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
The girls put effort into dressing for a walk through the sugar woods — hair up and all in black, save for a borrowed pair of colorful leggings. In capitulation to winter (which remains), I exchange my holey and holy jeans for a better pair and pull on a raggedy sweater.
We’ve stretched into Sunday and into winter school break, with waffles in the shape of maple leaves and needlepoint projects the girls have pulled out of drawers. I’ve finished my taxes and offered what was apparently an incredibly dull overview of federal monies — who profits, who doesn’t. It’s no loss — the girls shake off the warmth of our kitchen and greet the wet woods and sprinkling rain with joy.
The woods are misty and ghostly, crisscrossed with animal tracks. The maples bend overhead, whispering their secret language. The 13-year-olds jump on each other’s backs like puppies, giggling, and empty snow from their boots.
After reading Donald Antrim’s harrowing essay in the recent New Yorker, I picked his memoir, too.
People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens if the truth is not one simple, brutal thing?
— Donald Antrim, The Afterlife: a memoir
Hardwick Town Forest, tapped in for sugaring
We’re in the February funk, with every family I know sick in one variation or another and a silly amount of snow and ice. Wealthier Vermont families make plans to fly elsewhere, the rest of us reveling in the days of longer light. Snowbanks to the contrary, every day carries us along towards spring.
One of the Saturday morning knitters at my library bemoans she always chooses turquoise yarn. The women around her ask. What’s the problem with that? Turquoise is beautiful. She’s unconvinced.
Turquoise, gem of the deserty red Southwest, exotic color in our snowy north.
Gently, a woman reminds her that knitting need not be about the finished mittens or sweater, but the pleasure of putting it together. Metaphor for winter? Perhaps…. Certainly, that’s easier to acknowledge on a sunny morning like this one……
Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.
―
I’m reading The New York Times on the couch when I look over at my middle school daughter on the couch who’s reading. She’s in her athletic pants, her hair carefully up in a bun like her friends, her face still tawny from a summer mostly outside. When she’s finished with her chapter, she tosses the library book on the couch, and I ask if she knows what the word anti-Semitic means.
She doesn’t.
The word is so terrible, I’m not sure what to say. In our house, we sometimes joke about language. This week, the girls have been tossing voluminous around playfully, like a half-deflated, helium-filled balloon.
I glance into the dining room I’ve spent all weekend painting a color described as lemon custard, my motivation simply love of color and warmth.
And then I look back at my daughter who’s waiting, patiently, on the couch.
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly… Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
―
My daughters and I often wonder where our cat Acer sleeps at night. His brother takes turns tucking among our feet, or curling on our faces.
In the middle of the other night, I walked into our upstairs glassed-in porch, looking for a book. On the little couch there, Acer sprawled, wide awake in the moonlight. I bent down and rubbed his velvety pink nose, this little cat who needed his own private room.
Here’s a few lines from the late master, Andre Dubus.
So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers…. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth…. in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan…. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.
— Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels
Walking home from the library last night, I met a friend on the way, who walked with me up the hill, through the cemetery, and into our back yard, the half moon overhead watchful.
My friend’s decades-long job had recently ended, and she was painting the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink. Laughing, we exchanged painting stories, and I confessed my intention to turn the downstairs of my house into sunflower hues.
Over my barn, not far above the wooded horizon, hazy red Mars kept company with the pearly moon. My 13-year-old, walking barefoot over the dewy grass, came to say hello and remarked how near the planet seemed.
Oh mysteries of twilight, when the impossible seems possible.
Holding the umbrella,
The mother is behind.
The autumn rain.
— Nakamura Teijo
chicken door
Stony Soil Vermont 