Back in our sugaring days, in March and April when I walked with the girls down the driveway to the meet the schoolbus, we guessed the temperature, and I was often within a degree or two. In those days, so keenly attuned to the weather, I was dialed in.
Today, October 22, I weeded barefoot in the garden, a detail worth noting.
Two other things: Seven Days ran my interview with the gracious Jacqueline Woodson, and – most worthy of all – a gift to my younger daughter of two lively kittens.
One advantage to the days I work at home is the option to close up my laptop and head out for more baking chocolate when the girls – intent on chocolate cake – run shy of this crucial ingredient. The kids used an amount of chocolate that amazed me. A confirmed Michael Pollan fan, I refused to buy corn syrup, so they googled a substitute option.
All that sunny afternoon, the girls were busy with flour and chat, serving me the leftover coffee they brewed – so strong I winced.
Skeptical? Yeah. But at least I was silent.
I made my recipe-less part of the meal, using what I found at hand: onions, kale, parsley, and sage in the garden, sausage, tomatoes from the neighbor: a decent, passable stew.
But the kids? Their cake rose both light and rich. A delicacy I’ve never accomplished – and the kids sweetly teased me so.
Here’s the opening lines from Hayden Carruth’s wonderful “Birthday Cake” poem:
For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
This morning, the younger daughter and I noticed the phlox, now fully blackened with frost, has withered enough to let light beneath our deck. The two of us (barefoot in October!) looked down through the slats. What might lie under there?
No school for a few days. While the laundry flaps free from the clothesline, the girls bake a chocolate cake for a visitor tonight, and I spread my work over the dining room table.
Every day, less and less leaves on the trees, but the sunlight’s still holding strong.
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.It went on…
– Jane Hirschfield
East Hardwick, Vermont
I’ve heard authors read work from mesmerizing poetry to an essay about a colonics session – but the Argentinian cartoonist I just met likely ranks at the very top. Incredibly famous outside the verdant realm of Vermont, the cartoonist sat on the floor with the kids and told stories and made the little ones laugh, and assured them they could all draw, too.
Even after the adults tried to close the hour, he kept on answering the kids’ questions, saying, This is an important question. This is good.
At the very end, a boy asked how he could become a cartoonist. The cartoonist said, Like this. Tell your parents you will need a book without these things – and here the cartoonist drew four parallel lines on a piece of paper – those are not helpful. You will need a black marker. And then you are on your way.
Great rule of thumb: when in doubt, get rid of the lines.
In my opinion, childhood is one of the most intriguing phases in life… For instance, when they (kids) draw, they do it with such freedom…! We adults can’t ever experience that level of freedom again, simply because we are scared of looking ridiculous or failing or making mistakes. When they draw, my kids have no fear. And that’s the hardest trick for an artist.
– Liniers
On my wedding invitations, I printed a line from Robert Frost, and a guest, mistaking Carl Sandburg for crusty Frost, gave us a collection of Sandburg’s poems.
I woke this frosty morning thinking of a poem we read aloud in my fifth grade class, in the basement of a three-story brick building later converted to senior housing. Although I grew up in wooded New Hampshire, far from any harbor or city, the poem’s perfect for kids – short and muscled, primed to pounce, cat-like.
Here’s the past again materializing: I’ve long since forgotten that teacher’s name, or even anyone else in the class. Yet I distinctly recall sitting there as a quiet kid wearing orange tights, in a warm classroom where the basement windows opened to the back driveway, loving this poem.
Hard frost last night. Wearing winter coats, the 12-year-old and I walked last evening, the stars overhead, passing no one.
“Fog”The fog comeson little cat feet.It sits lookingover harbor and cityon silent haunchesand then moves on.
This autumn gives us day after day of warmth, and while the days’ length dwindles, the light oddly expands as the branches shake down their leaves, opening up the landscape around our house and on the distant mountains, too.
The cold will come. That isn’t an if; it’s a when. At its front, our house has a two-story glassed-in porch, and, pretty as these windowed rooms are, I can imagine January wind and grainy snow drifting through these old panes.
It’s October, time of house arts-and-crafts. The girls wash the windows, and my older daughter weather-strips with caulk, smoothing the beads. I bury crocus and snowdrop bulbs in the front flowerbed, smoothing the soil over these knots of roots. We leave the doors wide open, and sunlight fills our rooms. The neighbor’s little white dog comes to visit.
The crow
walks along there
as if it were tilling the field.
– Issa
Stony Soil Vermont 