of jumping into a long swimming pool that had blue but didn't seem to have water though I could still swim.

He liked the pocket porch idea.

10

Night of hard passive pain.

11

Woke at night with aching arms. Sore up and down.

Monday morning, sprinkler on. Have begun to be able to send people home with lettuce, Chinese greens, chard.

12

Luke's dream.

Talking with him this morning about ancestral gardening.

Less sore today.

Yesterday Jennifer and Ben and his boy Rusty painted the fence, moved the rock piles to a row along the base of the front of the house, chopped down the long grass and goosefoot under the plum and down the west edge, and dug up the lilac patch out front. That let me plant the fig finally, and the Cox's orange pippin, and the grapes on the lattice, and the clematis Rob brought.

I'm thinking trembling aspen for the front gate, both sides, my totem. They'll spread back into the grass.

I dreamed Tom was outside in a car with a lot of puppies, living in his car I thought, in poverty and disorder. I had gone inside to sleep and came out early in the morning, said I'd make him coffee.

[Opposite: planting plan for the front yard]

part 2

time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project