I found that plowing land, traversing rows of vegetables, mowing, traveling back and forth from barn to house – this shuttling is akin to writing, the body a pen, the land an endless tablet. I learned that the words within us, under our gambrel skulls, are waiting to be let out to pasture.
– Julia Shipley, Adam’s Mark
We’re thick into the summer now, with a smear of humidity, and the breeze this evening through the open window and balcony door rich with the sweet scent of freshly mown grass, the nocturnal animals calling and chirruping.
I have this vision of summertime involving sweating glasses of refreshing lemonade, and every year about this time, I realize there’s lemonade, but the sweat drips from my hand. More likely these days, there’s a cup of coffee beside my laptop, my toes grimy already from an early morning weed in the garden.
July is the month of verdant growth – not a month to miss in Vermont. But while the garden is growing, and the jewelweed and ferns and raspberries march in, the human realm doesn’t seem to pause, either. Some of this is just fantastic – the radiant happiness of a ten-year-old at art camp (oh joy!) this week – but our lives have no pause, no genuine respite from the undercurrents of our inner lives. Perhaps this is simply the nature of being human, and the lushness of summer echoes our own midsummer madness.
In the Thoreau paper I’m writing, I propose Walden is a spherical whole, where all aspects of the natural and human worlds are intertwined. Joy knots around a kernel of sadness, and grief holds a gleaming ribbon of happiness.
Here’s Paul Gruchow again:
But the fact is that the same dramas and miracles of life occur in Windom (Minnesota) as in Tokyo. People are born, they struggle to live worthy and productive lives, they are challenged by fate, buffeted by setbacks and disappointments, heartened in unexpected hours, visited by evil and grace alike, and come to sudden and premature or to lingering and overdue deaths everywhere in the world.
Go for a swim in a cold, deep lake, with its illusive bottom. Eat cherries with kids and spit the stones, laughing. Lie awake at night listening to the breeze dappling the maple leaves.
WHEN WE FAIL TO TEACH our children how to inhabit the places where they have been raised—when we don’t teach them the stories, the customs, the practices, the nature of those places—then we also fail to teach them how to be at home anywhere.
But suppose local history, culture, and natural history were at the center of our teaching. Wouldn’t that, you might well ask, just encourage parochialism and xenophobia, and don’t we already have those attributes in more than adequate supply?
I would argue, on the contrary, that parochialism and xenophobia are fed by the suspicion that all the really important things happen somewhere else. One of the magical effects of freeing the imagination to go to work in the place where it finds itself is how this enlarges the world.
– Paul Gruchow, “Discovering the Universe of Home”
By sheer fortuitousness, I stumbled upon Gruchow – particularly keen as I’m writing an essay on Thoreau, sense of place and my own Vermont writing. If there’s one thing in my (perhaps questionable) parenting I’ve given my daughters it’s place in spades: here, this clayey piece of land, is where you learned to walk and run; the grass under the apple tree where tea was sipped from miniature, ladybug-painted cups with dolls; the dirt road where you learned to pedal a two-wheeler; our house under the gossamer Milky Way. Right now, our place in this bend of Vermont gleams a myriad of green, heady with the fragrance of mud and multiple blossoms.
The Long Trail, Johnson, Vermont
Here’s the thing about Thoreau and gardening: Thoreauvian time is distinctly non-linear, perceiving the world through cyclical seasons. Walden is written as a single-year cycle, with multiple circles within. As gardeners, we must all, on some level, embrace the world in variations of rebirth, growth, and demise.
Today, my garden bursts in profusion: white currants, greens, rogue chamomile mixed in with the bee balm. A woodchuck we saw running by…..
This is the season of a ten-year-old girl picking peas, of dinner cooked over an outside fire, of rain on the sunhat left on the grass while we played an evening game at the neighbors’ house. Their four-year-old daughter showed us her garden, while her younger brother ran in excited figure eights. Walking home tonight, my daughter’s hand in mine, fireworks from Cabot and Morrisville lit up the night sky over our mountain, while fireflies blinked around us. Our heels struck the dirt road, our guide home in the thick country dark, the frogs peeping and the owls calling, this season of Vermont July.
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men… At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable by us because unfathomable.
– Thoreau
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…. be that apple pie, a small vineyard, or the stock market.
The pursuit of happiness doesn’t get any more American than that. But way down at the end of this document, those signers staked their personal bets on something called Providence and did a blood-brother we’re-all-in-the-same-boat handshake. Huh.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
While writing an essay on Thoreau and a sense of place in contemporary Vermont literature, I’ve reread Donald Hall’s “Why I Hate Vermont.” Having spent a chunk of my childhood in Hall’s New Hampshire, I can only laugh at this essay. It’s wickedly funny (and his claim about the trout is actually true).
In Vermont deer are required to have shots. In Vermont people keep flocks of spayed sheep to decorate their lawns. In Vermont when inchling trout are released into streams, a state law requires that they be preboned and stuffed with wild rice delicately flavored with garlic and thyme…. In Vermont, in 1999, the license plate slogan was Eat Three Nutritious Meals a Day. In legislative committee this slogan edged out Experience Mozart.
– Donald Hall
The more serious side of Vermont…..
Stony Soil Vermont 