My neighbor planted sunflowers way late – so late all I did was nod at her belief those seeds would bloom. Now the sunflowers are humbling me.
Halloween and these beauties are not even marked by frost. I’ve been humbled by worse things than a sunflower though…..
The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.
– Loren Eiseley
In the moonlight last night, with the stars overhead, my daughters and I walked up the hill to our house with a single window lit. Our former house, tall and narrow with a cupola, always reminded me of sailing ship, steady through sunny days and pelting sleet.
Our house now is square, its windows like eyes to the mountains and the valley. Entering feels like greeting the embrace of folded arms.
In the village at night, the houses are alive, even those sleeping with darkened windows. Enter our kitchen door and discover our white tin table strewn with hand-scrawled notes, hair ties, library books, a wooden car my child made, Halloween chocolates. What’s on the tables of all these neighbors, I wonder. Just how fine a photography mosaic all our tables might make.
“In a Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
– Ezra Pound
On a cheesecloth foray for the 12-year-old and her friend (a must have for making mummy luminaries), the kids and I stand in a parking lot, and I point out a maple tree across Route 15. More or less, the foliage is finished around us now, but this mature maple had gold at the crown sprinkled down to green at its lower branches.
We were in one of the uglier areas of town, swampy, with a gas station/liquor store, a depressing Dollar Store, some rundown houses and trailers. The tree, however, was so exquisite that my daughter’s friend remarked it appeared to be pruned. We laughed at that thought – as if a ladder could scale this great beauty, as if human hands might shape this natural perfection.
Across the cemetery is another lovely maple; down Spring Street are the silver maple gems…. and on and on…. And if you’re in Montpelier, admire the maples on the library’s lawn.
Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabel
Made Maple first take notice of her name.
She asked her father and he told her, “Maple—
Maple is right.”…
From Robert Frost’s “Maple”
On a rainy morning, I received lushly gorgeous photos of a baby brand-new to the world through my library email. In my inbox of book buying, interlibrary loan info, event details, the news of this baby girl dims everything else to irrelevancy. A little girl. A healthy baby.
Heather Harpham, in her new book, quotes the figure that 245 babies are born every minute. Statistics? Oh, so what.
Hallelujah: the town of Woodbury is one soul richer.
My first child, my girl, was born just before seven on a spring night, perfect… She smelled like sliced apple and salted pretzels, like the innocent recent arrival from a saline world that she was.
The opening lines of Heather Harpham’s The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After Happiness
When I was a very young girl – maybe four – and lived in New Mexico, my parents visited friends in Ames, Iowa. In the murky way of memory, mostly what I remember is the house we stayed in had hardwood floors, and Iowa seemed to possess an infinite sprawl of gorgeous lawn. The friends had kids of their own, and their father sprayed us on the lawn one afternoon, raising and lowering the spray while we pretended we were flowers opening our blossoms in the morning light, and folding closed again with twilight. For a desert child, the abundance of water and the sweet scent of cut grass was magical.
Today, our front door will be swapped out with a new, tighter door to keep the cold out, not if but when the bitter cold arrives.
My daughters had lived in our former house all their lives – a combined total of 30 years – but already in these months, this house has changed its shape with us: the scent of freshly coated floors wafted through open windows, paintings of flowers hammered on plaster walls, kittens shedding their fuzzy hair over the kitchen floor.
The house I visited as a little girl held more than its portion of misery, but from a knee-high vantage, there was sunlight and laughter, too.
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s allover: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
A Little Tooth by Thomas Lux
Back in our sugaring days, in March and April when I walked with the girls down the driveway to the meet the schoolbus, we guessed the temperature, and I was often within a degree or two. In those days, so keenly attuned to the weather, I was dialed in.
Today, October 22, I weeded barefoot in the garden, a detail worth noting.
Two other things: Seven Days ran my interview with the gracious Jacqueline Woodson, and – most worthy of all – a gift to my younger daughter of two lively kittens.
Stony Soil Vermont 