11-years-old. Hair sun-bleached. Eyes on the bike route. Hungry for mocha mud ice cream.
Evening breeze —
water is slapping against
the legs of a blue heron.
– Yosa Buson
Stowe, Vermont
August, 2016, Vermont
mothering
Girl with Confidence
My 11-year-old daughter woke up this morning, searched for a particular pair of shorts, and ran down our dirt road. She ran for the first time beyond the road’s well-travelled end and down the narrower section, where woods and wild blackberries flank either side.
In the afternoon, she took her sister and me on a tour of Morrisville’s rail trail where she’s sprinted this summer with a friend. With delight, she showed us a bridge over a narrow road, the brewery where we later ate dinner, a tiny house with a glass front, a cluster of ramshackle trailers.
The ride, fragrant with August’s lush goldenrod, scottish thistle, honeysuckle, was a three-dimensional map of her childhood world: a unique, dear gift.
Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
Scout, in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
Morrisville, Vermont
Mother’s Work
Maybe I’m just incredibly narrowly read, but it seems far too infrequent that I read a male writer exclaiming, “Thank god. The kids played Monopoly all afternoon and left me alone at my desk. For two whole hours.” Perhaps what I need isn’t so much a room of mine own (which I now have, after many years) but a nanny of my own.
Rain is rumored, but long in arriving. We’re now settled into a summer routine of kids swimming at the lake while I spread out my laptop and a bag of work on a stained towel. By the dinner, it’s been a full day of work sandwiched with swimming and snacks. This is the high point of the summer – the crickets at full throttle, the lakes endless, the garden escaping its fence and long past the dire point of must-weeding. What will grow, will indeed grow. Blackberry tart rears its maplely head this evening.
Here’s a brief bit of beach reading from Mary Norris’s Between You and Me, one more womanly skill among many mothering others:
Used well, the semicolon makes a powerful impression; misused, it betrays your ignorance.
Blackberries in All Their Heavenly Glory
I naturally think of the world in terms of metaphors, and blackberry season is a thread that’s wound all through my adult life. Twenty years ago, we moved into our house – essentially a hunting camp then – on a clay-soil Vermont hillside with little else of human life around. On a woods road behind the house, I discovered a blackberry thicket. I see my younger self, picking alone in those brambles, wearing an old red t-shirt and darted at by hummingbirds, afraid of the bears who had clearly enjoyed their share of the wild harvest.
My daughters and I easily picked a quart last evening of exceptionally sweet and juicy berries. Some years, the berries are seedy and hard; some years, the vines are nearly absent of fruit; others, like this one, go on and on for weeks, delicious, wild, there for the gathering.
One year, I pulled a long thorn from my young daughter’s sandal. Her tiny heel released a single drop of crimson blood. Through all these seasons, here’s been the berries, various as our own family dynamics – generous or bitter, depending on the season – but invariably returning. Isn’t that metaphor enough?
Here’s a Galway Kinnell one-liner:
I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry – eating in late September.
Photo by Molly S.
A Mouse Passing
This will likely reveal the sad state of housekeeping around here, but the other morning I found a dead mouse in the living room. The little creature must have folded itself against the chimney in the night and passed along into the next realm for small rodents, leaving behind a gray and a very long-tailed body. I swept it into the dustpan and laid it outside beneath a maple tree. Still early in the morning, the grass was cool beneath my bare feet, and the children were sleeping, wreathed in their world of dreams.
Ill, injured, or simply old? I don’t know. The leaves flipped up their undersides, preparing for rain. I knew the little body wouldn’t remain there long. These shells of creatures never do, scavenged up by some other animal, turned into someone else.
Oddly, as I walked back into the house and picked up my laptop on the couch again, I thought of an Issa haiku I first read when I was a teenager, more resonant, stronger, than ever. Ah, little mouse…
Don’t kill that fly!
Look–it’s wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.
– Kobayashi Issa
One Life Instruction, via Mary Oliver
Last summer, we were eating dinner with friends who have young children, and two couples compared notes about their toddlers drinking dirty bath water. I laughed and assured them, yes, someday their kids would brush their own teeth. The real challenge, I claimed, was when the teenagers take off in the Toyota.
As I often am, I was wrong. What about when a child decides to disappear into a remote mountain wilderness? Or head down her own path of parenthood?
In my forties, now, I’ve reached the point where life is no longer that amorphous, endlessly murky terrain, but indeed life stretches out, far more winding than I ever would have imagined when I was twenty. Perhaps it’s the decade of my life, but now separations, cancers, loss and loss again, is no longer uncommon – which perhaps is why good news is so much sweeter. Every one of these babies born well, a new house, a book published, a journey completed in good humor.
Or this: my girls with their long legs sprawled on the couch, laughing about silly things, nothing more, just silliness. Long life is made of little tiny moments: soak up the sweeter ones.
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
– Mary Oliver
Stony Soil Vermont 