Late afternoon, shaking off the day’s chaos, a light and very welcome rain sprinkles down.

I’m drinking a glass of water and picking a few rouge leaves from here and there in the garden, when I look up and see a rainbow, a gem, tucked over the hill.

I stand, the rain falling ever so slightly. We need rain in a serious way, in a way that makes me worried about gardening. Every evening, I give little sips of water to my plants. But for this moment: water and color.

The rainbow never tells me

That gust and storm are by,

Yet is she more convincing

Than Philosophy.

— Emily Dickinson

A fellow school board member and I take a tour of the high school. I haven’t actually walked the halls in a year. The high school is very, very, very clean. Like, crazy clean, especially for a fifty-year old building.

In the gymnasium, I remember all those basketball games, the graduations, the Congressional delegation visit….

Afterwards, we stand outside in the sunlight, masks on, talking and talking, looking at back at this school that has meant so many things, to so many people, in so many ways the heart of the community — now, of course, for vaccine clinics.

School board positions are not hotly contested in our world, but in this sunlight, after a tour with so much history and so much more to come, I feel oddly so lucky to have this elected seat. The pandemic has flipped the tables in so many ways. It’s impossible not to think that the world is changing right now, all around us. As I leave, my fellow board member wonders how change will come, if we’ll all be hugging each other in the co-op, if things might get really weird.

Weird, I say, I can deal with. I walk home to where my daughter is baking a birthday cake for her sister’s friend. The house smells of sugar, and the cats are sprawled in a patch of sunlight, where flour is spread on the floor. How good to be here. Part of all this.

Reading about Texas, I wince for these folks. We’re colder here, in Vermont, but we’re ready for the cold — at least the fortunate of us are. My daughter, at 15, wears thin canvas shoes to school. I watch her in the morning lace these up, knowing she’ll walk home through snow and sometimes sleet in these shoes, but the walk isn’t long. More importantly, the choice and consequences are hers. And who wants to clomp around a high school in winter boots?

We’re living now in the interminable zone of midwinter, where the promise of spring scorns us like a mirage. At the same time, inherently we’re living through a countdown to mid-March. I remember that cold afternoon I stood with my daughter in our kitchen, listening to the governor on the radio as he explained the shelter in place order. She was 14 then, and kept asking me what that meant. I had no idea then, but I could sense walls ascending around our house, as if rising from the earth.

One year later. It’s not my anniversary, it’s an anniversary for all of us. For what that’s worth.

Here’s a poem written for the love of summer….

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

— Ted Kooser, “So This is Nebraska”

I’m walking to the co-op in the late afternoon and stop when I see a boy heading towards me. He’s maybe ten or twelve, and he stops and dutifully pulls up his mask.

I don’t know him by name, only by sight, and I know he’s always diligent about that mask. It’s cold, but not so cold as the past few days, and the sky is the twilight blue that reminds me of distant seas.

As he passes, I nod, and then I realize he’s wearing a hat I knitted with a coppery gold yarn. A friend had asked me to donate knitting to a local hat drive. I look back at him and watch that boy and hat disappear around the hillside.

Almost immediately, I realize I’m wearing a down jacket that I gleaned from the local cast-off closet at work. Someone had donated three down coats so brand-new the material slid beneath my fingers. I took all three, for my daughters and myself.

There’s likely a lesson there, but who cares, really? I tug the collar higher against the cold and hurry along the street.