On this spongy, springy April day, may Fortuna smile a little more warmly on northern Vermont…..
With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious.
— Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Nearly 14 years ago, my friend and I drove to Burlington to shop for a baby carseat. I was pregnant; she was pregnant. In the backseat, our two 6-year-olds chattered and ate snacks. Somewhere in the midst of our errands in Burlington, we discovered it was Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day.
What’s 14 years in the scope of human history? A nearly nothing. But for us, two baby girls, one death, five jobs, one book, a rabbit, two cats, one divorce, and a whole lot of living later — 14 might as well be a trip around the moon and back.
No free cones on this trip. We returned with four boxes of Narcan, oodles of info, and even more talk….
Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.
— Louise Glück
Just before we leave for the evening, the girls run out and cut some lilacs branches. On our kitchen table, forsythia sticks from a friend soak up water in a jar, their yellow blossoms half-open.
Since my girls were little, our house’s doors were a porous membrane between wild Vermont around us and our domestic space: moss, pebbles, fungus, bark…., tempered off in the snowy winters.
In Vermont, April, not March, is the season of in like a lion, out like a lamb. All night long, wind rushed around our house, the official month of opening the windows.
… truth, which I believe to be both unchanging and at the core of all art. I think the essential thing about truth is that it must be experienced, and in order to be experienced, I think it has to appear nakedly, not woven into inherited notions.
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, So Much Longing In So Little Space: the Art of Edvard Munch
In our former house, the pink Owens-Corning insulation had been so shredded by mice in the ceiling that we could easily hear rain on the metal roof — a pleasant sound, although the resulting winter cold didn’t match that coziness.
Our house now is cool in the summers, warm or certainly warm-ish in the winters, the most well-insulated house I’ve ever lived in, and I’m darn grateful for that, all the way around. Last night, I opened my daughter’s window so she could hear the sound of the rain. Her cat jumped up on the sill, his nose pressed against her screen, curious about what was happening in the night. We haven’t heard the rain for a very long time now — a few aberrant storms in the winter — but this steady rain promised the chirping peepers will return.
Nearly 40 degrees out, I left the window open a few inches so my daughter could lie in bed, reading and listening to the rain.
On the other side of her wall, I read an article in The New Yorker about lost notebooks in Egypt. The sap will be running all night.
My daughters and I place bets on when the snow in the garden will completely disappear. The stakes? Yet to be determined….
End of March: either the dusty or snowy or rainy season in Vermont. The back roads are miserable, rutted-mud driving. In this season, I no longer take the narrow dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais, that long slow rise (or fall) above #10 Pond. Instead, I drive along paved Route 100, road of my past years. Over the highways hang clouds of dry road sand and salt, rising like our Vermont-esque version of insect clouds. The roads wind between the mountains and along the rivers — ancient traveling paths I follow on my way to that long-ago sea of Lake Champlain.
I hang the bedsheets to dry on the clothesline, snapping in the breeze, teach my daughter to play euchre. We read in the evenings. I’m awake before dawn, drinking coffee and talking to the cats and wondering if I’m heading down the crazy woman path…. I decide to paint my bedroom blue.
Evenings, the light lingers in the sky now. I show where I intend to plant two oak trees this spring. With a bit of a shock, my 13-year-old realizes she’ll never climb these trees as a child. Why plant them? she asks. I give her the only answer I know: Because.
This morning, I heard a dove cooing.
You that lose nothing
Know nothing.
— W. S. Merwin
Sunburn, ski trails so sticky my pro daughter face-planted on a downhill, melodious redwing blackbirds…. Vermont March in all its splendid, unpredictable messiness.
“Prayer”
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
— Galway Kinnell
Stony Soil Vermont 