Saturday evening in June….
There are names for what binds us:strong forces, weak forces.Look around, you can see them:the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,nails rusting into the places they join,joints dovetailed on their own weight.The way things stay so solidlywherever they’ve been set down—and gravity, scientists say, is weak….
Elmore Mountain from West Woodbury, Vermont
One rainy Saturday when I was a kid, my dad drove me and my siblings to the movie Watership Down in Manchester, New Hampshire, in an old green Commando Jeep he drove most of my childhood. On the way there, approaching an intersection, the brakes failed, and he slid through an intersection blaring his horn and flashing his lights. Under a benevolent star that day, we cruised through the red light unharmed, and my dad pulled over, doubtlessly nearly breathless with relief.
For a child, that memory remained as a flashy bit of drama. As a parent at the wheel with three kids, terrible misfortune averted. When I told my 18-year-old daughter to drive safety the other day, heading to high school or work or out with her friends to the movies, she rolled her eyes. I reiterated that I will always be your mother, so bear up, my beloved.
Today is my mother’s 80th birthday, two days after my father’s 80th birthday, both children of the Depression, with their own long lives which have touched so many people.
I think of parenting like the proverb from an old Tom Selleck movie: The ox is slow, but the earth is patient, plodding along with heavy-hooves, but overhead spreads the changing, infinite sky, the eternal constant comfort of the earth beneath our feet.
Best wishes on your birthday, mother.
…Let me congratulate you on
the birthday of your son…
You didn’t make him prosperous or famous,
and fearlessness is his only talent.
Open up his windows,
let in the twittering in the leafy branches…
Give him his notebook and his ink bottle,
give him a drink of milk and watch him go.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko, from “Birthday”
Recently, on a freezing afternoon, I was late to a workshop for writing a grant, in an attempt to keep funding my second novel endeavor. Either because I live where parking is usually not a problem, or because I don’t think ahead, I arrived with about a heartbeat to spare, but then couldn’t find parking, and ended up running in my clunky boots and parka a few blocks.
The workshop was held in a dance studio that was hardly heated, and all of crowded around tables in our sweaters and coats and hand-knitted hats. Mainly painters, the other attendees ranged from a young man who seemed to have just rolled out of the sack to elderly folks who asked a lot of good questions. Although I didn’t linger, I knew these were my tenor of people – not all that well-coiffed, intense enough about their passion to seek out sitting for a few cold hours in a shabby end of Burlington.
To get through the first cut, I’ll need to write four paragraphs. I sat there, in my sweater with the unraveling cuffs, and thought, That’s it? Four paragraphs? While the painters asked questions about matting, I started scribbling my answer. Be specific. Be profound. Articulate why literature matters. And, for God’s sake, don’t be afraid of four paragraphs.
Check back in May and see if I’m weeping….
Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place.
– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
Hazen Union, Hardwick, Vermont
These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.
Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.
That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.
From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon-beholders.
– Matsuo Bashō
Hardwick, Vermont
House hunting with my enthusiastic contingent, us adults stood in a dim basement yesterday, so cold we kept swaying from one foot to the other, trying to stay warm. Outside, the children tromped in the snowy yard, warmer in the sunlight than we were in the house.
In the basement, someone discovered a wooden chute, carefully nailed shut from the cement floor to the under boards of the dining room above. Intently curious, my friend pried off a board, and I peered up through the darkness where I saw a gleam of daylight through an ornate floor grate.
What the heck?
It made no sense to any of us, running through our logical possibilities.
In the end, blowing on my hands, I said, But it must have made sense to whoever built it. Look at the labor.
Upstairs, the children were laughing and throwing snowballs at each other, busy in their own meaningful kids’ work.
Whether I buy the house or not, we’ve spent serious time already, running palms over pipes, fingering up loose linoleum, rapping on old plaster, getting to know just a few mysteries of this old house.
When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context.
Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic – and How to Get It Back
West Woodbury, Vermont
Every winter, I shovel a path from the woodshed to the back entry, and another from the kitchen door to the compost pile, a hand-cut maze around my house. The snow in northern Vermont falls so amply my daughters, when toddlers, were sometimes completely concealed in these paths. I could hear a little girl laughing, running with baby steps in snow boots, invisible to my eye.
Yesterday, the 11-year-old and her friend, still wearing pajamas, opened the door and oooohhhhed at the snow. They shoveled a steep slide off the kitchen roof, and then made another from the sugarhouse roof.
In the afternoon, sun emerged and light snow drifted down outside the public library windows. The library filled with just the right amount of people, the children busy with crafts, the adults companionable, drinking coffee and working. At five, I walked outside into what must be the best of Vermont winter: drifting bits of perfect snowflake shot through with sunlight, mixed with the blueness of twilight.
But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment….
William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl
Stony Soil Vermont 