An August Sunday list with the daughter:
The screened door slamming tells me it is summer…
— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”
Years ago, when I sold syrup at the Stowe Farmers Market with my toddler, she spilled water down her dress, and I hung the wet one over the back of a wooden folding chair to dry. Later that day, a customer appraised my booth and noted, You’ve really set up house here.
I had. With a blanket spread on the grass, a jumble of toys and three-year-old art supplies, snacks and the perpetual baby dolls and that drying laundry and likely my camera and notebook, the gypsy blood in me came out those market days and I came prepared.
If you’re raising kids, why not settle in?
In these dim November days, the trampoline is taken down for the season. The neighbor boy arrived to our delighted laughter on his unicycle this afternoon, and the kids have spread out before the wood stove making origami chairs. Warmth, sustenance, art supplies: ingredients for a Sunday near-to-snowing afternoon.
But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.
– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water
Last night, in a wild windstorm, we were lucky to have the lights go out. My teenager and I had – painstakingly – filled out her college financial aid papers, and, at the very end, I could not electronically sign and submit. The younger daughter lay on the rug asking what’s wrong?
Frustrated, I snapped that, in a real world, I could just take a pen and sign my name. But not in a virtual world where the synchronicity of username and password didn’t jive.
With relief, darkness unexpectedly enfolded us. I closed my laptop, and we lay on the rug before the woodstove’s glowing glass door, the firelight flickering over us. The wind whooshed around our wooden house. Lacking light, we played my old stand-by, 20 Questions, traveling in our imagination to Portland, Maine, and then remembering sweet potato tempura we had eaten in a Japanese restaurant in that city. We discovered an interestingly ontological conundrum: was my brother’s dog Mona a thing? A live thing? She’s not a person, not a place….
By candlelight, we brushed our teeth and, rather than read by flashlight, I went to sleep far earlier than usual.
This morning, I’m reunited with my laptop, in work I genuinely love; however, while I do live in the world where papers are signed with clicks of my keyboard, I also reminded my girls that their ancestor signed his John Alden on the Mayflower Compact with a scratchy quill. And the implications of that document have long lingered…..
IN The Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation…
– Mayflower Compact 1620
Hardwick, Vermont
In my twenties, I made a decision which changed the course of my adult life: I left the academic world and threw in my (considerably small) fortune in agriculture. My former husband and I sugared for nearly twenty years, on a small family-scale, and, while he was a carpenter and I worked various jobs (census taker, book seller), the bulk of income I brought in was through the Stowe Farmers Market. I made more money at that farmers market than I ever have anywhere else.
Yesterday, my teenager daughter skipped high school and stayed home to help load some of the heaviest things from the sugarhouse into a buyer’s truck. Are you kidding me? she asked. I’m not going school and missing out. The buyer was a New Hampshire family with their 26-year-old son and sleepy dog, and they arrived in a wet snow with such good cheer and humor in our unheated sugarhouse that they convinced another gentleman who arrived to write me a check for a sap tank.
The man and his son and my daughter with her honed tractor skills (“I’ve been driving this tractor since I was 10,” she explained) loaded up the heavy stuff while his wife and I talked about novels and farmers markets and, oddly, sex.
Afterwards, eating apples with my teenager, I raved about how terrific sugarmakers are, with their can-do because must-do attitude. She answered me, “You sugarmakers are all nuts, mom.”
I didn’t bother to point out that she’s one of us, too, with her graceful physical strength, her gritty determination to accomplish what needs to be done, and – even more so – her sizing up of priorities: why sit in a classroom doing hated trigonometry when you might put your hands and back to work and accomplish something useful?
Before she left, the woman told me they had taken a ten-year hiatus from sugaring and then commenced again. You will, too, she assured me.
My daughter eyed me. No, she said.
One of the things I loved best about sugaring was leaving the house’s confines at the end of the winter and moving, essentially, down to the sugarhouse and outside. Yesterday, my feet freezing on the cold cement floor, smelling the pervasive scent of fresh snow and remembering the blackbirds who nested in the white pines and sang every April, seeing the chalk drawings my daughters made on the rough-board sugarhouse walls and the huge rope swing hung outside the door, I assured my daughter, I’d do it differently, the second time… even better…. How could we not make sweet syrup?
She looked at me and shook her head.
And yet, I can trust she’ll lend her hands, again.
Here’s a few lines from the Van Gogh letters I’ve been reading.
You will no doubt tell me, the moment may well arrive when one regrets becoming a painter. And what could I then reply on my own behalf? They who have such regrets are those who neglect solid study in the beginning and race hurry-scurry to be top of the heap. Well, the men of the day are men of just one day, but whoever has enough faith and love to take pleasure in precisely what others find dull, namely the study of anatomy, perspective & proportion, will stay the course and mature slowly but surely.
The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
Photo by Molly S.
The ten-year-olds are at their fort building again; odd pieces of plywood have been scavenged, a long 2×6″, silver spray paint glistens a joyous arc in this early morning dew. The project is all rough draft. No terminal point of placing Ma’s china shephardess over the mantle will ever occur. Lacking the need for a finished project, the kids’ creation is all joy and curiosity. Could these old pallets be used? A split hose?
At select moments, the daughter opens her door and invites me in for a tour. What do you think? she asks. What more can I do?
And then: Pull up that bench I made. Sit down and enjoy.
So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half pleasures which are not whole because they are not shared. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth….
Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels
Photo by Molly S.
Years ago, I worked with a Bulgarian family who, every March, made little yarn dolls of red and white wool. Red for the heat of summer, white for winter. We were all friends at that workplace, and everyone wore those little gifts of martenitsa dolls until they frayed. Then, our Bulgarian friends insisted, spring was here.
Spring may come quicker in Bulgaria than it does in Vermont.
With snow falling today, the little girl left her forest fort alone, reading library books by the wood stove and eating popcorn.
Another way, perhaps, to think of martenitsa is as a great leveler: even winter’s savage teeth will yield to the persistence of spring.
But not yet… not quite yet… Vermont’s version of martenitsa is maple sugaring. Fire, sap, sugar: all eventually overtaken by budding.
The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.
– Helen & Scott Nearing, The Good Life
Woodbury, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.
Stony Soil Vermont 