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
A few minutes early to collect the 12-year-old and her friend from track practice, the 19-year-old and I take a walk around a neighborhood circle near the high school, passing a house I considered buying but didn’t.
Full of excitement about her morning, my daughter talks on and on, her happiness as visible as red-breasted robins in a bare-branched maple tree. We pause for a moment before the three-story house, with large original windows on the first and second floors, bordered at the top by ornate stained glass. The owner confessed the windows leaked air profusely but couldn’t bear to replace them. The house is no longer for sale; my daughter and I speculate the family still lives there.
We walk by another house flanked by five sugar maples, the trees young enough to live for many more decades.
Robins, both visible and hidden, sing.
My daughter and I pass these houses and these possible lives our family might have taken but didn’t. Then we’re back at the high school, still in the cold and clear March sunlight, beside a maple filled with robins fluttering their wings, chorusing in the beginning of spring.
I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.
— Galway Kinnell
A lover I had for a very brief time complained I wasn’t good at accepting gifts. Pride, he noted. About that, he was right.
And yet a life without pride in yourself and your actions? Lack pride and you become a muddied doormat. So here’s the theme that surfaces over and over in all our lives — where to find the sweet spot of balance.
Hard things have a way of bending you, and that bending can go either way, I tell my daughters. In this long cold spring, that sentiment runs deeply.
cherry blossom petals
blown by the spring breeze against
the undried wall
— Masaoka Shiki
This morning, I step out on the back porch to say, Goodbye, have a nice day to my 12-year-old as she walks to school. I lift my voice a little and add, Feels like March and spring!
By way of answering, she raises one hand, watching the ice beneath her boot soles.
Okay, she’s headed to 7th grade (myself and all my friends think been there, done that) but I also see, as the new town kid, halfway through the school year, she’s figuring out how to navigate her own way: who to walk with, and what’s the best snacks for the jaunt home.
I, on the other hand, like many mothers I know, step back in the house and breathe for a moment before the week with all its many pieces rushes at me.
Here’s some good things: an interlibrary loan book I know will be in the post office box today. None of us are sick. The cats are curled in a box, sleeping off their breakfast. The kitchen floor is washed, and there’s all this sunlight, as the planet ever so slowly bends toward spring.
Buying leeks
and walking home
under the bare trees.
— Buson
Outside Hardwick’s food co-op are two boards thumb-tacked with wind-tattered signs, the cultural postings of this small town – free community postings of library and school events, classes offered, a deadbeat father’s rambling missive to his family. I stand in the cold reading the jumble of those scrawled words, thinking how much more his children would have appreciated a loaf of bread.
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry
A few years ago, an enormous storm dumped gravel on local farmers’ fields and generally wrecked significant agricultural damage. Farmers around here are small, small-scale, no one ever gets adequate insurance compensation, and the storm hurt.
I bought this sketch below at a community fundraiser for local farmers at the Woodbury Town Hall, where the people from the surrounding towns came together for a dinner and live music, and many folks donated all kinds of beautiful handmade things that switched from hand to hand with some cash.
Some money, no doubt, was raised. The night was a goodwill, community gesture after a bad event. This is the better, more generous, gracious element of Vermont. We are not always so kind.
Walking around this small town where I live – Hardwick – whether to the post office, or crawling under broken boards with my visiting nephews to get into the empty granite sheds for an “historic” tour, I keep returning to the notion that more deeply understanding all the variations of this small town, I would gain some tenor of illumination.
Just to mix things up in the little-light month of December, I’ll aim to share a few snips of life within walking distance.
Whether the recollection is of fascist Italy in the 1920s, of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror of 1937-38, or of the purges in communist eastern Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, people who were living in fear of repression remembered how their neighbors treated them. A smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting – banal gestures in a normal situation – took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and acquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew.
–Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century
