Some unexpected events in our thawing patch of Vermont:

• dinner guests of chatting children eating grilled eggplant and chicken wings, with gusto
• exquisitely beautiful poems read at the Galaxy Bookshop last night – and adult companionship, too
• clouds of frog eggs, knots of trillium blossoms, profuse sunshine and clothes drying on the line
• a rotten tooth mended

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles – not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Brattleboro, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.