In these days of long light, my daughter and I are drinking tea and talking on our glassed-in porch when she spies a fox walking along the lilacs that fence us from the road. The red fox, a real beauty, turns and looks at us.

June has been a season of the wild pushing in — the prolific groundhogs (and my thoughts will come to naught about this, but I’m wishing for a more even ratio of groundhog to fox, for my garden’s sake), the multiplicity of birds, raccoon and possum, the circling turkey vultures. This year, too, my garden grows half-wild, the amaranth reseeding around the Brussels sprouts, coreopsis sailing over the fence. One morning, I straighten and pause, brushing dirt from my fingers, when I spy a fox staring at me through the layers of hydrangea and pin cherry trees. For a time without borders, we hold each other’s gaze. What passes between us is a wordless language, with no clear question or agreement. Maybe simply curiosity.

There’s plenty of the human chatter around me these days, much of it rippling up in chaotic waves. But then, this, too. Last night, poetry at a rural arts center, with all the best things of Vermont June: wildflowers and the pleasure of company, the beauty of words stitched finely together.

…. Last, never least, here’s some words about the unsurpassable Vermont novelist Jeffrey Lent, in need of a little lift…

Child

How you’ve grown, child

of mine—pearl from my oyster,

you sparkle like snow. 

— Mary Elder Jacobsen