With both my daughters in their teens now, I spend a stupid amount of time thinking over what makes our lives, what fills our days, how has their childhoods unwound?
Yesterday, looking up from my laptop at the kitchen table, I realize this — kid with cat — is the main action around here. Thank goodness.
Before a Cat will condescend
To treat you as a trusted friend,
Some little token of esteem
Is needed, like a dish of cream…
— T. S. Eliot
Our Kitchen, Hardwick, Vermont
When my little daughter was three, one morning in the kitchen she noticed the orange day lilies had opened their buds, and she ran upstairs to her sister, calling, Willies! Willies, sissy!
Yesterday, driving around Vermont — perhaps in an attempt to shake off a funk — day lilies bloomed everywhere, colorful masses along the roadside and white clapboard meeting houses and tiny shacks with fantastic views of green and blue mountains.
Fully into July now, I know our summer will be filled with work — some terrific and some not so — with the family complexities of single parenting, of keeping our life not only cohesive but creative. There’s lists of things I’d like to do — climb the Underhill route to Mansfield’s summit, paint the trim, plant two fruit trees — but lying in bed this morning, listening to the songbirds crack open the daybreak, I decided to par this down to one single thing: swim in the pond until the water grows cold and hostile. I lay there thinking that’s free to do, and then wondered when I had lost the sense of free in this life might be.
… (the day lily is) coarse and ordinary and it’s beautiful because
it’s ordinary. A plant gone wild and therefore become
rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,
like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.
— David Budbill, from “The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July”
Sudbury, Vermont
This in-between holiday week, our unstated goal has been to swim twice a day — in the midday hard heat and in the dusky evening, when the surface of the water holds warmth and our feet trail into the cooler eddies beneath.
We’re drinking our fill of milkweed blossoms, the reflection of clouds in rippling ponds, ice cream cones — as if this stockpiling might carry into the white and gray palette of Vermont’s winter.
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue….
(The geranium flowers) are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
— Hayden Carruth, “August First”
Hardwick, Vermont
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
… your denunciation of tyrants… mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
— Frederick Douglass, 1852
Montpelier, Vermont
My 13-year-old wraps an ice pack in a kitchen towel and gently rubs it along her cat’s hot paws. The furry creature nuzzles his head against the cold pack. Hot, hot, the cats lie on the wood floor, panting.
Viridescence begins this July, these very long days slick with humidity, turbulent with thunderstorms, the domestic garden and wild woods pulsing, rampaging green — growing headlong, magnificently wild.
This slice of summer is the season of cousins, of sprawling sunsets and lingering dusk, s’mores, and the overarching goal for today: swimming.
In a New Hampshire river, my daughter stands at the edge of a waterfall — the rocks around us radiating heat, the water so cold the small bones in our feet ache. She disappears behind the waterfall, wholly hidden by the frothing water, then emerges blinking and drenched, her smile luminescent.
The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.
— Takahama Kyoshi
Nearly July, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had sun — an apt metaphor for life, I suppose.
Early this morning when the sun spread its inimitable crimson across the horizon, and the cats stepped on my hands, reminding me gently of their hunger, I lay listening to the birds and thinking how wrong I was to envision my life as pieces — work for these hours, sandwich in volleyball, the endless litany of email, handfuls of garlic scapes I picked from the garden, hanging laundry on the line.
Our lives — my daughters’ and mine, the others around us — flow as one stream, sometimes turbulent, sometimes sweet as a June rose petal.
I’m folding up the laptop for a few days, in this summer melody.
According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed…. while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world…
— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
Stony Soil Vermont 