Despite the snow, marigolds are blooming in my cobbled-together greenhouse, their scent still a sharp tang. I carried a handful with me this afternoon to my Woodbury library job. With the light ending early this days, it’s the Vermont reading season.
My bookseller friends at the Galaxy scored me an Advance Copy of Rachel Cusk’s new book, Transit, a novel title I love: what else is our lives but transitioning from one moment to another, so constant, perhaps, we’re hardly aware of the unbroken undulation and flux of our lives. Transit, transit. Going about my day, I murmur that word.
Around me, the natural world mirrors this movement: golden leaves shower from trees, the sunflowers have laid down and pressed their wide faces into the ground, the river is slate gray, cooling down and readying itself for the coming of ice.
I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
– Rachel Cusk, Transit
October, Woodbury, Vermont
Stony Soil Vermont 