I’m drinking coffee in an empty corner of a coffee shop when two strangers meet up at the counter and strike up a conversation. They’re kidding the young man behind the counter who’s been sitting on the floor behind the counter, talking to a young woman. It’s a quiet morning, and their chatter has been gently full of laughter and wit.
One stranger buys the other a coffee — “and throw a shot of espresso into it” — and then his card jams and won’t work. The barista turns the card reader upside down (I mean, what else can you do with those things?) and then the other stranger pulls out cash. The men talk songwriting and growing up in North Carolina and the price of a cord of wood.
It’s a kind of Valentine’s bit of goodwill on a snowy morning that soon will turn to sun in Northern Vermont….
When the winter chrysanthemums go, There’s nothing to write about But radishes.
It’s been awhile since I did a carpool or handoff along the road — once a mainstay of my life. Seems like I spent hours of motherhood waiting at some designated place. I leave early to have this little pocket of time, a few minutes, no more, to watch the sky darken. I bring a book, too, more out of habit than anything else.
Vermont highways are lonely and busy, with stretches of time where you can walk down the center line, and then times when you risk your life (actually) to walk those yellow strips. The girls are laughing when they arrive. I hand over my daughter’s gloves, warm from my car heater as I tried to dry out the wet remains of yesterday’s skiing. I stand talking, shivering in my sweater. I’m sweaty from skiing, and I’ve forgotten my coat. The girls are busy, busy, happy in a plan of their own, my daughter’s hair still in the braids I wove for her this morning.
The girls drive away. I head back to my car, sliding in my plastic-soled ski boots, and someone I’ve known for years pulls over and asks if I need help. Good lord, I laugh. Because our kids played together as toddlers, I feel I can start right in and so I do. I begin with the bathroom sink drain that I need to take apart, and how does anyone endure the college app process, and am I ever going to remember to clean the inside of my windshield, save for when the sun hits it and blinds me?
I’m really laughing by then, and she is, too. I lean against my car — again, shivering, shivering — while we exchange the usual kid and life updates of people who know each other but sometimes go years without talking. The cold air comes down in this sweet-spot crepuscular moment as the night slowly floods in. She leaves, and I stand for a moment, looking up for the first stars. Such little cares I’ve listed, the stuff of living, blessings more than grievances.
And then I’m on my way, too, leaving the river and road, at least for now.
The outside light flicks on early this morning, and my little cat Acer stares wide-eyed at a skunk making its snuffling and curious away around a flowerpot I left on the back step. Well before dawn, the cats are already fed, the kitchen warm, redolent with coffee, and here’s this wild creature, not in the least troubled by the two of us.
The skunk waddles on its way. Shortly afterwards, snow and chunks of ice rush down the house roof and crash on the porch, softened in the rising temperature. My cat runs. I wonder about the porch railing which snapped in prior years, but nothing appears broken. The design is poor — steep roof and wide porch and slender railings — and I let myself wonder just for a moment if this is some kind of hidden cosmic twist, a long-buried plan from when my former husband built this porch. I cut off that sentiment. This far along in life, I’m well-acquainted with the steepness of roofs and the precariousness of ice and snow and dynamic temperature. Gravity is not ruled by human desire.
At the other end of the day, I’m carrying in a few armloads of wood from the barn when another ice chunk falls, shaking the porch where I had tread a moment before. Through the glass door, my teen raises her hands — what’s happening? — Acer at her feet.
The cold’s drilling back in for the night. In the valley below, the village twinkles in the darkness. The wind whirls around the scent of woodsmoke. I step back, finally wary. The roof has cleared.
When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out….
On my way home, I stop to fuel my Subaru. A light snow falls, icy around the edges, barely sharp enough to tease my cheeks as I stand looking up. It’s after dark, and the people are coming and going in the convenience store with cups of coffee and bottles of wine and white paper cartons of fried food. The river curves behind the store and the attached garage, silently bending through town, water running beneath the frozen surface.
The evening before, my daughter asked me about The Yellow Wallpaper, the novella she’s reading for class. I remembered the free copy I picked up in high school, dirty and water-stained — a copy I probably snagged from my high school floor. This is the season of freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, the long slow slog towards spring. In the late afternoons, skiing, the sunlight pushes through the forest. Some days, cold. Some days, warm. So it goes.
A profound cold stills our world for a few days, narrows our lives. All night on Friday, the wind screams and howls. By Saturday afternoon, the wind drops. I ski out to the river. The air is broken glass, so sharp breathing hurts.
To celebrate my oldest daughter’s birthday, we eat at a little restaurant/bar in Plainfield where I haven’t been in fifteen years. We’re at a back table so cold that the other three keep on their jackets and I note the usefulness of my handknit sweater. This observation impresses no one except myself. My daughter orders a drink with a lemon peel. The food is scrumptious, rich with garlic.
In their zipped-up jackets, side by side, my daughters talk and laugh with their ongoing story that includes frozen pipes, getting lost, a red prom dress, what happens when a car is started at 27 below zero, and the IRS. Outside, a round moon is ringed with yellow luminescence, so brilliant the sky around the moon is blue, surrounded by night’s black. Our boots crunch over ice as we list the moon’s might: tides and weather, childbirth and madness, the beauty of moonbeams.
In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head.
All week, people have been dropping in at work, with ideas and needs and so much school board talk. A stranger dropped in yesterday and mentioned she expected to become a grandmother that day, possibly the next. Candlemas, the ancient festival, forty days after Christmas and its official end. February 3 marks my own holy day, the day my oldest joined us in the world and I crossed over into motherhood.
In labor, I walked outside in Birkenstocks and stared at the melting snow that was running in sunny trickles. Just days after she was born, a fierce cold sunk in to stay. The neighbors brought a blueberry pie. As a toddler, I called this child a wildcat. Now, all grown up, she’s still a cat, with a cat’s complexities — half-feral and blissfully domestic, fierce-clawed and loving.
With worry edging her voice, the stranger told me she expected her family’s birth to be healthy. These usually go well, she noted. I agreed, and we walked out together. The wind carried dry snow over the parking lot. She disappeared in her car, but I stood for a moment longer, remembering my daughter was born shortly before midnight. My long labor ended with a surgeon who held my vernix-smeared baby in his gloved hands so I could see her. Her eyes were wide open, and she looked directly at me.
listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own.
Stony Soil Vermont 