acceptance

July 1: I’m driving on a back road to a nearby town where there’ll be the traditional New England small town Independence Day festivities, when I suddenly realize I can no longer see the road before me. The road dips down and then rises up. I know this, because I’ve driven this road so many times. I know precisely where to swerve around the persistent pothole where the stream runs under the lowest point of the road. But the rise is hidden in smoke.

The day marks a line for me, a place I won’t forget. I’ve been here before; this is familiar territory. I remember the precise afternoon I knew I would severe my marriage. Likewise, today, it’s clear to me that this smoke, in what will likely be one unimaginable variation after another, will remain.

Nonetheless, I go on into the day, watch the parade with an old acquaintance and we catch up about kids, ruminate about our old college days. I talk to a woman who’s built a house of cans and bottles and tires. She asks me to stop by sometime. Heck, who could pass that up? Of course I will.

Then I’m back home again, working, working, on this third book, taking it apart, sewing it back together, phrase by phrase. I wind in how it feels to walk along the edge of a lake that may not be frozen and thread through the Himalayan blue poppy, a child’s nightgown, pebbles under a clear running stream. I’m after those same old things: how to salvage order and beauty from chaos and destruction and despair. A river of sadness is not the torrents of despair.

Swim. Bartzella peonies. My neighbor leaning out her door, green curlers in her hair, saying hello.

When I was a new parent, I mistakenly searched for our family life to even out. Oh, so this is what being a mother is like — as if our family would steady into evenness. Maybe family life does work that way for some people, but I doubt it. Our life kept changing, because the infants grew into round-kneed babies, who grew into curious toddlers, then little girls who made houses from blankets, and teenagers who rode bikes and shared secrets with friends. Because the very heart of life is change.

And yet, we’re still us, who like to play card games and take walks at night. My daughters are on a trip to the southwest, the two of them on cusps in their own lives, one beginning young womanhood, the other her adolescent years. In the intensity of young motherhood, I never imagined our lives would not so much diverge but widen.

Someone asked my younger daughter if she was afraid to go so far alone. She answered, I’m not alone. I’m with my sister.

Here’s a (perhaps unrelated) few lines from Tod Olson’s terrific kid’s book, Lost in the Amazon:

Even the naturalists, who spent years studying the plants and animals of the Amazon, never understood the jungle as well as the men who paddled their boats. Richard Spence, the Englishman who marveled at the size of the rainforest, once overhead a native man talking about him behind his back. “This man knows nothing,” he scoffed. “I doubt he can even shoot a bird with an arrow.”

Burlington, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

No Going Back.

Separate Travels