Hurray! May!
The May I was pregnant with my second child, rain fell every one of those 31 days — from a few sprinkles to all-day, shiver-inducing soakers. There’s an old adage, or so I’m told, that the rainier the May, the hotter the summer. That year, at least, was so.
Silage corn pushed through the black earth in the days after her birth, tiny nubs of green.
Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers.
— Issa
Exiting the interstate at midnight last night in rainy St. Johnsbury, it’s just me in my little silver car, the strange combination of lonely hearts’ radio and tinny country music, and that profound country Vermont darkness. That stretch of interstate rims the outer edge of utter nowhere.
Year ago, returning from a trip to my sister and her husband and their hospital-bound infant, my brother and I had trouble finding his snow-covered truck in the New Hampshire airport parking lot. Maybe it was midnight already, maybe not, but we certainly passed it, driving north on the interstate, where we stopped at a gas station and bought (and drank) terrible coffee. We were so tired we laughed until we were too tired to laugh, and then too tired to talk. Finally, at his house, his wife sat on the stairs and offered us take-out Indian food. I lay on the kitchen floor. Possibly, I even slept there, in a pile of boots and cat food bowls.
The next day, my friend and her 4-year-old drove over the White Mountains in a snowstorm to bring me home to my family — and my four-year-old. At the top of the Crawford pass, I got out of the pickup and brushed snow from the windshield and stood for a moment in all that white, not sure entirely where the unplowed road lay.
But I got back in. Her son waited patiently in his carseat between us. She kept driving. What else could we do? We couldn’t stay there. And, that, perhaps, is all I ever needed to learn about faith.
Miraculously, the snow lessened as we neared the Connecticut River, heading home.
I’ve been knitting the same three balls of yarn over and over in different patterns for months now — perhaps a silly amount of time. I’ve knit half a vest, decided the shaping was off, abandoned that vest, begun a sweater whose gauge I never measured correctly, unraveled that and began again.
Sometimes at night, as I say good night to my daughters, I wonder about this day we’re closing our eyes to — and maybe this illuminates nothing more than my own crazy mind — but that day’s gone, over.
So many of my parenting days when the girls were young, I greeted the night with relief — the chance to close my eyes and be still. But there’s no re-dos on life, no taking apart and casting on again. That’s obvious maybe — that my life is not a ball of yarn to knit and knit — but those obvious things can be so difficult.
Hence, this early morning, gifted with a few more inches of wet white snow, I’m in my bare feet on the back porch, listening to the wind chimes, for the robins’ first clear notes of the long day ahead.
...It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing...
From Jack Gilbert’s “Horses at Midnight Without a Moon” — a short spring poem well worth the read…
Everyone was outside today. In all her golden beauty, Spring returned. I left my library door open, with a few patrons in charge, and walked down the dirt road to post a sign about state reps coming to visit the library in a few weeks.
The melodies of blackbirds followed me.
Rapture, as near as can be…. all afternoon, my nearly 14-year-old daughter and I were out, in a day so suddenly hot. Yes, she’s a teen and wonders why I gnaw the edge of my thumb, there’s blue paint on the edge of my t-shirt, and is possible that I’ve shrunk? I say the word necklace with the wrong intonation of vowel. The knees of my jeans are stained, possibly with coffee.
And yet, on this particular day, I can see clearly how strange a creature I am in her eyes — who is this strange woman and how did she birth me? Likewise, I wonder, who is this miraculous not-girl and not-woman, and how did I birth her?
For the moment, though, there’s this afternoon, there’s just the two of us — as much rapture as I’ll likely ever deserve in this life.
We must risk delight….
We must admit there will be music despite
everything.
— Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”
I’m nearly sure to lose our household bet of what date the garden will be freed of snow — our variation of “ice out” on the lakes. I’ve picked Monday, April 15, both tax day and the anniversary of Lincoln’s death.
April’s the season of running water in Vermont, the carrying off of snow to Lake Champlain. Nature’s licked us — once again proving the futility of competition, industrial revolution notwithstanding.
On our evening walk up a nearby dirt road, snowmelt reveals a winter’s worth of Bud light cans. We see three deer, maple trees stitching together the sky and the great hayfields brown and drying in the spring breezes. Spring, going about its business.
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
The snow’s back, keeping the population in Hardwick predictably low.
This time of year is both ugly and tantalizing — the trash bleeding up, the tree buds fattening, robins chittering. And yet, the snow lies ubiquitous.
What else would we complain about? a friend asks at a middle school concert. We sit in the very back row — she and her husband, myself and my knitting I take out of my bag, but no further. Quickly, we’re laughing, giggling, silly, admiring our middle school daughters, intrigued at their age and maybe a little afraid — so new, so new; everything about adolescence shrieks of heading over the nest’s carefully mudded wall.
Often, I think of Robert Frost’s line: In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. So it does. But, like anyone, I’d prefer life to go on better, rather than worse. So, perhaps, grousing about the weather is nothing.
Despite the snow, the lakes have opened up. The herons are back, their great wings cutting across the gray sky.
What I’m thinking of….
Stony Soil Vermont 