Hurray! May!
The May I was pregnant with my second child, rain fell every one of those 31 days — from a few sprinkles to all-day, shiver-inducing soakers. There’s an old adage, or so I’m told, that the rainier the May, the hotter the summer. That year, at least, was so.
Silage corn pushed through the black earth in the days after her birth, tiny nubs of green.
Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers.
— Issa
My daughter picks at dirt on the cuff on her jeans, troubled by this, which interests me. She’s a remarkably easy and even-tempered girl, and I sometimes wonder at her own and distinctive understanding of the world’s order.
In my bare root order, I have a handful of what seem to be sticks with filigreed root balls. Walking behind our garden in the damp April evening, she asks me if I’ll still live here when these sticks become trees.
I’m planting for the property, I answer. That answer suffices for her. She stands with me, as we envision stick widening into trunk, twig fattening into branch.
Exiting the interstate at midnight last night in rainy St. Johnsbury, it’s just me in my little silver car, the strange combination of lonely hearts’ radio and tinny country music, and that profound country Vermont darkness. That stretch of interstate rims the outer edge of utter nowhere.
Year ago, returning from a trip to my sister and her husband and their hospital-bound infant, my brother and I had trouble finding his snow-covered truck in the New Hampshire airport parking lot. Maybe it was midnight already, maybe not, but we certainly passed it, driving north on the interstate, where we stopped at a gas station and bought (and drank) terrible coffee. We were so tired we laughed until we were too tired to laugh, and then too tired to talk. Finally, at his house, his wife sat on the stairs and offered us take-out Indian food. I lay on the kitchen floor. Possibly, I even slept there, in a pile of boots and cat food bowls.
The next day, my friend and her 4-year-old drove over the White Mountains in a snowstorm to bring me home to my family — and my four-year-old. At the top of the Crawford pass, I got out of the pickup and brushed snow from the windshield and stood for a moment in all that white, not sure entirely where the unplowed road lay.
But I got back in. Her son waited patiently in his carseat between us. She kept driving. What else could we do? We couldn’t stay there. And, that, perhaps, is all I ever needed to learn about faith.
Miraculously, the snow lessened as we neared the Connecticut River, heading home.
T. S. Eliot who famously wrote April is the cruelest month did not live in Vermont, where we have much crueler seasons. Like January.
Yesterday, on my way from work to a grant-writing workshop, I returned home and changed from a sundress to jeans and sweater (again), but the robins are under the trees, wrenching out live worms. Daffodils splash.
Take what goodness you can get: I hold this as a mantra of single motherhood, but that’s likely my own solipsism. Vermont spring, while inevitably snowy in places, is a ubiquitous joy.
The workshop was held on the second floor of a gorgeous community art center, where I admired the artwork and the particularly pleasant shade of lavender on the walls. Last year, I was knocked out in the final round of this competitive grant; this year, I partook liberally of their snacks and chocolate, a kind of boon.
In this State 14, my daughter’s rock garden appears.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
— Wendell Berry
My daughter calls two ducks besides the April-fat river Mrs. and Mr. Duck — Out For an Evening Swim.
A brown female the hue of last year’s fallen leaves. The male’s garish, jade head reminds me of the unmistakable hue of Japanese beetles.
Nothing more — nothing earth-shattering — merely those two ducks easing into the muddy river, the frothy current quickly ferrying them around a bend and beyond our sight.
And yet I keep thinking back to that duck couple, a poem in motion, in no need at all of my fond wishes or thoughts.
Don’t say my hut has nothing to offer:
come and I will share with you
the cool breeze that fills my windows.
— Ryōkan
Easter bouquet
This hopeful holiday is paired with tiny spring blossoms — crocuses, grape hyacinths, glories of the snow — and early morning services in the cemetery beside our house.
Yesterday, at Quechee Gorge in the pouring rain, we stop in at the state park visitor center where there’s no one but us and an elderly man behind the counter who lays his glasses on the newspaper and takes his time talking with us and telling us about the trail. When you go under the bridge, he says, you have to stop and look up. The bridge, when we get there, harbors singing birds — a great steel enormous arch over the spring-wild Ottaquechee River, so far down this rocky channel.
We walk further to the dam, where the water roars. The two younger girls are afraid, holding back from the edge. The rain has stopped, with a few sprinkles of sunlight pushing through the mist. Water: so much water. Rain, river, the profligate clouds, a few drops in our palms from the first maple buds we touch: drop by drop, water cutting through stone.
Awakened, I hear the one true thing —
Black rain on the roof of the Fukakusa Temple.
— Either Dōgen
Stony Soil Vermont 