Oh… parenting a teen. More daffodils, please. Devour sunlight. Dig up the first shoots of emerald garlic and fry the savory greens with eggs. Read.
Nourish a flourishing sense of humor.
When we get into a mood of complaining about life we often start telling this long epic, a story about our personal journey. It involves a series of misfortunes, trials, and tribulations. It often starts with being born into the wrong family, with the wrong parents, and with very inauspicious circumstances.
home
When I was about seven or so, my older sister read me Harriet the Spy, a book she liked so much she wanted to share with me, who couldn’t yet read that length of novel.
Early in the book, we hit a plot point of great excitement, when Harriet takes the journey to visit Ole Golly’s mother – her nanny’s mother. Oddly enough, I can still remember the rented townhouse living room where we read, with the glass doors leading out to a balcony suspended over a scrubby backyard.
It’s the ‘Ole Golly’ space I find in reading – and in my own life – forty years later. Open up that door. Introduce me to someone who will make think differently about this life. Clearly, I am no longer seven, my sister and I gnawing on the ends of our braids, but don’t we live the same things in our lives, over and over, and yet all the time changing?
Well, you must realize, Harriet, knowing everything won’t do you a bit of good unless you use it to put beauty in this world. True or false?
Hardwick, Vermont
Anyone who knows my daughters and myself knows our story of moving from this beloved house to another; our path not wholly determined. These days, in the rush and glory of Vermont spring, we are still fully here, reveling in the first sighting of trillium blooms, our familiar dirt road we have walked and biked thousands of times. This spring, surrounded by the upheaval of change and illness, reminds me yet again that the salvation of our world is through children: in the steady joy of trampoline jumping and chocolate-egg-with-sweet-cream-yolk eating.
Yesterday, standing outside the library with another adult, listening to the raucous chorus of Woodbury’s wetland peepers, far down below the school’s garden, concealed in the thick brush, we heard children’s voices. As we listened, into the song of frogs and robins and sparrows wound peals of laughter. On and on…..
Here’s the beginning of a poem one friend wrote, and another sent me today:
Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life…
– David Budbill, “The First Spring of Green”
Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.
I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.
What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..
Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.
– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature
Last evening, as dusk threaded in slowly, the 11-year-old and I played leisurely games of croquet, stepping around the blooming Siberian quills we planted late last fall. They flower in profusion over the lower leach field, whereas the other bulbs, in higher ground, are merely slender green leaves, with no apparent sign of flowering. Fitting?
That mimics a line I read early this morning from Katie Kitamura’s Separation.
Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.
When my girls were little, we played Signs of Spring for weeks, enthusiastically spying the first unfolding daffodil bloom, robins’ beaks clamped around strands of nesting material, tiny dresses flapping on clotheslines.
On the evening shift now, my 18-year-old came home last night and said a goose wandered into the nursing home. With another woman, they lured the wild, spitting creature through the open door with bread.
Spring tidings in Greensboro, Vermont?
Laughing, my daughter digs into her salad, a pile of fresh greens piled high with salty feta and kalamata olives, already thinking of other things. She’s sparkling, this young woman.
spring begins
as it has deigned to do
for a thousand ages
– Issa
Montpelier, Vermont
