Mary Oliver, poet of the rugged soul, champion of kindness, lover of the world’s broken beauty. 1935-2019.
I wanted
The past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country…And nobody gets out of it, having to
Swim through the fires to stay in
This world.
— Mary Oliver
A woman I worked with for one summer in Craftsbury, Vermont, lived the rest of the year in New York City. Before she left, I offered to mail her a few books. Don’t, she said, really alarmed. The mailman leaves packages on my doorknob in my apartment building, and people steal them.
Really? She assured me, yes, people did, in fact, steal.
People steal in lovely Vermont, too, but not like that. On my back porch, I leave my friend’s vest and a jar of peaches my daughter and I canned last summer. When my daughter returns from school, she discovers a gift of chocolate cookies and a cat calendar.
While boiling pasta for dinner, I leaf through the Eliot Porter photography book my friend left, too. In it, I discover a chapter written about nearby Glover, Vermont, not far from us.
The passage below reminds me of when I was 18 and moved to Vermont, and knew this state was exactly where I wanted to live — with a kind of certainty I’ve known about a handful of things — being a mother and a writer, tending a garden, the necessity of laughter…. and handing things from friend to friend.
Vermont is a great character mill, and it grinds exceedingly fine. It is too rough a country for pretenders, but it will make room for anyone, however odd, if he doesn’t on airs or show himself incompetent or think himself above the homespun and the calluses and the hard-mouthed virtues that Vermonters have come to the hard way, and don’t intend to lose.
— Wallace Stegner
Outside the town clerk’s office, a little after 8 last night, I’m talking with an another adult while the kids jump around in what feels like balminess at 14 above zero when I suddenly shout out, Look at the moon!
Ringed by a rainbow, the luminous half-moon hangs over the town clerk’s building — a former one-room schoolhouse.
Our friends head home one way, my daughter and I the other.
Woodbury, Vermont, with its population less than a 1,000 souls, has a 3-person selectboard. I’m there as the town librarian. Most of the school board is there. Members of the public. The worry is to how to retain the tiny elementary school the state seems intent to close.
The kids are not in the meeting. They’re hanging out at the clerk’s main desk, reading graphic novels, and raiding the clerk’s candy jar. They’re giggling about kid stuff that’s important to kids.
I want the kids know this version of democracy — a group of people wearing fleece and hand-knit sweaters, jammed into a tiny room, our knees bumping, some of us liking each other and some maybe not at all, but all of talking, thinking things through — what’s the wisest course of action? how do we tend the common good?
It’s the first snowfall —
When it melts again we’ll see
Dewdrops on the grass.
— Buson
In a box of books my sister shipped to me years ago, I found a copy of Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up. In those pre-internet days, I didn’t realize this little gritty novel had garnered its own classic cult following. When I recommended the book to someone else who was reading Crime and Punishment, he laughed and said that would have been a good title for Dostoyevsky’s book, too.
From the fifty-cent bin in a library book sale, I pick up Joshua Mohr’s Some Things That Meant The World To Me. My 19-year-old lifts the book from the kitchen tale and mentions the cover is from “Wheel of Fortune,” which makes me ask how she’s so intimate with that game show.
My daughter reminds me she works in a nursing home.
She asks about the ink splatters on the cover below the “Wheel of Fortune” lettering — the half of the cover that made sense to me. Rorschach test I tell her, and offer a brief explanation.
I’d probably fail that test, she says, not perturbed in the least.
She bundles up, heading out for a ski. 11 below zero.
We’re all writing about the same things, we’re all trying to evoke emotion. How are you going to find a new image, a new way to say it that your audience hasn’t experienced before? If a character comes in and just blurts out, “I’m sad,” it’s a pretty bad way for a story to start. But, if I describe a woman in Dolores Park at three-o-clock in the morning, drinking tequila out of the bottle while sitting there hunched up, and suddenly the sprinklers come on. She doesn’t even move. She just continues to drink tequila. The reader comes out of that scene understanding she’s sad by putting the pieces together.
Photo by Molly S.
I buy my daughter a pomegranate, because she loves the fruit, because of the red it brings to our snowy Vermont landscape, and because Saroyan wrote about pomegranates. My parents did not buy pomegranates. As a kid growing up in New Hampshire, I wondered about that mysterious fruit — much like I wondered about Turkish Delight, the Narina sweet my father found in Ann Arbor and bought for us with great joy.
On a snowy day, the girls discover a coolant leak in my car. The mechanic who fixes the leak explains to my teenage daughter what the level of coolant should be in a car, when to add coolant, and when to worry. Standing between the two of them, I study his unzipped Carhartt jacket, stained with motor oil. Like Proust’s madeleine, so much of my past was redolent with wet and snowy clothes, work and words twined together.
Like that, then, the past’s gone. The girls and I stand outside the garage in a snowstorm again. I tell my older daughter as I always do, drive carefully. Laughing, they’re off again.
From one of my mentors, poet Ruth Stone:
Yes, we are everything, every experience we’ve ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don’t even began to touch upon it. There’s an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.
What’s the one thing that makes Vermont winters survivable? Friends? Laughter? Knitting? A chicken roasting in the oven? Nope: snow tires.
Driving to Burlington on a snowy Sunday morning to interview a young poet, I kept thinking, At least I bought new snow tires. When my daughter disappears in the darkness to work, I think, I’m so glad I shelled out for those tires.
On my way home through the Calais back roads, I pull over at the town hall, a beautiful and somewhat mysterious building to me — why is it here? what’s the history that’s now disappeared around this building? I’ve been listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and laughing so hard I’m actually crying.
Outside my little Toyota, I’m immediately reminded of winter’s enchanting beauty, the bit of wind on my cheeks and the snowflakes in my eyelashes. Sunday afternoon, and no one’s out and about, save for one grownup far down the road, walking a dog. Leaving my car at the roadside, I walk down to the meeting house and stand there, staring up at the steeple in the gauzy snow, listening. Then I put those snow tires to use again.
Winter seclusion —
Listening, that evening,
To the rain in the mountain.
— Issa
Stony Soil Vermont 