I snapped this photo of my beloved daughter’s bare feet at a gas station, just before I had a conversation with a couple who had left Tennessee (brutally hot, they repeated) for the romantic life in Vermont. I kept thinking, but you haven’t meet Vermont’s January yet….
After so long, we finally had a full dinner table on our back porch yesterday, myself and the daughters and the boyfriend and my brother and his partner, all of us together with summer’s greenery pressing in — the domesticity of my potted plants and the wildness of box elder and cardinals interwoven.
Rain sprinkled, and we grilled steak and vegetables. Our conversation wound through drought, the pandemic and the Delta variant, QAnon, and my teenager’s job in a general store this summer.
Over the valley, I saw clouds darken, and rain broke again. Plate by chair by glass we carried in what needed to be covered, and kept talking.
I had dinner in someone else’s house. Big deal? It’s been a very, very long, a pre-pandemic time.
At the end of an afternoon of a school board retreat, we kept sitting around the table, eating and refiling our plates, and drinking seltzer and beer. Our talking wound through laughter, through gossip, and musings.
Someone relayed the story of a long ocean voyage on a container shipping vessel, how the weeks at sea eroded any sense of time, until his life was simply water and ship and sky. We listened, in no rush at all.
Then, when we had talked ourselves out, we still sat there, unwilling to move, to break this quiet spell.
Rain fell; the sun shone. None of us ran outside to look for the rainbow. We simply sat.
A thunderstorm rumbles in early Saturday morning, in that darkest spot before dawn. We’re nearly at the solstice, and the days are long and lovely, full of just the right amount of warmth. Our Vermont world is in bloom.
The rain this morning is welcome. When the downpour passes, I lie in bed beside the open window, listening to the pattering of a gentle rainfall on the leaves of the mock orange below my window. In bloom now, its flowers are white as snow.
In my memory runs a few lines from an Eric Clapton song. The day before, I had driven to St. Johnsbury, a road I had often driven when I was first married. As I crested a mountain, VPR cut out, and that song came over my radio, scratchy. Long ago, we had a second-hand turntable, and a few cast-off records, and that album we played over and over.
The thing is, I didn’t like the album much at all, but I gradually came to like it, maybe simply through habit. That one sweet song had always been my favorite. Now, over the radio, my past returned, fuzzy and unclear, but never forgotten.
A year ago, George Floyd had recently been murdered, his death replayed endlessly around the planet. Riots erupted around the country. Now, under a different administration, Juneteenth is honored.
So much. All that great wash of the past — from immense societal waves to the tiny trickles of our own lives — pushes us along. And yet, sweet rain on this quiet morning. Even the hungry cats press their whiskers against the screen, welcoming in the morning.
While the daughters tie their kayaks on roof racks, I sit in the grass, keeping company with hungry bumblebees in the rhododendrons.
This hardy plant is doing its thing now, a visual symphony of color.
Spring crickets, garden soil under my toenails, pond water in my hair. And still, early June.
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.
We pulled into the DMV exactly on time for my daughter’s driving test exam. I sped while driving there — lousy parenting example — but at the very last moment before we left, it seemed we needed my daughter’s social security card for her license — as if I knew where that was. So we left without it.
Driving there, I remembered the card is in her baby book, in the blue hope chest.
Fortunately, the DMV staff was cheerful on this Tuesday afternoon after the long holiday weekend. The missing card was glossed over; I produced her birth certificate; and then they asked me if I had a utility bill or a piece of mail with me. Weirdly, I had brought the electric bill that arrived in the day’s mail, so I could read it over while she took her road test.
When we finally walked through the doors to wait outside, my daughter and I exhaled an unintentional collective sigh.
For these 15 minutes or so, I had absolutely nothing else to do at all, but sit there — something that seemed unimaginable to me for so many years as a mother. I had things, of course, I brought with me to do — reading that electric bill, for instance. But for these moments, I slipped off my sandals and dug my fingers into the warm clover.
In the sunlight, I soaked up my gratefulness to live in gorgeous Vermont, one of the sweet spots on the globe. Sixteen years ago, as I was driven away from the hospital after a surgeon’s scalpel made this daughter’s life possible, I saw corn nubs emerging through the black soil. Corn! What a miracle!
Sixteen years ago, I never would have predicted that one member of our family of four would have absconded for another life, that the life I have with my daughters would evolve into a version of Elizabeth McCracken’s line, It’s a happy life, but someone is missing.
So much of this past year I often imagined myself in a twisted story, a freak Camus novel, but now here I was on the flip side. Meanwhile, my daughter channeled her life into literally her own hands. Sixteen years ago, I was still foolish enough to believe that my children’s lives could be buffered, that they could live in a make-believe world of no bad things. I was still naive enough to believe that was desirable.
My daughter passed her exam. On our way out of the DMV this time, we didn’t sigh. In the sunlight, we spoke of little things — what to cook for dinner, tomorrow’s plans — the stuff of everyday life that makes a life together.
…we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet..we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again…the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”
May ends in a welcome rain, and June begins with a watercolor-esque sunrise over our wall of fading lilac blossoms.
This is the weekend when our vaccinated friends stood in our kitchen, talking and talking, and then walked slowly around our downstairs, asking, “What’s happened here in the last sixteen months?”
I showed the window trim I had painted a pale blue, called Innocence.
This was also the weekend I drove my friend and her daughter. Over years, this friend and I have drove endless hours together, and the car I’ve owned for over a year she’d hadn’t even sat in.
The afternoon was rainy. I drove along a dirt road, and the maple trees gleamed a brilliant green. We had been at a ceremony that was both happy and terribly sad, and I was cold to the bone. I turned on the seat warmers.
Seat warmers! my friend said. That’s wonderful.
We started laughing, my friend still hunched against the partly open window, as if that mattered now.
Bring on the wonderful, please.
(Highly recommended reading below…. :))
It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.
Stony Soil Vermont 