About 17 years ago – in what doesn’t at all seem like another lifetime but part of these continuous decades I’m living, I walked in the dark from our sugarhouse to our house with my two children. Having worked all day, I’d received a reprieve from sugaring and carried up the dinner chili pot and dirty bowls and spoons. March, the nights are always cold, although sometimes a balmy breeze stirs up as a teasing promise of spring.
I threw the kids’ soaked snowsuits in the washing machine (in those days, the washing machine was always churning) and banked the wood stove. I was knitting something from yellow yarn. What this was – a child’s cap, a gift pair of mittens – I can no longer remember. But I remember reading Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Noodle Soup with Rice to my five-year-old, who slept beside me, profoundly as a child sleeps, her cheeks flushed rosy from a day outdoors. In these hours of making syrup, the children had brought in the mail from the driveway box.
The house was warm after hours in the unheated sugarhouse and also cold, since no one had fed the fire all day. I opened The New Yorker and read “March” by Louise Glück, a poem I probably quote every March in this blog. 17 years later, I’m still reading this poem, even as that kindergartener is now a college sophomore. There’s that cliché, in like a lamb, out like a lion, but March is often lion and lamb, all the time. Now, 17 years later, less impatient with spring’s maddening dawdle, I no longer read Maurice Sendak. Yet, unlike the triteness that when the children are grown, they’re flown, our family delves into my disease, digs hard at the stuff of what family means.
Still at Dartmouth, the nurse muses this morning about nine degree temperatures. March is a brutal tease and may leave more sharply than she arrives. But it’s March. The earth will thaw. The universe ambles along, dragging us, too.
You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure….
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
Stony Soil Vermont 
March the poem and this month and you surviving. Take in the rumblings of
change as you are doing. Damn hard, your recollections are poignant, I can feel
them even though I haven’t ever sugared but have experienced Vermont March’s for years. Haven’t ever thought about sea and erasure but will read the poem again and again. Writers like you who delve deeply from so many perspectives. Words carry us through tough times. Thank you.
I have a memory of walking into Louise’s Plainfield garden following her quietly as she picks very, very carefully small salad greens, new leaves delicate and ready to eat. Her poems are woven with such strength from her small hands.
What a beautiful response. I felt like I too was walking in Louise’s garden.
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I love the truth of sea’s promise of erasure. Indeed it is promised and kept.
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Hi Cacky, I never met Louise, but I’m an enormous fan. What a poet!!!
I have never sugared. Never been in Vermont except once, in the summer, and saw something call the Bread and Puppet Festival. Must have been the 70s. But I have lived by the sea my whole life, sometimes a mile away, sometimes an hour away. You and the poem bring a different perspective to me on something I thought I knew so well. Erasure is a good word, though I was just writing about how the shore and ocean are always different. You walk one way along the beach and watch the changes, and the other and there are more, continuous. And the next day it’s all new, or at the turning of the tide, new again. But I never thought of it as erasure, and now I will. Thank you, I hadn’t read this poem before. Your family stories are striking too.
I loved this description of walking along the beach… Bread & Puppet is still going strong. That’s in my area.
This is a great poem. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you like this! It’s a mighty poem.
‘But it’s March. The earth will thaw. The universe ambles along, dragging us, too.’ This is great.
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We feel like it will never be spring, and at the same time feel little bits of it already here.