I always imagine Medieval life as so much field around all those storied castles. In May, the Vermont landscape is wide open. The forest aren’t leafed out yet. The bushes are sticks without greenery. The shape of the land is there for the looking.

The comparison ends there, I know. Contemporary Vermont isn’t bound by class or infused with religion. No holy temples are built here, save what each family builds for themselves.

But there’s still all this land, fallow, ready for seed. All this potential, of yet another growing year.

Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems.

— Basho