Every morning these days, my daughter and I look to see if the lilacs have opened. Today, today.
Their scent reminds me of some of the best things: early childhood, summertime dinners on the grass, the return of spring.
a scrap of iron–
without fail, menfolk
stop to look
— Uda Kiyoko
With two 12-year-olds and a giant dog cage in my small Toyota, I drove along the dirt roads in Woodbury, in search of the woman who said she had chickens. Ignore the no trespassing sign at the foot of the driveway, she told me, a warning for burglars. That part of the Woodbury is mountainous in the small, Vermont way, with curved hillsides cupping homes, and lots of clear running streams and glacier-carved ponds.
It was nearly dusk, and she was outside, waiting for us. The girls eyed the chickens, who were not yet in their houses. Waiting, the woman showed the girls her fluffy chicks, and then we went inside. Her house had an amazing floor made from stones on the property. While the girls waited quietly, the woman and I talked about her relatives who had been in the area since before the Revolutionary War. She showed us a photograph on the wall of her distant relative in a Civil War uniform with his wife, who must have native blood.
The woman’s house was filled with dusky light. She was one of my people, a small woman, and, standing, we were eye-to-eye. I could feel the girls getting antsy for the chickens, but they were quiet, saying nothing. This woman had raised three sons alone in a mobile home on this property, and then built a house about the time the boys moved on and began their own families, cutting a deal with her ex-husband’s child support arrears for more land instead of the money he owed.
The girls petted her lovely black lab. I stood listening to the unexpected bends of her life, to an autoimmune disease and the loss of a job, and then, she said, the chickens saved her life. Began her on a new track. In the descending gloaming, we walked behind the coops and visited her new bees. For a moment I guessed she would offer to take us further, up that steep hillside I admired where she and her son cleared a field.
But the girls edged toward the chickens. The hens muttered, stepping slowly into their houses for the night. We took four, driving out through the sound of the clattering peepers.
Morning glories
enough thatching
for this hut.
— Issa
Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!
I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….
Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?
Why not?
A single day of rain has pushed up green.
As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….
This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —
— Issa
Come what may — more April snowflakes, cold rain, glittery frost in the weeds against the barn — in our corner of Vermont we’ve stepped across the line to spring.
Yesterday, in a chilly rain, my daughters and I peered beneath the pear trees and along the thicket of roses, now merely a brown tangle of prickly vines. But the earth reeked of thaw, of soil melting its cold frozen heart, releasing its mysteries of worm and grasping root.
Thaw begins not with warmth, but with the subtle gradations of less cold. And how darn good our earth smells, breathing.
Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.
— Buson
Raising teenagers so often feels in your face hard — sometimes breathtakingly hilarious, sometimes just not.
I remind myself of running rivers. Not far from us, Buffalo Mountain’s watershed drains into Cooper Brook, which runs around the log yard and by the old granite cutting fields into the Lamoille, which bends its sinuous way through town. Watching drone footage over our town, my daughters remark on the river’s size, its curves all through town, and how we take its mighty presence for granted.
On a Sunday walk today, robins flocked around us. Ahead, a woodchuck disappeared down a hole. Garden predators are stirring, too!
….There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day…..
From Maxine Kumin’s “Woodchucks”
A retired Barre police officer sat beside me while I was waiting outside a courtroom in the Washington County Criminal Court, and he mentioned he thought he knew my former husband. He suggested that clearly I didn’t know my former husband all that well, and he told me some wrongdoings he knew my former spouse had committed. I protested that the man he referred to wasn’t my former husband.
The officer persisted. Listening, I began to wonder how much I knew about anyone, really, in the end. In my bag, I had a copy of Janet Malcolm’s biography of Sylvia Path, The Silent Woman, which I had read with enormous interest many years ago, right before I was married. In this book, Ted Hughes is quoted as writing, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.”
I knew when I entered that courtroom, again, as I had before, that I would need to relinquish some of the darkest facts of my life. Just the facts, ma’am, and yet the facts seem so much. The reality is, of course, none of us own the facts of our lives. We’re hardly discrete entities, spreading into each others’ lives messily as we do.
Just the facts. Granite photos, the trio of a judicial panel, bailiff, what must be an endless of stream of adults coming and going through the security at the door. Outside, robins sang in the maples behind the courthouse. I’d been there so frequently, I knew the way out of the one-way streets.
Stony Soil Vermont 