Nothing I Cared in the Lamb White Days < The Happy Monk Baking Company

Gazing out on the Salish Sea, across Boundary Pass at the moon rising over the San Juans, I am humbled by the stillness and intense beauty. It’s prime summer, just now, and the scene is emblematic of this time and place, South Pender Island.

We are in the dog days of summer, those sultry, humid days of bees, dragonflies, and swooping swallows. Though it’s evening now, heatwaves still shimmer over the brown grass, and a breeze from the ocean brings faint relief from the solid heat. Children shriek on Craddock Beach, and lovers sit atop the Living Rock Island watching the gulls, the moon…and dream.

Undercurrent of malice

Yet the quiet of this summer evening is tinged with an undercurrent of malice. Temperatures on Pender have been mild thus far. Still, elsewhere in the world, we hear of extended periods of extreme heat (Texas and southern U.S. states) and deluges of rain and flooding (New York and the northeastern U.S.) Smoke from Canadian wildfires has blanketed many parts of our country and the U.S.

It’s hard to enjoy the peace of a summer evening on Pender Island without thinking that all is not well. Climate change looms.

“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

I have a vivid childhood memory of summer stillness: an evening in July 1966, the evening before my mother, brother and sister, and I were to fly east to visit our eastern relatives in Montreal and New Brunswick. The summer was young; a long holiday stretched out ahead of us. School was a memory; we wouldn’t have to think of it for weeks … or months … or years.

Summer stillness

My father, James Morton, circa 1966, on the sundeck of our West Vancouver home.
It’s his birthday as I write, July 11. He’d be 101 today!

It was still light. The day had been hot, but the air, then, was cooling; the house was quiet. My mother and father lounged on a pair of chaise longues on the sundeck overlooking Burrard Inlet from West Vancouver.

I was bursting with excitement, but the peace of that moment seized me; the crickets, evening birdsong, the sky, bluer than blue. That interlude between dinner and children’s bedtime.

It was a profound childhood moment: I grasped a measure of my existence. The fullness of the moment, the promise of summer, the warmth of my home, the beauty of that evening.

“Here are my mother and father,” I thought, filled with a sense of closeness to them; for all they were to me; for all they had given. I felt wrapped in their warmth, their protectiveness, their love. It was an usual moment for the 11-year-old me, not normally attuned to the profound moments of my young life.

“Here are my mother and father …”

My parents’ eyes were closed. My mother wore a soft blue summer dress; my father a white bathing suit, bare chest. I had a question and wanted to talk to them. But instead of opening my mouth, I sat on a deck chair and basked in the summer peace. The lush garden my father laboured over, the cedars rising from the bottom of the yard and Burrard Inlet, the city and English Bay in the distance.

It’s the stillness I remember, unencumbered by the looming spectre of climate change or, for that matter, the vicissitudes of adult life. The problems, the heartaches, the fears for the future … and the lingering hope that all is well, after all, and the sun will rise tomorrow.

But I wonder if that moment of awareness in 1966 also opened the door to the darker clouds. That the profound sense of who I was at age 11 in West Vancouver was also tenuous, not eternal, as I might have believed.

As it happened, that door quickly closed, and I became once again heedless and carefree as a child. The summer holiday back east flew by, school returned, and life loomed: the blue sky and dark clouds both.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

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Undercurrent of malice

Summer stillness

“Here are my mother and father …”

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