As part of my heal-from-cancer and keep-the-cancer-from-returning approach, I borrow my daughter’s yoga map on Thursday mornings and walk through the cemetery and along Little League field to the village. The studio is above the town’s coffee shop. The windows frame the town’s main intersection of routes 14 and 15, the Lamoille River, flanked by July’s burgeoning green.

As I lie on the polished maple floor, the sound of the traffic comes and goes. This calmness reminds me of those years I lived in Brattleboro, pre-internet, when the main source of my twenties’ activities was walking to the public library or a favorite bar, hiking, or hanging out with my roommates in the house we rented, running our mouths about the state of the world. There was a lot of laughter, a whole lot of discussion about morals and relativity.

This particular Thursday is the anniversary of the floods in 2023 and 2024, exactly a year apart. The class leader repeats a theme of in the edge, that fertile and sticky place between terrains. I think of this summer’s profuse wildflowers – trefoil and asters and Canada lilies – that spread between the river and the fields. Afterwards, I spread out my notebooks and papers and laptop in the coffee shop, plunge into a hard piece of work. I’ve no illusions that yoga will set me floating down any peaceful river. The edge, that complicated habitat, has long been my domain. Friends appear and tell me they’ve sold their house, are pulling up stakes and heading overseas. Around me, people come and go, talking and eating, figuring out or not figuring out parts of their lives.

Later, at home, the catbirds screech. A robin perches on the porch railing and studies me. The woodchucks scurry under the steps from den to woodpile, or have they slowed to a who-gives-a-damn saunter?

Winter, the edge terrain is a cold beast. July, I’m all in…

“Not so much a game
as a sphere,
a mystery.
Held up to light,
a small hole
into another dimension.” ~ Ruth Stone