How lucky I was to have a houseful of girls tonight, laughing and eating, with just so much chat-chat-chatting. They have questions and their own contrived theories – could this be true? This? Would life be different with a houseful of sons? Somehow, I think so.

Driving to the movies, in this dark November night, I listened to their talk braiding around each other, and I realized these girls know each other through language. Too often, I’ve thought of my own use of language as either tool or weapon. A few years back, I wrote an essay about industrial wind in VTDigger, intentionally using language as weapon. Now, in the bits of journalism I do for paid work, it’s a serviceable tool. But these girls remind me, again, of simple loveliness of speaking, and that the deepest profundity is often what’s right at hand.

…If you can read and understand this poem
send something back: a burning strand of hair
a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood
a shell
thickened from being battered year on year
send something back

— Adrienne Rich

Woodbury, Vermont