An August Sunday list with the daughter:
The screened door slamming tells me it is summer…
— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”
Midsummer, we’re at the numberless place in July where we might commence to take swimming at dusk as a given, to be exasperated by heat, to seek solace in a cool living room from the day’s sharp light.
As summer might unwind forever.
Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
— Pablo Neruda
Brattleboro, Vermont
Walking home through the cemetery fields, I noticed how brown the grass is — pretty much withered.
That’s a particularly beautiful walk, high enough up above the village that I can see how Hardwick lies in a narrow valley along the river, cradled between forested mountains.
So much of my life often seems defined by absence — the children’s missing father, not enough money, shy of parenting patience, lacking skills to fence in my daughter’s chickens. And yet, here we live, nestled between these mountains, with two sweet cats and three laying hens.
Reminder to self: define by what is, not what isn’t.
Montpelier, Vermont
This morning, I step out on the back porch to say, Goodbye, have a nice day to my 12-year-old as she walks to school. I lift my voice a little and add, Feels like March and spring!
By way of answering, she raises one hand, watching the ice beneath her boot soles.
Okay, she’s headed to 7th grade (myself and all my friends think been there, done that) but I also see, as the new town kid, halfway through the school year, she’s figuring out how to navigate her own way: who to walk with, and what’s the best snacks for the jaunt home.
I, on the other hand, like many mothers I know, step back in the house and breathe for a moment before the week with all its many pieces rushes at me.
Here’s some good things: an interlibrary loan book I know will be in the post office box today. None of us are sick. The cats are curled in a box, sleeping off their breakfast. The kitchen floor is washed, and there’s all this sunlight, as the planet ever so slowly bends toward spring.
Buying leeks
and walking home
under the bare trees.
— Buson
Snow came recently to our small part of the world. As the year turns around again, this quiet time seems right for pausing, for a reckoning up of last year’s affairs, and what might come for the future. Perhaps, most of all, it seems the right time to cup our hands full of prayers, in gratitude – and the desire to keep full of gratitude.
On New Year’s Day
Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover
crying, where I live and work with my lover
Woody and my cats, where the birds gather
in winter to be fed and the squirrel dines
from the squirrel-proof feeder. Keep our water
bubbling up clear. Protect us from the fire’s
long teeth and the lashing of the hurricanes
and the government. Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed.
Keep our cats from hunters and savage dogs.
Watch with care over Woody splitting logs
and mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.Marge Piercy
Woodbury, Vermont
Stony Soil Vermont 