Saturday morning before work finds me with a rag and the vinegar bottle, hands and knees on my kitchen floor, working.
The 10,000 things? The mysteries of the universe? The uncountable varieties of growing things in a Vermont July? Scrubbing the kitchen floor is one of these — as much as exploring waterfalls.
There is
a time to live
and a time to die
but never to reject the moment.
— Lao Tzu
Morrisville, VT
Nearly two years ago we moved into our house — from the house where my daughters had lived their whole lives. Now, two years in, this new-to-us 100-year-old house, the house has morphed into home, with a particular shade of yellow I painted the dining room, our first chicken buried in the backyard, the front porch filled with piles of library books, Yahtzee score cards marked up, kid sweatshirts.
Infinitely lucky we three females are, to move five miles down the road, from a forest to a town, our cardboard boxes ferried by friends.
Here’s my State 14 postcard.
In Plainfield, Vermont, my daughter and I start up a wide hiking road, after a discussion about why I so frequently fail to read directions — and yet, as I pointed out, I generally arrive where I’ve planned to go. This is not an abstract, metaphorical conversation. The truth is, I’ve taken the Gazetteer out of the car, failed to print directions, and my daughter — with her adolescent orientation to cartography — navigated by cell phone to the trail head.
Amicably, we’re walking up this wood-flanked, pleasant road, when I have the strangest sensation that I’ve hiked this path, many times, although I know I’ve never been here.
My daughter’s ahead, around a bend in the forest, when a warbler lands on a slender branch near my face, its chest flame-gold, so stunningly beautiful I simply stand there, alone. A second, then a third, fluttered by. Later, Peterson’s guide indicates this is the Blackburnian warbler, fairly common.
The mystery of déjà vu and extraordinary fiery feathers.
O bush warblers!
Now you’ve shit all over
my rice cake on the porch
— Bashō
Apple blossom season! Photo by Molly S.
Hurray! May!
The May I was pregnant with my second child, rain fell every one of those 31 days — from a few sprinkles to all-day, shiver-inducing soakers. There’s an old adage, or so I’m told, that the rainier the May, the hotter the summer. That year, at least, was so.
Silage corn pushed through the black earth in the days after her birth, tiny nubs of green.
Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers.
— Issa
My daughter picks at dirt on the cuff on her jeans, troubled by this, which interests me. She’s a remarkably easy and even-tempered girl, and I sometimes wonder at her own and distinctive understanding of the world’s order.
In my bare root order, I have a handful of what seem to be sticks with filigreed root balls. Walking behind our garden in the damp April evening, she asks me if I’ll still live here when these sticks become trees.
I’m planting for the property, I answer. That answer suffices for her. She stands with me, as we envision stick widening into trunk, twig fattening into branch.
Exiting the interstate at midnight last night in rainy St. Johnsbury, it’s just me in my little silver car, the strange combination of lonely hearts’ radio and tinny country music, and that profound country Vermont darkness. That stretch of interstate rims the outer edge of utter nowhere.
Year ago, returning from a trip to my sister and her husband and their hospital-bound infant, my brother and I had trouble finding his snow-covered truck in the New Hampshire airport parking lot. Maybe it was midnight already, maybe not, but we certainly passed it, driving north on the interstate, where we stopped at a gas station and bought (and drank) terrible coffee. We were so tired we laughed until we were too tired to laugh, and then too tired to talk. Finally, at his house, his wife sat on the stairs and offered us take-out Indian food. I lay on the kitchen floor. Possibly, I even slept there, in a pile of boots and cat food bowls.
The next day, my friend and her 4-year-old drove over the White Mountains in a snowstorm to bring me home to my family — and my four-year-old. At the top of the Crawford pass, I got out of the pickup and brushed snow from the windshield and stood for a moment in all that white, not sure entirely where the unplowed road lay.
But I got back in. Her son waited patiently in his carseat between us. She kept driving. What else could we do? We couldn’t stay there. And, that, perhaps, is all I ever needed to learn about faith.
Miraculously, the snow lessened as we neared the Connecticut River, heading home.
