When I was 20, I taught myself how to adjust the valves on an even-then ancient Volkswagen bug. My millennial daughter, in contrast, takes great pleasure in hoisting her kayaks on her roof racks, showing up the quarreling boys beside her who wrestle with their rowboat.
On a Monday morning of a week that will end in August, the last of our Vermont summer months, hurray for young muscles. I’ll breathe in some of your good cheer.
I find an empty cicada shell beneath a leaf on an oak tree I planted this spring.
That line sums up midsummer, this lush and gorgeous summer. I planted that tree from my bare root order, a mere stick with a frizz of roots. Maybe, my kids said. And yet these trees thrive.
stillness–
sinking into the rocks,
cicadas’ cry
— Basho
Molly and Fluffy
Stopping by the new coffee shop in Hardwick last weekend — Front Seat Coffee — I discovered this gold-covered book which I am darn sure was The Book of my childhood. My dad actually bought this book for our house; he didn’t check it out of the library or stand in a bookstore reading it — his two main ways of gleaning information when I was a kid. He bought it and used it.
Need heating vents upstairs? Consult the book. Toilet broken? Get out the book, kids. Hot water heater on the fritz, again? Book. Move the washing machine, install a kitchen sink, put in a window or an outside door? Book, book, and book.
Inside are the classic ‘exploded view’ diagrams where my siblings and I honed our reading skills. Everything’s there, except how to smartly deal with the IRS…. a whole other lesson.
Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!
— Faulkner
Rain moves in; the heat moves out. I get up from my desk and put on a long-sleeved shirt. My older daughter and I — just the two of us — make pesto and spread it over a pizza with broccoli she slices. She looks at the pizza before she bakes it and says, Garden pizza.
Swimming holds no appeal. Instead, in the evening, we walk up a long dirt road heading out of Hardwick. I follow her into an overgrown pasture. She hands me her phone and has me photograph her in a field of Scottish thistles. She wades shoulder-deep into the prickles and purple flowers, and the memory of traipsing through forests and meadows behind her as a girl child returns to me. Those summers she and her best friends were obsessed with false hellebore as an ingredient for soup-making in her outdoor kitchen. Don’t mind the snails, she tells me. Let’s keep going.
As here’s a few lines from Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound I kept thinking about, as I drove to Middlebury on back roads, wondering if all these new fields of hemp might positively help to reshape Vermont’s economy….
A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members. This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered. A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy.
Cultivated and wild in my garden. Photo by Molly S.
Vermont midsummer in all its glorious stickiness. The towns empty out but for the perpetual delivery trucks and cars with canoes and kayaks on their roofs. In the post office Saturday morning, the buzz is Where are you swimming today? Where’s your spot?
In the late afternoon, we swim at Number 10 Pond, leaving our picnic and sandals on the rocky shore and swimming far out. A smattering of pollen covers the glassine surface.
I linger long in the water while my daughters laugh on shore, taking photos. Before we leave, I click a photo of my girls, too. For a brief moment, looking at this image, I realize even my youngest is just about grown up, too. Someday, I’ll look back and think, Good swimming that day.
At home, before a few sprinkles of rain, the girls pick peas for a snack. I weed and weed. The sun golds are ripe.
stream in summertime—
this joy of wading across
with sandals in hand
— Buson
Calais, Vermont, 2019
What’s up with the lilies in Vermont this summer? Even my kids noticed they’re crazy tall — like an advancing army of flowers, about the coolest thing imaginable, in a summer that’s turning not so temperate.
Now fully a teenager, my 14-year-old is not a street-legal driver, which in rural Vermont makes a real difference. She and her friends have their eyes on the road, anxious to spread beyond this small town.
Summer to her now seems interminable; I remember that sense as a small town girl myself, as though the hot days would just keep appearing, one after another. While I’m at work, I leave her alone for long periods of time, with two cats and a list of chores and the freedom to do what she wants, within these physical confines. I don’t know if that’s wise or not — but at the very least it gives her the space to imagine….
Stony Soil Vermont 