When I was 20, I taught myself how to adjust the valves on an even-then ancient Volkswagen bug. My millennial daughter, in contrast, takes great pleasure in hoisting her kayaks on her roof racks, showing up the quarreling boys beside her who wrestle with their rowboat.
On a Monday morning of a week that will end in August, the last of our Vermont summer months, hurray for young muscles. I’ll breathe in some of your good cheer.
June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.
My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.
What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?
Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.
Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.
— Basho
For no other reason except sheer pleasure, magnetic poetry reemerged in our lives…. And sometimes one sentence is enough.
The rain cleared in the early evening, and my daughter and I hung out on her trampoline while she waited for her friend. She’s a pro; I’m a novice. Eventually, I lay back and stared at the clouds breaking apart, and the enormous box elders behind our house, leafing out.
She, at nearly 14, demonstrated all the moves that can be done on a trampoline. In her face, I could see the sweet impishness of her earliest years.
Rain, rain this May. There’s a kind of rightness to this, the earth and the ponds and the saplings and plants rushing headlong toward green and procreation. May is the season for this, and there’s a sweet satisfaction in the daily discoveries of what’s grown each day. May: bring it on!
Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.
—Hayden Carruth
My daughter plays clarinet in the band. Her school’s so small the band is both middle and high school, younger kids mixed in with the kids who are driving and working jobs and on the cusp of grownupness. It reflects the small town kind of world we live in, that, by the nature of its size, encourages acceptance. I linked up with a woman I’ve known since our oldest kids were nursing babies, 20 years ago.
Twenty school bands from all over the state played in a parade last night in Montpelier. As I walked around the high school, looking for my daughter, the evening sun in my eyes, I followed the tunes from one band to another. So much live music! So many kids!
For that brief time — the best of parenting. Laughter and silliness in the heady May evening, beneath trees just barely beginning to leaf out. I drove my hungry kid home, listening to her, as we drove through the dusk tumbling down, back to our house and the cats at the door, mewling for affection.
Hallelujah! What I believed had permanently departed my patch of Vermont returned: sun! Warmth!
Yesterday afternoon while I’m holed up in the Montpelier library, working, my daughter texts me, asking if she can open the house windows. Please? It’s hot.
At home, we open the upstairs glassed-in porch too. Her cat presses against a window screen, entranced by — what is that? — singing chickadees?!
My daughter asks, Why are you so happy? Is it spring?
I answer, It’s enough, right now.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being…
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Spring”
Stony Soil Vermont 