Fern Hill

Later in the summer, when the gardens are overrun with weeds, and cucumbers and string beans need to be picked from sagging vines, and the days are long with children swimming, and smoke hangs in the air from cooking outside, there’s often a point in the late afternoon when the world seems just a little much: that so-called witching hour mothers of babies know. We’ll move through that hour, through dinner and dishes, and washing up, and the cool leisure of evening comes in.

But now, in the spring, the world is yet at that new place. The weeds are nowhere near knee-high, and the warmth is as welcome as a novel in my hands I want to read.

I imagine this is how childhood should feel.

…And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams…

– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

Montpelier, Vermont

Day by day, this sweet August season winds down. Next week, I’ll walk with my girls down the driveway to the bus stop, where we’ll kick around the fallen apples from the wild trees along the road, looking through the misty fall mornings for the bright yellow bus. Our summer has been packed with all kinds of things: hiking and friends and art camps, not enough swimming, countless s’mores with the cousins.

We spent a lot of miles with my older daughter at the steering wheel, me with my knitting in the front seat, the three younger kids in the backseat, everyone talking sometimes all at the same time. Near the end of the cousins’ stay, late one afternoon we drove up the winding dirt road towards home, everyone hot and hungry, miserable and crabby all the way around. Without thinking, I put both my bare feet out the window and waved my soles at the passing trees. The children shouted, What are you doing? and because I started laughing, they all started laughing, even the teenager in the driver’s seat who does not approve of such undignified behavior, not at all, although she graciously tolerates my foolishness.

Silly? Completely. But in the face of things that are not humorous–words that none of us even want to say, like cancer for instance–why not occasionally throw your feet up and rally to the grubby children in the backseat? Say: I don’t want to hear bickering; just hang with me for a little bit in this golden summer, with all of you so near?

Driving to work today, I thought of these kids of mine and that afternoon, and the last stanza of one of my most beloved poems, “Fern Hill.” I’d always considered the final words tragically bittersweet, but I wonder perhaps now if I misunderstood these lines. Perhaps this poem is about acceptance of our mortality, and simultaneously an exhortation to sing like the sea, rage on against the dying light, laugh in the face of despair. Write beautifully in this good world.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

–– Dylan Thomas

Photo by Molly S. Gabriela and Kaz, Sterling Pond

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Being a Child

Summer: Sing Like the Sea