the green notebook

, fragments of a work-in-progress, (reading Etel Adnan, Czeslaw Milosz + Rachel Franklin Wood, etc.

We begin to solidify plans for a family trip, aiming five days of a genealogical trip driving through New England, landing back into Ontario via Niagara, allowing our young ladies two nights at Great Wolf Lodge. Most of our Rhode Island or Connecticut sites might be too distant to catch, but we’re beginning to compile possibilities.

Once more, to Etel Adnan’s Seasons (2008): “My thinking is slightly overcast, and traveling.”

In September 2014, Christine and I landed at a bookstore in Portsmouth, the since shuttered Portsmouth Book and Bar, during on one of our end-of-maternity leave road trips. Rose was ten months old and woke from her nap, prompting us to pull off the highway, which led to a discovery of this town, and this most remarkable bookstore. Portsmouth gave the sheen of a college town, and the open and friendly bookstore space provided an armload of books, wi-fi and the opportunity for lunch. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, not the Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where I’ve my genealogical thread. Apparently there are eight similarly-named locations across the United States, including villages, towns, cities, suburbs and townships in Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Michigan. That’s a lot to keep track of. All, of course, named for Portsmouth, England, originally a Roman settlement that currently sits in the south-east county of Hampshire. Which American Portsmouth was first? I would suspect New Hampshire, given the British origins. I refuse to look that part up.

*

I spend a rare afternoon at my usual spot at the Carleton Tavern, for the sake of a few hours of writing. With notebook, pens, a stack of books and journals with no particular deadline, Christine aims to walk to collect Aoife from her after-school program, and Rose is doing an overnight as part of her year-end trip. I am sitting here reading, and sketching out notes.

It has been more than a year since the new owner took over. There is a shift in this space, by a thousand cuts. Most of the regulars, I’ve discovered, have moved on to other venues.

I spent more than twenty years running my reading series, The Factory Reading Series, through its second and third decades in that tavern space, ghosted since by the new owner, who claimed nothing would change. And I am forced to relocate. After twenty-plus years, no longer running a reading series two blocks from where I was born. “From where I was born,” Czeslaw Milosz writes in Milosz’s ABC’s (2001), “the Niewiaża River flows beneath high plateaus to either side, and on the slopes of the ravine the green parks of the manors could be seen at intervals of one or two kilometres.”

The hospital where I was born is no longer there, the late lamented Grace, known as the baby hospital. The seniors residence that stands in its place, where some of us might finally land. Compared to how Milosz writes, where I was born not nearly so romantic, a working-class neighbourhood just west of the downtown core, held together by single-family homes standing relatively close together, amongst the remains of what was once a thriving factory district. The Carleton Tavern, a locus amongst these past ninety years for such a population, a far more comfortable space for my farm-self to work than some of the other spaces across the city, whether sportsbar, brew pub or coffeeshop. The familiarity of space, even one with photographs stripped from the walls and the menu changed. An entirely new staff. An afternoon deathly quiet when it should have had at least twenty regulars.

*

Rachel Franklin Wood, as part of “Casement,” in the latest issue of Fence (Vol. 22, No. 2): “Follow the pattern, follow the pattern, follow the pattern. Not a window or a mirror, a mottled wall.”

I pattern out words as I breathe, through. I breathe out again as I edit, rework, upon laptop. I breathe through, again, until able to return to those lines using breath.