Mad with colour

[vaneramos]

Yesterday leaving Toronto felt like tearing sinew, splashing blood. Talking in the front hall I knew I needed to say more, felt like I said too much. Always cautious, yes.

The road was a dark thread through a splendid tapestry. Took Guelph Line, like I have been doing lately. Les reminded me of that route when we drove to Montreal. Sideroad 20 passes high moraines. First I pulled off to capture the bright gold of goldenrod and spattered purple of asters against the broad yellow slopes of maturing soybeans. Two horses standing in a paddock stared at me. Once I got back in the car they put their heads down.

Something peculiar on the stereo: Kurt Weil's Symphony Number 2. He wrote it for a Polish noblewoman in Paris, while fleeing from the Nazis. It is harsh, like a dagger striking through the shower curtain, but I am compelled to hear this new thing.

Driving up Victoria Road I fall into a bed of treasure, more asters and goldenrod weighing down the valley bottoms. The dry stony hilltops are covered with frothy sprays of Aster ericoides. I get out, take pictures, then go in search of grey goldenrod, an unusual species that used to grow at Elmbrae. Meadows always make me think of that place, but never with sadness. My eyes are too full. I can't remember what grey goldenrod looks like, but it's tiny in this poor glacial effluvium. I want to look up geological web sites, try to remember exactly how moraines are formed; somehow rocks flow down the edge of a glacier, pushed by violent water.

Wading into the rampant lake of purple, gold and white, I am up to my hips now. Feel all this riotous colour leaching out the grey in my heart. All along the drive home I have felt the prickling potential for another panic attack: the longing, holding on, the hardness of pulling away from people I care about.

We are pack animals indeed. Think how hard it is to wake in the night when you're alone.

Remember the last night falling asleep, pressed against Danny's tailbone. I love that sense of potential, the weaving trails of desire, threads through our bodies. The simmering gradually subsides into sleep. Now he is shooting off to San Francisco like a rocket. Part of me goes with him today, pressed against the small of his back, a curious thought wandering, longing to see new places.

I would love to see Cameron right now, too.

But I am among asters and goldenrod, there is no better place to be alone, and I feel the beauty diffusing into me.

Leaving that splendid painting, like Monet gone mad with colour, I drive to Arkell Road, then turn aside to the east, drive up into the highest moraine here, looking for a certain place we used to stop. I was doing research for one of my profs, it must have been the summer with Dr. Reader. This wasn't our main project, so we only came here a few days. I remember parking by the road—I look for the spot—and walking onto the high stony crest, where dry meadows sprawled among old apple trees. We had little yellow ribbons in the grass to mark our test plots. What were we looking for? Now, driving along the road, I can't find the spot we parked.

Here is this huge, silent avalanche of small limestone rocks, sprawling upwards, pale as bones of the earth, like a whale carcass. Behemoths lie dead across the countryside, their neck bones forming sinuous ridges.

Turning back toward home, I pass the field where I photographed Brenna on a too-bright afternoon in May. My eyes smart in the sun of that memory. Today I'm under a heavy sky, warning of hurricanes, but none will come.

Saturday morning will dawn peerless blue. That's what Mom used to call it. I thought Peerless meant the name of the ice cream parlour where I would go sometimes after school. Mom would give me 25 cents for a cone.

Now I know peerless means matchless, beyond comparison. And today I'll enter that blue, walk underneath at the farmers market, tables decked on either side with autumnal abundance.