In the town’s Funky Fourth parade on July 2, tractors joined with antique cars. A man stood on a tractor with a red I Dissent shirt. I stood at the edge of the town green, watching, filled with my own kind of dissent. And yet… the morning unfolded into an afternoon of free ice cream and cookies, an auction to raise funds for Ukrainian children, and hours of chatting outside.
That, perhaps, sums up where we are now. At the end of the day, I came home with local cheese — gratis — and a fresh list of stories.
Happy Independence Day weekend, for whatever that means these days…
Five years ago I sold a house with an old apple tree in the front yard. The house I bought had a young small apple tree that not even a child could climb. This morning, five years later, I climbed into the tree. The hot day is cool there, the leaves rippling in a breeze, the unripe apples hard knots.
A week of such national chaos. However your political affinities lie, the reversal of Roe V. Wade and the January 6 hearings inevitably trickle to all of us, shaking what seems like a national consciousness utterly unified, unmoored, adrift.
Hence, my apple tree. I’ll just leave this here.
“What seems real one moment is fiction the next and gone out of existence the moment after that. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth, and change our only constancy.”
I’ve given over sections of my garden to seed this year — or blossoms more accurately. Carrots left unharvested from last year’s crop sprout into green feathers. These remain, overshadowing this year’s celery. Forgotten onions turn stalky, their tiptops bristly with imminent seeds.
In this year, perhaps, why not?
Our family of four is now two. The constant meals I once made are different now, with the two of us working and busy in our own ways. The Jonny-jump-ups take over the paths. Forget-me-nots have finally rooted in a corner. Cucumbers nestle beneath sunflowers. Tomatoes and basil and onions, Love Lies Bleeding, sweet peas and Sugar Anns.
Birds dart in and out, settle among the leafy chamomile, perch on the garden fence. The foxes have not devoured all the groundhogs, but the groundhog has not devoured my garden — at least not yet. Stray cats wander through. The man with the scary dog remains on the cemetery side of the fence. The turkey vultures, of course, adhere to no boundaries, save their own.
On my way home from Bookstock — a terrific book festival in Woodstock, Vermont — I stop at a farmstand for strawberries. I’m a little dizzy with heat, with talking, with the sheer writingness of the day. No one’s around, and I admire the lake across the road.
The farm owner backs up his truck. End of the day, he’s pulling in what remains in the wooden stand. We talk for a little about the pontoon boats and how the lake is surprisingly deep at his shoreline across the road, a perfect temperature for swimming.
He tells me about the alarm that sounded in his greenhouse recently when the overnight temperature dipped near to forty. We’re standing in near-90 degree heat but Vermont weather is fickle. The farm owner was a patron in the library where I worked. I bought political books for him that maybe no one else but he and I read. Cold winter days, he’d sometimes appear and read silently for an afternoon and then leave with a stack of books.
This day I’ve driven on blue highways down the heart of Vermont, along rivers and through narrow valleys, past homesteads with fat gardens, through classic white clapboard villages and a town center dominated by a post office and a rusting flag pole. On one farm, TRUMP is painted on a metal storage box beside the farmhouse where the roof is bitten out in pieces. Lilac bushes cover the first floor windows. An RV in the side yard appears to be the occupied space.
I buy two pints of strawberries. The farmer loads up his truck. I stand at dusty roadside in the hot breeze. Bring it on, I think. Summer. The strawberries are the sweetest I’ve tasted in years. Nourishment from the goddesses.
I’m standing in front of the town office where I work when a Subaru swings in, and the driver pulls up beside me. I’d been eating the stale focaccia and watching a swiftly moving rainstorm moving across the lake. The driver is someone I’ve know off and on for years, through school board and select board meetings, through the connections that unite people in Vermont towns.
We share a conversation about a resident who’s using his parcel of land hard, hard, so unnecessarily. Rain spits a bit. I gnaw at the side of the focaccia, worried about stressing my tooth with its repeated root canal work.
Of all the many things I’ve learned or observed in the pandemic, our collective need for these small moments has surfaced repeatedly. We’ll come to no plan of action, no change, but for this moment in a breezy June midday, there’s one more stitch in my life, tugging me back in the community life.
On my drive home, a deer leaps before my own Subaru — all long legs, glancing over its shoulder as it disappears into the woods. I take the long way home on the ridge above the Black River valley that twists along Route 14. The two-lane blue highway passes a highway that flows two ways — north and south.
… Today the fields are rich in grass, And buttercups in thousands grow; I’ll show the world where I have been– With gold-dust seen on either shoe.
Till to my garden back I come, Where bumble-bees for hours and hours Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums, To wriggle out of hollow flowers….
June, and I work in the garden or the outside tables as much as possible, countering my indoors job and the pandemic years that have thrown me (and humankind) off-balance. Despite the unusual cold and wind, I often read outside in the evenings while the neighbors’ boys bike on our dead-end road, calling out my name.
Just beyond the pin cherry trees, the foxes come and go, reddish-brown, their front legs black. They’re not disturbed in the least by the man who walks his leashed dog in the cemetery, both man and dog head down, preoccupied with what, I have no guess. Across the milkweed and lupine, the foxes and I stare at each other, before I silently head my way, or they head theirs.
They go about their lives of hunting and playing, their ears and eyes alert to the world around them. I go about my human life of language and thought — a life that sometimes seems fixated on lists and transactions. For these moments, coming and going like the sun through clouds, this relationship feels like one of the realest in my life, devoid of our human tendencies towards deceit and self-absorption. I’m not about to become a fox, but I might become a slightly better human for these true friends.
The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits.
Stony Soil Vermont 