Sometimes all day, days, rain falls, writes poet Janisse Ray.

Waiting for the school bus this morning at the driveway’s bottom, with the robins and redwing blackbirds silent, and not even a solitary crow winging its way through the mist, the children waited under our one umbrella, surrounded by greasy mud.

This is the season of last year’s debris rising from the thawing earth: split garden hose, broken bits of sap lines, sodden paper from who knows what, piles of lumber never put to use, a shattered red plastic shovel from a childhood friendship long worn out.

At breakfast, I told the children, Two days from now, the sun will appear, the green emerge, and we’ll find coltsfoot.

My teenage daughter said, Keep hoping, mom.

I am.

…Let it not be said that in passing through this world
you turned your face and left its wounds unattended.
Instead, let it be said that when your friends
cut open your chest to partake of its courage,
a loon was calling.

– Janisse Ray, “Courage,” in A House of Branches

Garden, West Woodbury, Vermont