We leave our dear friends in Switzerland. That morning, we walked in the forest among mighty mountains with their cat.
In Italy, the trains are jammed. We enter the wrong car. In a mixture of languages, people pass luggage back and forth. Lemons bend down tree branches here. We eat creatures from the sea. Such a long way we have come, to this world of color and wisteria fragrance. Cats sun themselves on ancient stone walls.
My father’s physical therapist tells him to keep moving. No matter what, keep moving to keep alive. My dad, thankfully, keeps moving.
My youngest and I are about to be on the move, too. We’ve left our cats and our house with competent and caring people, and are headed out for a spell. I’ll send a few photos along the way.
On the precipice of young womanhood, she’s game. And me — I’m somewhere in the Dante dark woods of what I hope will be a long life yet to come. It’s been a long pandemic, a long haul, for me, and certainly for you — for all of you reading my words.
Keep moving, keep alive in body and soul. I’ll be home to plant a bed of spring flowers.
Ever enthusiastic, my oldest buys a blow-up paddle board, and we set off on a Saturday afternoon. Her sister wonders if the lake will be frozen yet. In 70 degree temps — a strange April spike — ice seems impossible, until it’s not.
While she paddles in the patch of open water, her sister and I sit on the dock that isn’t yet pulled into the lake, either. We’re in a marshy area where the peepers are mightily going at what they do best, and redwing blackbirds yodel their throaty calls. Two ducks cruise by, intent on something else that entirely eludes us, too, the male with his emerald head trailing the brown female.
We’re in t-shirts and shorts, spring giddy, eating crackers and some of that cheese the lovely Cabot Library gifted me for a talk. When I returned home that night, my youngest opened the box of cheese with joy. The chionodoxa blue flowers are blooming.
Joy, on.
Everyone has their own familiar paths and places. This empty stretch of interstate in the Netherlands between Vermont and New Hampshire my daughters and I have traveled countless times now, in all varieties of weather and moods. Now, so many years into this, one daughter is grown, the other on the cusp. My daughters look at my brother and me with a mixture of so many things — what, precisely, neither he nor I need to speculate. Laughing, he suggest to them that he and I equal a full person, our meager strengths and copious broken places complementary. I suggest, Maybe even a little more than one person….
I’m grateful to be invited to read and speak at the Cabot Public Library Tuesday, April 11, 7 p.m. in a real-life deal. Come if you can.
And — definitely worth a read — Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America.
Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.
All night, wind howls around our house. I give up the charade of sleeping and pull out my library book. I’m in the final pages of Meredith Hall‘s memoir about growing up in New Hampshire, Without a Map, and I’m in no rush to end her story, close the cover, and return the book.
At my feet, my little cat lies awake, thinking cat thoughts, in a cat circadian rhythm of his own. The Ides of March howl in fiercely. All day, the wet snowstorm has swirled around us. My wet boots lie beneath the wood stove. Our house banked in by white and the ash bucket melting dirtily into the path where I’ve left to cool, its embers to burn out and die.
Somewhere in those hours before dawn, I shake flat the wood stove’s embers with the ash shovel and lay one, two, more pieces of wood on the flickering coals. In the dark house, the little cat follows me downstairs, curious about breakfast but not insistent.
I think of what I’ve read that day, about a stone house built nearby in the 1800s from a single boulder. A curious endeavor. Take this stone, cut it into pieces, and make a home. In the darkness, the wind rakes over our house, hurls over my snow-submerged garden plot, and whirls over the town cemetery.
“The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.”
— Meredith Hall
My daughter drives the interstate towards Burlington in the valley that folds along the Winooski River. I’ve driven this stretch of interstate countless times, in all kinds of weather, alone or with children in the backseat eating snacks and talking about something like various shades of blue.
We pass the town where, a few years back, I fiercely negotiated down the price of a Matrix. While my older daughter test drove the car, the owner and I stood on the sidewalk in front of his suburban split-level. He sold restaurant equipment and wasn’t in the least interested in sharing stories about that job. He couldn’t get the Matrix’s hood open, which made me ask how often he checked the oil. My question irritated him. That — and the cash I brought — tipped the price in our favor.
As it turned out, that Matrix never burned a drop of oil. My daughter drove the car for years. Well beyond 200k miles, we sold the car to a man who called himself Saffron Bob. Saffron Bob appeared in a snowstorm, also with cash.
My daughters found his story about growing saffron along Lake Champlain utterly believable. I did not, but I was wrong about that, too.
We stop for coffee. My daughter steps forward and pays. We keep driving and talking, another strand of our story.
Stony Soil Vermont 