On the first glorious day of summer, my daughters are on Lake Champlain, walking along a causeway in this enormous lake. The day holds that nearly unbelievable deep green. Walking down to the diner to meet someone, I keep marveling. Just soak it in, I tell my deeper, more distrustful side. Sweet summer… sweet…
Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.
— Buson
My cat at work in my office…. thinking…
Driving home from a soccer game in Barre — I must always be writing about driving, driving, as maybe that’s when my mind wanders most, maybe thinks the best — we’re tired, or I’m tired at least, and my daughter must be starved. It’s raining, and the way is wooded and green.
Stopping at my library, on the way home, it’s wood turtle day. The hard-backed creatures have laid their eggs and are edging their way back to the wetlands. I see a six almost immediately in the grass. Looking down at the kids’ soccer field, the turtles are on the move, their ancient dance alive on this hot and now rainy summer evening.
My daughter stands silently, rapt.
Some late night reading….
(Aldous Huxley after an LSD trip wrote he saw)… ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.’ The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: ‘The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.’
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
All day long yesterday, June hummed along, perfect in temperature, glossy green but not over-brilliant, busy with hummingbirds, bumblebees, a few stray mosquitoes.
What a day, everyone repeated, all through these hours capped off with a retirement party. One high school student shared the story of the facilities manager who repaired her broken flipflop when she was six. He used duct tape and a staple, gave it a test wiggle, and said, It’ll do.
‘Auto Mirror’
In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
for a moment.
— Adam Zagajewski
June, old quarries, Barre
…. or not.
There’s nothing quite like visiting your very early childhood territory with your youngest child, who’s now 14 and partly worldly as heck and partly a jigsaw-puzzle-loving kid.
An unrequited desire of mine had been to visit somewhere or someone from my past — a college best friend or a former lover. Instead, on near impulse, my daughter and I visited northern New Mexico. Hiking through the national forest, I realized I’ll never be able to view New Mexico as a dispassionate visitor, only — mysteries of mysteries — through the dewy and amorous eyes of very early childhood.
Edge of the world? Surely in early childhood the edge is always tantalizingly near…..
June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.
My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.
What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?
Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.
Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.
— Basho
Nearly two years ago we moved into our house — from the house where my daughters had lived their whole lives. Now, two years in, this new-to-us 100-year-old house, the house has morphed into home, with a particular shade of yellow I painted the dining room, our first chicken buried in the backyard, the front porch filled with piles of library books, Yahtzee score cards marked up, kid sweatshirts.
Infinitely lucky we three females are, to move five miles down the road, from a forest to a town, our cardboard boxes ferried by friends.
Here’s my State 14 postcard.
Stony Soil Vermont 