I stopped in a wood stove/chimney sweep shop in Montpelier, looking for a replacement length of insulation for my stove.

I’d bought the stove in 2020, in that strange period when some businesses had reopened; Vermont’s mask mandate was brand-new. I was looking to install a metal asbestos chimney in my 100-year-old house, determined to heat this house with wood and not rely on oil. I was new to wearing a mask. My teenager waited in the car.

Four years later, on a rainy morning, I stop in and two men are warming themselves at glowing stoves. I ask my question about the catalytic combustors and insulation wrap. One man reaches in a stove and pulls out a honeycomb piece. He asks me if I’ve taken my stove apart. Yes, I answer, and I’ve put it back together — not once or twice, but regularly.

The store is on the retail strip between Montpelier and Barre, and the greasy scent of the never-closed McDonald’s pumps through the damp air. On that same 2020 trip, I texted a staff member of the state’s Department of Libraries about hand sanitizer. The department was closed, of course, and I never met this woman, who left me sanitizer and children’s books. We wrote back and forth to each other, and then she vanished elsewhere into a job, or so I guessed, a different phase of her life.

This morning, my daughters and I park at the edge of town and follow the running water: tracking uphill from river to streams. The mushy snow melts in the rain. Three geese fly overhead, clamoring. There’s that famous line from ol’ Henry David Thoreau: the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. On this March morning, the silty waters running high and fierce, Thoreau’s chaos line returns to me. My old familiar, chaos, the companion sometimes in my pocket, sometimes in my face.

Then, this: the evenings are beginning to stretch with light, rich with the scent of wet earth. Last night, my daughter and I pull on our jackets again and head out into the damp world, in hopes of red-winged blackbirds. A no go, yet. But halfway through, I interrupt her and say, “Robin.”

And again, “Robin.”