The Culture of Summer
In Canada, the culture of summer includes some combination of earth, air, water, and fire. In the hot sunshine for which we have waited months we are infused with the energy of fire. Hitting the road to travel, we explore the earth. I took the Coquihalla Highway to the Interior to attend a 50th wedding anniversary celebration. Relatives from all over the continent converged on Vernon (http://www.ohwy.com/bc/v/vernon.htm). The afternoon reception on the lawn under the well-groomed weeping willows was a family reunion. At the historic O'Keefe Ranch (http://www.ohwy.com/bc/o/okeefera.htm), with Tom Cochrane ["Life Is a Highway"] (http://www.tomcochrane.ca/) advertised on the marquee, we demolished a hip of beef and then we roasted the happy couple. The man who introduced them on a blind date fifty plus years ago told the tale. If uncle did not like what he saw, he would mention bad weather. The go-between finally had to ask, "Is it raining yet?" "There's not a cloud in the sky," the smitten suitor replied. And there has been no cloud in the sky in all the years since, he assured us.
In Vernon I stayed with my brothers; Harv had driven in from Manitoba and George from Florida. The guys went to the casino; the girls went shopping. Each to our own therapy. At a used book store I found a long-sought copy of D. H. Lawrence's Etruscan Places and an autographed Dancers at Night, short stories by New Brunswick writer David Adams Richards. Yes! We did pizza and cider, and the hot tub in the hotel; we watched the teens, Neil and Sarah, dive at a friend's pool. Someone asked my brother (who is almost a year younger than I am) if I were his daughter. "Someone over eighty, blind and drunk," he was quick to correct me. But he exaggerates. No one was drunk. Isn't it strange that, no matter how much we think we have matured with age, being with siblings can put us right back there with our thumbs in our mouths?
The next day my brothers drove to my place. We ate more, taking turns cooking. My sister-in-law Joy and I took off for Harrison Hot Springs to address other cravings. At the Literary Café (Festival of the Arts http://www.echoisland.com/harrfest) Grant Buday read from White Lung. His get-even fantasies of a disgruntled bakery worker exploring identity and sexuality had us laughing in the most inappropriate places. Sharon Thesen's poems took me immediately to the Slocan Valley. Lorna Crozier, (http://www.nwpassages.com/bios/crozier.a... the third reader, I have enjoyed since before she was Lorna Crozier, when she still lived in Saskatchewan. I remember when Peter Gzowski interviewed her on CBC radio about her "sex lives of vegetables" poems (from The Garden Going on Without Us). You could hear Peter blushing, and Lorna loving it. At Harrison she read from her latest book, What the Living Won't Let Go. She asked us not to clap, but after she read a poem--about imagining her own conception, about "the other woman," about a mother licking her son so all other women will know he is hers--the audience's collective "gasp" created a vacuum relieved only by our spontaneous applause.
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