I don’t often post pictures of myself (or family anymore) but here’s a shot of myself and my brother at his brewery in Conway, New Hampshire. For this record, yes, I am this short (and my brother isn’t especially tall, either). In the midst of so much — floods, rains, wildfire smoke, the endless varieties of chaos that track all of us — I’m always happy to head out on a restorative hike.
That evening, we raced ahead of yet more thunderstorms to get to brother’s house, my daughter driving, me in the passenger seat prattling on about whatever, whatever. But isn’t that the way of family? Thank goodness for joyful moments….
Nearly a week into Vermont’s floods, I’m surely not the only one in this town awake at night, listening to rain through my open windows. Lush, lush, our world is. Sunday, I trim the rose bushes that thornily cover a window, then discover moss creeping towards the house. I snip and scrape, then dash inside beneath a sudden downpour.
Sunday, I walk along the Lamoille riverbanks, silty and sandy where the river rose far above its usual path. Red metal lies in twisted sheets, remnants I’m guessing from the motel that tumbled into the river. Twisted towels and clothing, tires, a stepladder are jammed into tree trunks and roots. Cassette tapes of bible stories lie in a puddle, oddly more or less intact. Down the river, smoke churns into the sky where a flooded sawmill has burned debris for days.
There’s an odd kind of quiet hovering around here. What I’ve witnessed is shock and disbelief, a heady kind of euphoria to fix and repair, and now a sodden dullness, the earth as drenched as I’ve ever seen it. My pink poppies have blackened before they’ve bloomed.
We keep on, of course. Our beloved capital city, Montpelier, hoes and bleaches. Word goes around and around about passable and impassable roads, who needs helps, who’s yet marooned by great rifts in the earth.
In the late afternoon, I buy poppyseeds at the co-op and pay off my tab. The staff is out-of-sorts there, too, grousing about a broken cooler and the mud we’re all tracking in. Rain falls, quits, but the day doesn’t cool. I bake a cake and listen to someone on VPR talk about the Buddha. In the evening, that fat woodchuck darts among my gardens. A flock of starlings scatter on the lawn. Robins and rain. The daylilies are brilliant, the flowers poet David Budbill called coarse and beautiful.
As I said, it’s coarse and ordinary and it’s beautiful because it’s ordinary. A plant gone wild and therefore become rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient, like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.
In fresh snow, I walk through the little neighborhoods around us. One man shovels snow. A few plow trucks hurry through. It’s nearing dinner, and streetlights are turning on, one by one, in the December twilight.
It’s been a week of phone calls and problems with no clear solutions, simply the inevitable change that comes to all our earthly doings. I’ve wandered on this walk without real intention, drifting away from chopping firewood and shoveling paths.
I turn a corner and see a house where I once bought sugaring equipment from a man who lived there. He’s passed on, and his wife sold the house and moved away. A family lives there now. Two little boys call at each other in the street. There’s no traffic about, and they’re standing beneath the streetlight. As I walk closer, I see their heads are back, and they’re catching falling snowflakes in their open mouths. Their voices are loud and excited about this small thing.
A man comes out and says, Get in the car. They get in the backseat of an idling car, and he drives away. Back at my house, my daughters have brought in the night’s firewood and swept the floor.
And because bell hooks was so amazing, another line from her:
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?“
I stopped for a flock of crows this morning on my drive to work, half a dozen or so of them, pecking at roadkill. In the slow way of November, the birds contemplated me and then turned back to their feast.
For a moment, I got out of the car, just me and the crows and the morning too cold to be damp. Eight crows, two yellow lines, one dead tree, and all that snowy field and sky around me.
Driving, I had been thinking of the poet Lucille Clifton, who wrote the saddest poem I’ve ever read, “The Lost Baby Poem.” The poem that needs no commentary, nothing further.
Clifton wrote about sorrow, but plenty more, too. She advised, “You might as well answer the door, my child,/the truth is furiously knocking.” It’s a line I’ve returned to over and over in my life, one of my guiding stars. This November morning, cawing crows opened my Subaru door.
I step out in the morning dark to get kindling from the barn. I’m grateful for many things, but a hot hearth is high on my gratitude list. The sprawling cats concur.
In the night, snow has fallen, a cold wind blows, and winter has spread out her garments. She’s here to stay.
At Thanksgiving, my daughters asked why I didn’t stay in the Pacific Northwest, where I went to graduate school. One reason was that I missed the drama of New England’s seasons. On this late November morning, I remind myself of this love for Vermont, that the need for winter’s stillness and beauty is driven as deeply into my body and soul as May’s blue squill around my house.
Here’s a link to a radio show at WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont, I did with my former US Attorney Christina Nolan, who appears in Unstitched— a woman I greatly admire.
This photo sums up November — little remainders of green, intermittent mud, and a long road ahead. It’s not all bad news, for sure. November twilights are the loveliest — pale blue and blood red.
On Anne Sexton’s birthday, a line from this poet: “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
Stony Soil Vermont 