On this frosty November morning, a few lines from Rebecca Solnit’s newest book:
To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”
In a light rain and pitch dark, my daughters and I arrive at Montpelier’s Hubbard Park for the annual Enchanted Forest. Masked, spread out, bundled up, I have the strange sensation that the three of us are alone, and yet not alone.
The forest path winds along lit jack o’lanterns and burning torches, and among live musicians and giant puppets. Near the crest of the hill glowing paper lanterns decorate a giant oak tree.
The climax of the walk is a creation story re-enactment of a very old woman. Her black dog unravels her weaving as she tends to the changing seasons. As the rain falls more steadily, I realize the story is the tale of my life, as a writer and a mother — the story of the tension between order and disorder and the human longing for order to reign. Yet total order, total perfection, is impossible in this earthly realm.
We walk back through the mud puddles. Before heading home, my oldest pulls into a convenience store. Under a well-lit overhang, I stand outside, watching a man pump gas into an enormous SUV. He’s with a woman wearing a coat that falls to her ankles, a pretty garment with leaves and vines. I’m too far to hear what they’re saying, but I see his hand reach out and slip the top button closed on her coat and smooth the collar over her clavicle.
Through the plate glass window, my daughters stand at the store’s counter, buying hot chocolate. They’re wearing masks, so I can’t see their mouths, but from the way they look at each other, I know they’re laughing.
November looms tomorrow. Our New England darkness. Tighten your coat collar.
Talking with friends by the side of a road, I notice a flock of Canada geese in the field across the road.
My friends tell me hunting season is just a few days away. The geese should move along.
My friends leave, too, one by one, and I linger with one woman, talking about farming in Vermont, an acquaintance we believe may have gone down the rat hole of QAnon, our elderly parents who live thousands of miles away. We branch into motherhood and gardening.
At the end of August, my youngest starts 11th grade today. The cats and I are up long before dawn this morning, the days dwindling at each end rapidly now. Next spring, with its promises of coltsfoot and trilliums seems forever away. I stand at our kitchen counter, drinking coffee, reading the New York Times.
Here’s a poem, not offered as an antidote to so many families, all over the globe, just solidarity.
Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination–
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other.”
–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Last summer, my neighbors put a Black Lives Matter sign in their front yard. The sign was stolen. They purchased another. The second sign was stolen. The patten repeated. Our neighbors brought the sign in at night. They placed the sign between our two houses. They kept at it.
Earlier this summer, I noticed a sign had appeared on their lawn again, above a tarp spread out near the sidewalk. I didn’t note much of that. It’s a way I don’t usually walk in the non-snowy months. I nearly always cut through the cemetery or take a different side street.
But last night, walking home in a faint rain, I saw they had planted a row of wildflowers where that tarp had been. The flowers are about knee-high, festooned with delicate blooms. Their sign remains.
The cold, my old familiar friend, sweeps back.
Carrying out a bucket of hot ashes from the woodstove in the early morning, I stand for a moment in the gusting wind. Is snow falling or merely blowing?
Inside, the cats pace, hungry, then hunker before the stove, waiting for warmth.
Midwinter, our days unfold in an unusual patience, a kind of dreamy standstill, fluctuating between work and home for my older daughter and myself, and the new version of school for my youngest.
In Vermont, the Agency of Ed aims to fully reopen schools by the end of April. My high schooler asks me, while we make spicy egg rolls, what that means. Among all the things she doesn’t like about this mixed-up world, she’s come to relish the kind of collegesque schedule she’s managed at the high school, coming and going at her own will.
At fifteen, she’s composed and level-headed, determined to get done what’s necessary.
I tell her what I believe — that the world will not revert to the way it was, that our future is already unfolding around us, in ways we don’t yet understand.
I can’t tell her what I’m thinking — seize the reins you’re already holding and steer your own fate — because I know she doesn’t want my advice. Maybe she doesn’t even need my advice.
Instead, I scrape out the last of the cabbage from the pan and say, “Do what you need to do. This is your life.”
Outside, this morning, the wind chimes bang in the wind.
In the bleak Winter
When the World is one color
Is the Sound of Wind
— Bashō
I’m reading on the couch Sunday afternoon when my daughter calls from her cell phone.
She’s walking on a nearby trail system and met a woman who lost her dog. The woman gave my daughter her cell phone number, in hopes that my daughter might find her dog.
My daughter says excitedly, I found the dog!
Good going, I say.
The dog, however, keeps rolling around on its back and begging for rubs. The dog won’t walk. What do I do?
Good lord, I think. I close my book.
The afternoon is rapidly heading towards dark. I take the leftover soup from the refrigerator and set it on the woodstove to begin heating. My younger daughter, excited to be doing something, knocks off her homework and offers to drive, nothing that her sister needs assistance.
As we head through the village in the twilight, I say, Hey, look at you. At fifteen, you’re already on your first dog rescue mission.
She asks, You’ve done this before?
Nope….
It’s dark by the time we find the elderly woman, wearing a mask, in her car in the dark by the side of the road, talking on her cell phone with my daughter.
I tell the woman my daughter is in the field, on the other side of the ruins of an old house, marked by maple trees. My youngest goes ahead, and I walk with the woman, lifting strands of electric fence that have been turned off for the season. In a break in the parting clouds, the sunset appears briefly as a dark bruise in the sky, before the night swallows it up. It’s balmy yet, for December; but it is early winter, and I know our house will be warm when we return.
My oldest — who cares not at all for dogs — has remained with the dog. At home, she washes away the scent of dog under her cat’s serious scrutiny.
Her sister says, You kept the dog’s person from getting lost, too…
Stony Soil Vermont 