11-years-old. Hair sun-bleached. Eyes on the bike route. Hungry for mocha mud ice cream.
Evening breeze —
water is slapping against
the legs of a blue heron.
– Yosa Buson
Stowe, Vermont
August, 2016, Vermont
photography
Novelist as Voyeur
Among many, I’m reading Gay Talese’s intensely bizarre The Voyeur’s Motel, and I squelched an impetus to conceal the unmistakable cover at the lake with my kids this afternoon. There’s an underlying subtext of, well, porn, which is something I never read.
Perhaps the other subtextual issue is that I realize, like all novelists, I’m a tenor of voyeur, too, always looking at other people and parsing their lives, wondering at the mechanics not only of their material lives, but their souls, too. Talese’s book reminds me of the far classier Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and the four horsemen in relationships. Over and over, I’ve thought of that Contempt horseman rearing its head. (How much I wish I’d heeded Gladwell’s words, many years ago.)
A third of the way through the motel book, I’m already longing for Talese to toss me some kind of bone of human decency, and perhaps one reason I keep reading is I want that decency to rear up at some point.
You can never really determine during their appearance (of couples) in public that their private life is full of hell and unhappiness. I have pondered why it is absolutely mandatory for people to guard with all secrecy and never let it be known that their personal lives are unhappy and miserable.
– Gay Talese, The Voyeur’s Motel
Such a grim view. Then there’s this: swimming, we could see a bank of clouds rushing across the lake today. In this humid day, with no sign of lightening, only the rain rushing in and rushing out, the girls kept swimming in the downpour, just the two of them in all that cool water. Voyeur that I may be – beneath a cedar tree in a shower storm – I hope to catch a more joyous slice of human life.
Greensboro, Vermont
The Stars
I first fell in love not with Vermont’s pastoral landscape but its nightsky. I grew up in a New Hampshire village, so the New England terrain was intimately familiar to me, but the constellations were dimmed by the town’s lights and curtailed by roofs and wires. When I was eighteen, I moved to rural Vermont, and the first night there, I lay in bed, staring out the uncurtained window at all those stars. Uncountable. I was beyond smitten.
In America, a country of such material excess, the whole force of the culture often seems to push for more, more, more. Of course, I understand as much as anyone the mathematics of economics, of raising children and hard work and a driving need for stability; none of that necessarily excludes our human need for the stars. Shouldn’t we encourage our teenagers to envision their adult lives as productive within the real context of earth beneath the soles of your feet, stars arced over your head?
Early August in northern Vermont: the children are tanned and healthy, the asparagus has shot taller than any 11-year-old, our pockets sag with lake pebbles, and the cucumbers are crisp and profuse on the vine. That’s something.
On the white poppy,
a butterfly’s torn wing
is a keepsake
– Matsuo Basho
Singing Season
We’ve reached the point in the summer where the crickets’ song is gaining the upper hand, slowly rising in volume and intensity and the songbirds’ melody dwindles, and then, eventually, the crickets fade, too.
End of July is lush and full; end of July is swimming season.
In the last week, we’ve swum in four lakes. Beneath our bare feet, the sand varied from pebbles to smooth as wet dust; the water murky or clear from our shoulders to our toes. Ever present are the Vermont mountains, from Craftsbury’s smaller hills to the sheer cliffs of Willoughby.
Sonorous is the word for this season; let it ring.
Here’s what I’m reading these days:
But there was something there, something imperfect, something sharp and bent and rusty, that tore into him somehow, that made him believe the human condition was one great and mournful but still achingly beautiful cry.
– John Gregory Brown, A Thousand Miles From Nowhere
Lake Eligo, Craftsbury, Vermont
Flowers of All Sizes
My daughter picked a piece of a dill flower in the garden today, then noticed her sprig was a miniature version of the whole. Curiously inspecting, she saw the symmetry reflected again in a smaller blossom-within-a-blossom.
For the longest time, my child examined that flower, wondering how tiny flowers could be. Down to molecules? she asked.
Forget those high school chemistry drawings and imagine this: molecules in the shape of flowers.
Maybe a little summer boredom isn’t such a bad thing….
Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.
– Yosa Buson
West Woodbury, Vermont
Vegetable Queen
Back in my maple syrup selling Friday afternoons at the Hardwick Farmers Market, I spent a lot of slow afternoons talking with the farmer whose booth was beside mine. One afternoon, I confessed the potato was not my favorite food.
The farmer was horrified. The potato, he informed me, is the queen of the vegetable kingdom.
I would have placed garlic on that throne, but he was adamant civilizations had hinged on this humble food. Touché, I finally acknowledged. He’s right. Garlic is savory, but the potato is substance. The truth is, my potato ignorance was extreme. My farmer friend introduced me to blue potatoes, to Purple Majesties, Russian bananas, and his prized fingerlings. While my infant daughter gnawed at my knuckles, he told me how to cook these beauties, too. A main component of my garden is now this queen, her star-shaped lavender and white blossoms opening wide, staple of ancient worlds, blight notwithstanding.
“Appetite”
I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father…my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoonmen kill for this.
– Maxine Kumin
Stony Soil Vermont 