Skiing through the town forest yesterday, I ducked beneath sap lines. The sugarbush there is tapped and ready for the sap to run. I’m ready, too.
For years, our family sugared, and February began weeks that turned around the season and sap flow. We had no weekend. We had no days off. So now, on Sundays, I (mostly) fold up my laptop and lean into family.
One (small) silver lining of the pandemic is the pleasure of a single donut: peach, flower, poppy seed.
A friend and I have a habit of emailing back and forth requesting send me something good. We’ve been doing this so long now that I can’t remember when we started, although I’m nearly 100% certain this began in a long Vermont winter.
Generally, we offer little bright bits — a book to share or a decent recipe. Yesterday, she emails about the rising full moon. Drivers along the County Road pulled over and took photos.
Little bits that are maybe not slight at all.
After dinner, my daughters and I bundled up against the sharp cold and went walking in the silvery moonlight. We hadn’t dressed warmly enough and shivered by the time we returned. Chattering, my girls were exuberant that winter had finally arrived in all its radiant beauty.
That gleaming round moon, the sparkling snow, a warm house: solid strands of our web.
Way back in the last century, when I first moved to Vermont as a young woman, my then-boyfriend and I drove in the middle of one night to Boston. We passed through tiny Massachusetts town after town, shuttered up and dark for the night. As our old Toyota hurried through, I wondered who lived there. At two in the morning, hardly anyone but a parent with a crying baby is awake.
Walking downtown last night, while my daughters wash our dinner dishes, I marvel how the pandemic seems to have placed us in a very long 2 a.m. In the dark, I pass a single masked person. Treading carefully on the ice, we each half-raise a hand, a human version of ships passing in the night.
This morning, my neighbors’ lights are off. Last year, with their youngest, their house lights glowed at all hours. Now, at 6 a.m., the house remains shrouded in the darkness of sleep. And so it goes, I remind myself, night always yields to dawn.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.
A warm Christmas Day rain washes away every bit of snow in our patch of northern Vermont, save for a few ice-hardened and blackened plowed-up ridges. As the dawn drips in with its gray, the landscape appears unfamiliar to me in December — an experience that, again, sums up 2020.
Friends of ours had Christmas dinner on the in-laws’ porch, with the in-laws inside and themselves on the covered porch, eating Christmas dinner 2020-style. Strange and weird, but what wouldn’t I have given that for hilarity.
Talking with my brother on Christmas morning, he mentions he may grout a floor that afternoon. My youngest, afterward, tells me how fun that sounded and then wonders if she would see her uncle before she’s all grown up, headed out into the world on her own, not so far away.
And so it goes in this landscape of unfamiliarity: suspended in a warp of uncertainty. In the midst of all this, there’s me with my lists, my agendas, my determination to craft plans for happiness.
In this gray and blue and brown landscape — not the traditional Vermont snowy Christmas — there’s nothing to do but let all that fly away in the rising and balmy breeze. The heart of the Christmas story, after all, is the unexpected gift in the barn’s manger, the promise of joy where we least expect its appearance.
The forecast for this Vermont Christmas is 100% rain, which pretty much sums up the year 2020.
From work, I take home a donated cat bed, lined with a downy fuzz and nearly new. When I set it on our living room floor, our cats approach with caution, sniffing, and then begin growling, doubtlessly sensing some former occupant.
A dog? Or simply some stranger?
All evening, our pampered house cats pace around the bed, suspicious. But, in the morning, I see our tabby Acer curled up in the bed’s center, sleeping, paws over shut eyes, tail tucked beneath his chin.
And so it: 2020 and on into 2021. Wherever each of you are, dear readers, I hope you take some comfort in this strange bed of where we are, as our planet slowly turns back toward the light, again.
Cutting with the ax, I was surprised at the scent. The winter trees.
Vermont December is not the season of picking garden zinnias or gathering wildflowers.
December is the season of intentionality: wear a hat and mittens everywhere, dry your boots before the wood stove when you return, drive carefully on the slippery roads.
As the holidays edge in, I keep on with my daily routines of tending the fire, going to work, checking in with my daughters about who’s cooking dinner. On the more submerged level, our lives go on, too. My youngest dreams of her future. I read about the bad year 536. In these early winter days, I return to my original love affair with reading — novels. Fiction reminds me, over and over, in an infinite number of ways, why we love this world.
The pandemic has taken plenty from us — much more from so many people than my little family. But it’s also given us this tiny quiet space, too, like the breath at the beginning of each day, just before dawn. In this space, I see my path could bend many ways. Don’t, I caution myself, write a mad letter to the former in-laws. Instead, leave Christmas gifts of homemade soap on the neighbors’ front steps.
Stony Soil Vermont 