Once, in a year of postpartum depression, when fear of death was something that plagued me, I went for a long run in the evening. I was trying to burn off sorrow. I remember the sky was a luminous shade of apricot lined with lilac, and my spirits began to lift and a random, rattling thought about death coincided with the sudden appearance of a small, bright yellow bird on a fence post. The bird was wild, but looked exquisite and out-of-place in the neighbourhood otherwise full of bland, old, postage-stamp-sized houses with crooked front porches. I wondered how it had come to be there. Mostly, birds around the area were grey, or pale brown, but this bird was the yellow of a wax crayon. I kept running. The yellow bird chirped and hopped on ahead of me for several blocks and with a jolt, I felt that it was some kind of magic portal: When it came, death would be a tiny yellow bird leading me to a new place, nothing to be afraid of. I knew it in that way you can know something that can never really be known.
On the Intangible Feeling of Home
As I write, I am sitting on the beach at the end of my road, leaning up against a log, my notebook on my lap. The tide is low and the sun is glinting off the tide pools. Once in a while, an eagle calls from a treetop. Far out, I see the shining head of a seal; it surfaces, then disappears, then surfaces again.
Sometimes I have to pinch myself: this is my life. I’m here, and it’s really my life.
I have always loved the sea. A good deal of my childhood summers were spent at the sea, and my mother taught me the names of things—anemone, urchin, barnacle, olive shell—and I remembered them and walked the beach, whispering the names to myself. A kind of music.
Up where we lived in the interior, the landscape was vastly different: dusty paths worn into dry, open hillsides of waist-high sagebrush, wild mustard, milkweed. I learned these names too, and loved them. But something about the water lapping against the shore, the cool nights and the coastal drizzle made me feel more at home than home did.
What is that feeling? I’ve been asking myself this for a while. Old houses, too, have done this to me. I grew up in a modern house in a brand-new subdivision. There were smooth sidewalks and those green electrical boxes that kids sat on, trading stickers with the other neighborhood kids. There were tidy cedar hedges and basketball hoops and paved driveways and shiny white rocks in the front flowerbeds.
Sometimes we’d go across town and visit my mother’s friend Val, who lived in a heritage house on a quiet street where big trees—Chestnut, Sycamore, Maple—lined the boulevards and old porches creaked in the dappled light, their window screens blowing in and out in the breeze. Inside the house, the hardwood floors shone, and the windows opened on a hinge and the air smelled faintly of garden soil. Visiting there, my heart would leap, as if it recognized something from another lifetime: This, I thought, but could never pinpoint what “this” was. It had to do with love and something suiting my particular type of wiring, and a feeling of belonging paired with curiosity.
Not long ago, I ate dinner with a man who was hosting a show of mine on another gulf island. I was telling him about a city I used to live in, where life felt whole, and a city I lived in after that, where life felt misaligned. We talked about this exact thing—and I wondered out loud how life could feel so intangibly right in one place and not in another. What is that hard-to-pin-down quality, I wondered. That “yes, this,” feeling.
“I think the word you’re looking for is resonance,” he said.
I just spent some days out and about off-island, as we say here, though I was still on an island, only a much bigger one. It takes two ferries to get there from here, three if you want to get onto the main land, if there is such a thing. (Technically, we all live on islands of varying degrees.)
And now that I’m home, I’m newly aware of that “yes, this” feeling upon walking into my big, old rental house that smells of garden soil and wood smoke; the light slanting in the windows across the floors; the tree branches scraping against the side of the house. Last night I watched a big, round moon rise into the sky on the other side of the skylight. I went to bed with the window open a crack and read a book and heard the rain begin. And now, as I write, my back against a beach log worn smooth by waves, I am watching a flock of Cormorants fly in unison above the surface of the water. How do they do that? How do they know to all veer left at exactly the same moment? To curve around a bluff and head straight up into the air at precisely the same distance to one another? It’s called synchronicity, and it’s a grace I’ve stumbled onto a few times, but have never lived inside of completely. But deciding to come here—to this life that resonates with me—that was one of them.
map
Yesterday Ella was grouchy and tired and kept leaving messes everywhere. I put her to bed a bit too abruptly, feeling relieved and frayed.
This morning she came downstairs in her jammies. “I won’t see you for five days,” she said, standing close to me at my desk where I’ve been writing.
I reached out and pulled her in, kissed her soft, sweet cheek. I pulled an index card from a pile on the edge of my desk and drew her a map. I drew a ferry boat and some waves. I drew the three islands I’ll be going to and an arrow pointing down the highway to Sooke.
She studied the picture, traced her small finger down the highway, then back to where she’ll be.
A tiny video where I didn’t cheat and put on a nice scarf
My duo partner, PK (Pamela) and I got together for a few days of practice for our upcoming Vancouver Island mini-tour.
I am the sort of person who takes a long time to do anything. I have been writing a book for 12 years. I “plan” things for months.
Today, PK said “okay, let’s make a little video” and I was like: “what? but my hair’s not even brushed. And I am practically wearing my pyjamas.”
She said who cares, so we went into my greenhouse room where the light is nice and set up her iPhone on the window ledge.
And when I wasn’t looking, PK did her hair and put on this nice scarf.
Anyway . . . This is a taste of our folk/pop sound.
If you live in the Vancouver Island/gulf island area, come on out to a house concert/show this weekend . . .
~k
A Poem
In the Truck With My Dad and Bob
It’s a hot summer day in 1982 and my dad and I are in his white Ford pickup, making our way across town to the hardware store. I’m wearing shiny red shorts and the vinyl seat is hot and sticky against the backs of my legs. The radio is on, and my dad leans in to turn up the volume.
“What about this guy?” he says, leaning back against the hot vinyl. “You think he’ll ever make it big?”
“No! He’s terrible!” I say, and I mean it. He sounds like an old man just getting over laryngitis.
Dad chuckles. It’s Bob Dylan singing Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance, but I won’t know this for another twenty-or-so years when a friend will give me a guitar lesson and order me to buy Bob Dylans’ second album, which I’ll love so much I’ll play it every night for months as I wash the dinner dishes, taking breaks to lift my newborn daughter out of her blue bouncy chair and dance her around the kitchen.
Honey, just allow me one more chance
To get along with you
Honey, just allow me one more chance
Ah’ll do anything with you …
To get along with you
Honey, just allow me one more chance
Ah’ll do anything with you …
When you’re getting ready
When you’re getting ready to leave for an out-of-town show and you do a last minute facebook message check, whatever you do, don’t get distracted and browse the pretty pictures on the screen. Don’t click on the gorgeous photograph of a little girl curled up in a ball on what seems to be a cement floor and wonder what filter was used to get that grungy, vintage-y effect. Don’t suddenly take in that she’s surrounded by what appears to be an outline of a woman made in white chalk. Don’t look more closely and read about how it’s a chalk-drawing the little girl made in the shape of her deceased mother and about how, after the little girl drew it, she took off her tiny shoes and climbed into the drawing to fall asleep against her mother’s chest. Don’t do this, because it’s hard to concentrate on packing when you have tears burning in the backs of your eyes. And it’s hard to remember why you wanted to write poems and sing folk songs instead of doing something more useful with your life—say, finding a cure for poverty, or moving to Iraq so you can be one of those people who hold orphan babies and sing songs to them when they cry. Don’t do this, because you will forget your suitcase beside the door, which contains your hair straightener and your pillow and your favorite brown high-heeled shoes. Don’t do this, because playing a show with rubber boots on is not nearly as professional as playing a show wearing nice brown shoes, despite the fact that you yourself won’t really care, since, in light of that small girl sleeping inside the chalk, the hair straightener and the pillow and the brown high-heeled shoes hardly seem to matter.
Botox, Plexiglass and What I’ve Been Up To
Hello dear ones.
Today, on my way to a yoga class, I walked past the Cosmetic Surgery Clinic. There was a sign on the door advertising a free mini-lip (value $150!) with the purchase of $400 worth of Botox”. I couldn’t help it – I walked in and asked the lady behind the counter what a “mini-lip” was. The woman smiled stiffly and explained that it was a teensy – hardly noticeable! – injection of filler to make the lips more full. “They’re lovely,” she said, and offered me a pamphlet.
Really? Are we really doing this to ourselves?
A minute later, as I rounded the corner, I almost tripped over the homeless man curled up in his sketchy sleeping bag under the overhang. My God. What is this world coming to?
Anyway . . .
I can’t believe I’ve been so absent from this blog lately, but I’ve been hiding out, studying poetry and fiction at the University of British Columbia and trying to catch my breath from the big sorrow that hit me after I left my little island last fall.
But spring is here, and all the bad news has flown away and good news keeps popping up like the bulbs in the flower beds.
For starters, in May, I will be heading back to my little island, because if I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that I am no longer a city girl. (Can you hear my sigh of relief all the way from where you are?) I will still tour and teach, but I will have my quiet little community to return to instead of the craziness of traffic and billboards and strip malls and Botox Clinics.
In March, I was nominated for two Vancouver Island Music Awards for “Canvas & Clay” – “Album of the Year” and “Vocalist of the Year”- and ended up taking home the award for “Vocalist of the Year” in the form of a sharp-edged chunk of Plexiglass with my name written on it. Yay for Plexiglass! What exactly is Plexiglass anyway? Whatever . . .
My song “Oh June” is in the CBC Radio Searchlight Competition. You can listen to it and click “VOTE” for me right HERE.
I am getting ready to head up to the Yukon and the Northwest Territories for a house concert tour from April 8 to 21st. If you live there, please come!
Oh, how I’ve missed telling you stories! I have a few that have been poking at my ribs, wanting to be let out onto the page. But for now, I will leave you with a little experimental piece I wrote in a class where I was studying Gertrude Stein. I had never read any of Gertrude Stein’s work before, though her name was familiar to me. She’s a writer who made a point of writing things that made no logical sense, where “the individual elements of her sentences were familiar, <but>their significance as a whole seemed to have been stripped away.” Her aim with words was “to emphasize their musical qualities, favoring sound over sense”.
No, I’m not on drugs. Sometimes it’s just nice to let go of logic, and let words and rhythms flow in whatever way they come. I urge you to try it sometime.
LOST & FOUND
LOST:
1. A red scarf wound around the base of a Sycamore on Parkview Avenue between two and five pm.
2. Two pinches of salt, three stale breadcrumbs, a half-ounce of mayonnaise to taste.
3. A map full of rivers, clearly labeled, drawn with charcoal and magenta pencil crayon, soiled with coffee rings and blackberry jam.
4. A marmalade cat, medium size. Last seen dressed as a barmaid and heading North on Highway 9 in the back of a blue Ford Pickup with no license plate.
5. Four mismatched stainless steel forks, three broken teacups, an overripe pomegranate and a blue shoelace, slightly frayed.
FOUND:
1. Three small, smooth, turquoise pebbles that glow in the half-light of morning between June 3rd and July 22nd.
2. A five-dollar bill that gets pulled from your fingers by the cold October wind, then deposited two
hours later on your doorstep looking somewhat disheveled.
3. A pink faux-leather purse containing three dimes and two pickles, washed up on the sandy beach of a small bay on the Pacific Ocean, its buckles rusted shut.
4. Half a cracked cell phone under the left back wheel of a green Toyota Tercel parked in front of the Dairy Queen on the corner of fourth and Walnut Street in Raeford, Massachusetts.
5. An open road that leads into a spot of sky. I walked there yesterday in my summer jacket and my old army boots. Lost my way a few times, but eventually I got there and here I am. Write back soon.
~
While Ingrid Was Dying
While she was in hospice, dying, I was engaged in the shallowest of tasks:
Deciding what to wear to the launch show — stripes or polka dots? Heels or boots?
How to set up the merch table? Should we hang paper lanterns?
I scratched out absurd lists of important things that weren’t important: capo, lyrics, almonds, paper, water!!!!!
I phoned a makeup artist to book a session and she asked me if I wanted false eyelashes and I stopped to think about it. False eyelashes or not?
God help me, I thought. How can any of this matter?
But then suddenly, for the briefest of moments, I was with Ingrid in her kitchen, the light pouring in from the glass doors behind the dining room table, and she laughed and said — Are you crazy? This totally matters! You’re going to look amazing and be amazing and for goodness’ sake, say YES to the false eyelashes. If not now, when?
Because that’s what she was like, this girl, this woman, this friend, who is gone now.
So I said yes.
