Provisions
by Margaret Atwood
What should we have taken
with us? We never could decide
on that; or what to wear,
or at what time of
year we should make the journey
So here we are in thin
raincoats and rubber boots
On the disastrous ice, the wind rising
Nothing in our pockets
But a pencil stub, two oranges
Four Toronto streetcar tickets
and an elastic band holding a bundle
of small white filing cards
printed with important facts.from The animals in that Country 1968
I’m packing up my makeshift studio with a dream in mind. You know the dream of just having one little card table and a stack of paper, one brush, one dip pen, and one bottle of grey ink. These simple tools sit in a monastic room with milky light coming in from the picture window overlooking a choppy Nordic sea or glassy round lake surrounded by pines. The shelves of sketchbooks and boxes of important papers, and archive of obscure collected pigments mailed to me from around the world and carefully geolocated. Dated specimens and finished bottles of ink filed like a seed bank deep underground in some large well-labeled fireproof metal case on wheels custom made for all the draws and sub-drawers.
In the dream I am seeing all of this from above. In actuality, I’m a frenzied mole burrowing into the past detritus in piles all around me. You know these piles. The handful of never organized papers and materials and correspondence somehow sharing a shoe box with random ziplock bags full of an important green crumbly rock harvested at the very top of a cliff near Death Valley that was so hard to get that I can’t throw it out, but that what am I going to do with it now? A gift of pinecones from a 5-year-old delivered in an unforgettable moment at a workshop years back. The project wrapped in wax paper and carefully stowed away that has been brewing for 10 years now involving crystals, coffee stains, and a plate from Berlin which, why can’t I finish this or is it even a finish-able thing? The sheet of graph paper where I had written and underlined the phrase balls I have dropped. I am trying to be ruthless with the piles sending anything that doesn’t fit into my dream to the recycling bin or the curb or back to the earth. But then I came across this jar (above) and time stopped.
A year into Covid and with Papa not doing well, I talked to my sisters and Papa’s partner, and we figured it out— me and my eldest wore double masks and got on a plane out west thinking we were somehow going to fix something. But the trip ended up more of a holiday than a rescue mission and mostly on the north end of Galliano Island. I can smell Douglas fir cones sap summer sun on bark, springy needles on the forest floor, and we lay on the moss at the edge of the dirt road and looked up at those tall trees. The wind was soft sea air breeze, a hint of thick kelp and tide pools, and everything was so deep green, partly a memory of childhood. But after all these years away from the islands, there is some new kind of feeling too. The mossy stone steps down to the little house at the bottom of the hill almost buried in the forest, and the long walks on gravel road talking into the past with my sisters, sun filtering down through those big trees that make you feel like a kid. Amy took us to a rocky beach and Leah’s kids were there too and we got into collecting beach glass and bits of driftwood and things rolled in from far away you could kind of get lost looking at all the tiny little sculptures tumbled by the rocks and sea. Every time one of us found something—a shard of pottery, a lumpy piece of green glass that related to the first one, a bottle of soft drink long since gone out of business, a new colour of shell, tiny smooth unnamable things that caught our eye — it was a little surge of excitement and the others would run over to look at it. Leah, the youngest, was the one in our family from way back that always found lost things and still has the best most subtle eye. I remember her praying to Saint Anthony and Saint Jude, the patron saints of lost things and lost causes. So of course it was Leah found a tiny little translucent bottle that looked like a Victorian perfume sample or maybe opium or some other historical medicinal vial. Or poison. We all marvelled at it. That it was so tiny and mysterious and so perfectly preserved. Later, me and Amy, went for a long walk circling the island. She showed me her favourite little outcrop down a grassy path overlooking wild waves, foamy and blue below with an almost bonzai’d Gary Oak hanging on. The oak was covered in grey lichen and moss looking Lord of the Rings ancient and beautiful and made wise-looking by the wind, and I found little oak galls on it. I was so excited to explain, and Amy took some pictures of me harvesting and we were kids again. I put oakgalls into my pocket and one still on a twig to remember that tree.
The time on the island together as a family was too short and our kids were only just getting to the point of not being shy around each other because we live so far away. And then on the last night, we ordered Thai food to the beach and it took so long and we almost missed the ferry. It was cold and we sat on the long log and the sun went down and as it got dark, Amy saw the little glints in the fine waves lapping the beach and knew what it was. We all went swimming in the bioluminescence, which I didn’t even quite see at first. You get out there and it kind of surrounds you like a second skin or some cloak of the stars in the black water, and Lux said they felt like an angel. Papa stayed in the car but he must have been watching us out there making little trails of lights in the black water. I imagined trying to bottle up that water but I knew those little glow in the dark algae wouldn’t survive it and it wasn’t right to try to capture it anyway Just before we left Leah said check your bag and on the ferry back feeling sad and happy at the same time I saw that she had slipped that tiny little bottle in with my stuff.
Back in my still chaotic studio storage area I couldn’t throw out those scraps first softened by the waves then combed from the ocean’s edge by me and my sisters side by side with a twig with its little nub— a round home a wasp once lived in and made intensely tannic and that now could be made into ink with the right recipe and these remains bound into a poem by the circle edge of the jar. And I certainly couldn’t throw out the cut glass vessel fit into the centre of the poem the tiny bottle maybe once containing some dream medicine lost to the sea and then found and secretly made into a gift for me. I held the little bottle in my palm again, I imagined I might set it on the edge of the window in the dream studio. And inside the now empty bottle not a message, not a drug or memory or poem to place but just a little space. If you could make your mind small enough like fitting a ship into a bottle you would see that its a space where lost and found might meet.
I hope your summer is going well. I hope you have a little space of your own somewhere to work and think and dream and I wonder what is the one small momento you keep there. Further readings below in the Colour Lab
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