Saturday evening in June….
There are names for what binds us:strong forces, weak forces.Look around, you can see them:the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,nails rusting into the places they join,joints dovetailed on their own weight.The way things stay so solidlywherever they’ve been set down—and gravity, scientists say, is weak….
Elmore Mountain from West Woodbury, Vermont
After a week of just too much, I sat knitting in the back row at the Galaxy Bookshop last night, surrounded by some adults I knew, and some I didn’t, listening to the four poets read in a round robin. The poetry and the poets all flowed into each other – stanzas about Garage Sale DayZ and an expectant father slid into a particularly exquisite love poem by Sean Prentiss.
Afterward, I spoke with his wife and admired how their baby girl smiles with her whole tiny, joyful body. In the warm June evening, scented with the town’s profuse lilacs, I lay on the grass under a sugar maple at the elementary school, waiting for my sixth grader at her first dance.
June’s blooming beauty – Siberian iris, deep purple lupine – and the children are happy. Beneath my palms, I could feel the earth herself, free from winter’s grip, breathing.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever….
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever;
the wide dry field of geese…
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.
– Ruth Stone, from “Train Ride”
In the next week, my older daughter will graduate from high school. My younger ends her elementary grades in the beloved red schoolhouse. I will sell one house and buy another; my daughters and I will move seven miles or so from one county to another, all our earthly belongings packed up in cardboard boxes and transported by friends and relatives. I will shut the door one final time on a house my former husband and I built, and metaphorically step away from that marriage. Friends from long ago are coming to visit. My daughters and I will come to know how and when sunlight enters our new house, what the water tastes like, where on the horizon the moon rises.
My daughters good-naturedly roll their eyes when I talk about houses being alive, but our house now will pass into hands better able to care for its keen needs. In the sky over our new house, graceful and eternally patient turkey vultures spread their wings in spirals of air currents. All life is change; we’re in the spin of confluence this week – and likely the next – but then I intend to have a good long summer, listening to the birdsong, swimming in Vermont’s cold lakes, and studying those vultures, our new neighbors.
Sometimes when we lose, we gain, and when we gain, we lose. Our fears and joys are bound up inextricably, pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure. Our efforts to untangle and isolate human experience can leave us confused and depressed. Happiness means choosing to be productive and optimistic, recognizing despair for the ancient parasite that it is and outsmarting it.
– Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains
A naturalist did a program at my small library last night, appearing with a red-tailed hawk, a rabbit, a wood turtle, a frog, a snake, and a curved-beak raven. As the room was packed, I stood by the door, watching when he offered to let my daughters touch that gorgeous snake. Wincing – but polite – both declined.
The library is one of those essential places in our society, where everyone is welcome to drink a cup of hot tea in an evening after it has rained – hard, all day – browse the books, listen. Simply come out of our rural Vermont homes and realize the rest of the town is sodden with spring rain, too.
Closing up, I stepped outside, and the clouds had cleared. The sky was pink at the horizon, and an enormous rainbow bent over the library, the small building constructed with volunteer labor, years before I arrived at the scene. My daughter remarked about a pot of gold somewhere, maybe down by the school’s garden. The air was swept clean, already warming, promising sunnier skies. Robins sang.
My daughters walked across the field, oohing and ahhing, my older daughter with her camera, while along the path an older man moved step by step, making his steady way under those clearing skies, going from here to there.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
– James Baldwin
By chance, I’ve discovered a reprint of The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, published originally in 1968, about a German family who sought succor in my state during the terrible years of World War II. Herdan-Zuckmayer’s writing flows clear as water, pragmatic and thoughtful. How I wished she lived down my road today, and I might ask her to take a walk.
Among the states they (Vermonters) are a relatively poor state, but they are not afraid of their poverty; they don’t love wealth, they have little to gain and not much to lose. This modesty and moderation give them an independence from uncertain times and arm them with pride and fearlessness.
I’m still burning wood into June, in this long damp spring. Usually, my daughter’s birthday at the end of May marks the beginning of the swimming season, and many birthday parties have ended with an adult or two walking the little girls across the road in Elmore to the lake.
This year, while the children disappeared in the greenery, laughing, four adults stood around a fire, talking about everything from SBACs to dementia, while the damp wore into us. With an exhale, we could see the clouds of our breath.
Earlier that day, I had taken some children to a theater opening, and watched a magician blow bubble creations: a spinning carousel, a caterpillar, rainbow-hued bubbles-within-a-bubble. He told a story of keeping a bubble in a sealed glass container, checking it every morning as it changed hue, absorbing the air molecule by molecule, until one day it popped and disappeared.
Edging nearer the fire yesterday, I thought of this magician, waking up each morning, curious about the evolving state of his bubble, improbably spun from the simplicity of liquid and air, radiantly beautiful. The boy beside me had murmured, That is the coolest thing.
Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
– Jane Hirshfield
Stony Soil Vermont 