Rain pours. My daughters return, full of excitement of the ocean, of staying in a city, of a friend, and — for my younger daughter — driving around with my brother, stepping into his cool life.
They have brought me a wooden box of green tea and a tin of red goji berry tea.
Time seems suspended in the endlessness of January, but it’s not: the rain will slick to a landscape of ice, the days are already lengthening.
Again, from poet Kim Stafford:
I’m reading outside with my bare feet on the firepit stones when I feel something like my cat’s tongue on my toe. I’m reading intently, in the few remaining minutes before my daughter returns from soccer practice and my attention will abruptly shift into chat about school and peers and the righteous outrage I suddenly see emerging in this teen. How had I forgotten that one of the most interesting aspects of adolescence is an emerging moral sense of the world? What’s wrong? Who’s right? (And, please, as a parent, could I just remain low and out of the light?)
I’m reading, of all things, Wendell Berry, when I realize a grasshopper is nibbling my toe. It’s the very end of August, the sunflowers are opening, the basil is prolific, the beans have spread into a sculpture in the middle of my garden. I close the book and let the grasshopper gnaw.
We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
Rain moves in; the heat moves out. I get up from my desk and put on a long-sleeved shirt. My older daughter and I — just the two of us — make pesto and spread it over a pizza with broccoli she slices. She looks at the pizza before she bakes it and says, Garden pizza.
Swimming holds no appeal. Instead, in the evening, we walk up a long dirt road heading out of Hardwick. I follow her into an overgrown pasture. She hands me her phone and has me photograph her in a field of Scottish thistles. She wades shoulder-deep into the prickles and purple flowers, and the memory of traipsing through forests and meadows behind her as a girl child returns to me. Those summers she and her best friends were obsessed with false hellebore as an ingredient for soup-making in her outdoor kitchen. Don’t mind the snails, she tells me. Let’s keep going.
As here’s a few lines from Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound I kept thinking about, as I drove to Middlebury on back roads, wondering if all these new fields of hemp might positively help to reshape Vermont’s economy….
A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members. This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered. A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy.
Cultivated and wild in my garden. Photo by Molly S.
… rose over the hillside. Like a surprise, the moon simply appeared.
All day long it often seems, I go about moving things — words, dishes, weeds. Laundry from the line to the basket. My own sometimes tired bones. Then the moon, rising infinitely serene and wise.
After a late soccer game, the girls sat at table outside, the air abruptly cooling as the sun began to sink. The girls kept eating strawberries, shortcake, whipped cream. A forkful dropped on the table.
There you are, my daughter said to the moon, laughing. A hello from her to this heavenly sphere. July.
White Mountains. Hiking with my brother. Photo by Jess.
At my desk this morning, I realized all three of us are working this week — myself and my older daughter, and the younger sister now, too. At 14, she’s a junior counselor in a camp for a week — a take-it-seriously kind of kid, paired up with a friend she’s known her entire life.
Sure, learning to talk and walk are major milestones, but this? This employment thing turns a bend. Next week, she’ll be back to Kid Land, searching for something to do, and not particularly looking to me for anything, save for a ride and a restock of the larder. But still. For this week? Wow. I’m not quite sure what to think of this.
Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.
―
Our domestic July world
Saturday morning before work finds me with a rag and the vinegar bottle, hands and knees on my kitchen floor, working.
The 10,000 things? The mysteries of the universe? The uncountable varieties of growing things in a Vermont July? Scrubbing the kitchen floor is one of these — as much as exploring waterfalls.
There is
a time to live
and a time to die
but never to reject the moment.
— Lao Tzu
Morrisville, VT
Stony Soil Vermont 