View from our front porch. Which pretty much sums up where we are now.
… oh voiceless trees
Under the wind, I knew
The eager terrible spring
Hidden in you.
— Sara Teasdale
February.
Snowfall.
We’ve had so little snow this winter in Vermont that this morning’s deep snowfall comes almost as a kind of surprise. The day before, a cold rain fell all morning. As I bent into work, I kept glancing through the windows, glad of the indoor work that morning.
This snow is the classic, pillowy powder of the most magical childhood memories. Sure, spring is far in the offing on a day like this, but the billows and mounds embody winter’s profound silent beauty.
A decade ago in my life, this kind of storm would have whooshed in with a number of worries — will the sugarhouse collapse before the roof is raked? How long can I endure cooped-upness with small children? Will our firewood hold out? These days, my worries are different, as my life is in another place. But I’ve changed, too. We’ll do what needs to be done. What doesn’t get done, perhaps doesn’t need to be done. And some sun is in the forecast for this weekend, too.
[The 1800s opium epidemic in China] was once widely interpreted as a story of a once noble society destroyed by a powerful drug, but more recent scholarship has argued that this simplistic explanation overlooks the turmoil, poverty, and widespread dislocation caused by the wars themselves which in turn exacerbated the epidemic.
Carl Erick Fisher, The Urge
Sugar. Salt. Stars.
The air has turned this morning when I step outside in the dark with my bucket of hot stove ashes. Even without my coat, I’m not immediately shivering, and the cold doesn’t come at me with daggers on my face.
Beneath the starry sky, I gazed up at Ursa Major, a single gauzy cloud suspended overhead, as if in water. I’m reminded of frog’s eggs, those cushiony pillows I sought with my daughters when they were little. Every spring, we found clusters in ponds and in the ditches along our dirt road. We’d visit these clusters every day on our wanders. Sometimes the eggs hatched. Sometimes the clustered disappeared.
On this early February morning, beneath the stars, I stood for a few more quiet moments, thinking about stars and frogs’ eggs. Snow’s expected to move in soon, too.
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
~ Jane Hirshfield
Book Rec.
By chance, I start reading a book of letters exchanged between a photographer and a prisoner, an exchange in 2020 that opens a view into these two men, into our country, and into art. I devour the book. The book’s title is The Parameters of Our Cage, and I keep thinking about the cages culture constructs and we construct in our own lives. It’s a question I’ve returned to, over and over in my life. So much of my life’s hours have been devoted, in one way or another, to writing. As the pandemic has created higher walls and sturdier cages, writing, art, human imagination, are increasingly powerful. Utterly necessary.
I wake to a perfect zero degrees this morning. Our house is thankfully warm and pleasant, but the cold is ever present. There’s immense snow south of here, but again the storm has sheered off to sea.
The most profound art is generated out of the depths of a personal place, then becomes an entity in its own right thus developing a different layer of function that requires a social aspect or nature.
C. Fausto Cabrera
January. Twenty Below Zero.
Daughter and sap line
20 below this morning as I head out to start my car. The moon hangs in a crescent over our house, visible through the smoke from our wood fire. In January, Vermont, the days creak along with the cold.
In an evening meeting, it’s just me at the town hall, holding that physical place as an open meeting law requirement, everyone else virtual from their living rooms or home offices. From the hallway, I pick through a box of cast-offs and take a pair of Teva sandals. A kind of promise, for another season.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going.
— Mark Strand
Color.
We’re nearly at midwinter, the turning-around point of early February. The ice is hard; there’s snow; the light returns, an extra dipperful of it each day.
There’s that Currier & Ives vision of midwinter, nestled deep in fluffy snow that I’ve experienced in a few flashes. This year, unease eats us all around the edges, in strange kinds of ways. A shortage of kitty litter in the supermarket. What does that mean? Maybe nothing worth thinking about at all.
I buy a gallon of paint at the local hardware store. The young man who mixes it went to high school with my daughter. He puts the paint to shake, and I wait and wait in my winter coat and my knitted hat. I remember the first summer I canned so much from my garden and the endless jars I bought here — invested in, really — so many mason jars. High on a storage shelf above my head are those boxes of Ball jars, waiting for tomatoes and green beans and chutney.
He reappears, his face mostly hidden behind his mask. With a key, he opens the can of newly mixed paint. For a moment, he stands there, studying it. Then he asks if that yellow is the right color. I tell him, Yes. He hammers back on the lid, then pushes the can towards me. Good luck, he says.
As I walk out, I wonder if he means good luck with the color, or the painting, or just generally. But what’s the point, really? We all could use a little good luck.
Lovely review of Unstitched in Carved Spines. Thank you!
Stony Soil Vermont 