Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!
I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….
Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?
Why not?
A single day of rain has pushed up green.
As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….
This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —
— Issa
Certain Saturdays at my library the parents arrive with their babies, the little ones dressed up in their cutest outfits — fox prints, flowered rainbows, little ears on hoods.
The enthusiastic parents are as likely to talk about politics or soil chemistry as teething and sleep patterns.
They are all so new, parents and babies alike, that I’m a little awed, a bit overwhelmed at times, just by their sheer niceness.
My soul is not new, ragged and hardworn like the leather on my favorite pair of boots — been around. I mean this entirely without judgement, as I expect 19 years into parenting, these folks will be a bit ground down, too — although likely just as lovely.
And yet…. it’s spring. While the crocuses haven’t yet bloomed by our house, the avian life is bursting. Herons, turkey vultures, redwing blackbirds. Robins sing in a maple, a pure and unadulterated melody of beauty — no past, no future, simply there.
What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
—Issa
Photo by Molly S.
Whether the sun will ever appear in the Northeast Kingdom appears a matter of faith. I know the sun will return, likely soon, likely tomorrow, that long days of warmth will quickly melt the snow in the rose bed and bring those tiny grape hyacinths to blossom, but in the meantime….
And then: how could a girl making egg rolls with her cat cutely observing not renew my faith?
Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.
— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water
James Joyce’s “The Dead” is one of my favorite short stories, with that remarkable line about falling snow general all over Ireland. In my corner of Vermont, these days, the sentiment generally is enough with the snow for this year. April: season of rain, of snow and ice and, somewhere, beneath all that, struggling green.
I stopped in at the Woodbury school, leaning against the foyer wall while a man who grew up on a farm in the area told me the red-winged blackbirds reminded him of childhood. When he snuck away from farm chores, he headed down to the creek where those dark birds with their signature crimson mark sang.
Ridiculously visually inclined, I rely too heavily on my vision: really, as all my photos attest, the landscape here is yet the monochrome of winter. I’m wrong about this, of course, although I won’t point to any sign of spring at my friend’s request. Too cruel, she says, when sleet falls.
And yet — dumping coffee grounds around blueberry plants, fingering their branches and imagining small, perfect white blossoms, I then close my eyes and listen to the birdsong all around, their rising, sweet melodies.
I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil…
— Louise Glück
Woodbury, Vermont
The week after my birthday, my daughters throw me a surprise party — I walk into the house where the girls had made cupcakes and hung streamers and balloons and think, how nice, the girls have been busy this afternoon — and then my office door opens and person after person appears, like that classic skit of clowns unfolding from a tiny car — a skit so dated my daughters likely don’t know it.
Afterwards, my older daughter revealed the plan had been weeks in the making, and I must have known, because I know everything. Apparently, not.
My brother’s here, too: perhaps the greatest surprise. While he grills sausage, we laughingly make our usual pact — no ER or law enforcement this visit. Most of these people I have known now for years; many moved us from our old house. One guest laments the tape on the ceiling holding up the streamers, and I shrug it off. While I love this house and don’t particularly like painting ceilings, we live here now, and I hope to have birthday after birthday in these rooms.
That night, we set off the remaining Roman candles from my daughter’s high school graduation party — yes, we packed and brought those fireworks, too.
Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change form day to day…
— From Hayden Carruth’s “Silence”
My friend down the road emails a complaint regarding the break in my signs of spring project — because there isn’t any! she writes.
True, snow returned yesterday. Enormous, lacy flakes that would have been beautiful December — say — rather than April. It’s spring, all right, but spring is a very lengthy season in Vermont. For those two decades I sugared, through an awful lot of cold and sleet and the terrible early March when 70º temperatures ruined that year’s season and a chunk of our year’s income, the word persistence has gradually evolved in my way of thinking to patience.
Every year, although I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, I somehow have this mistaken notion spring will be brief and brilliant. But autumn is gradual, too, the light at that end of the year bit by bit dwindling before it disappears.
Hidden beneath that coverlet of snow, my garlic I’m sure is beginning to stretch and prod in its lightless place. This morning, the sky bends toward blue. Here’s this sign of spring: light.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
— Rumi
Stony Soil Vermont 