I’m late to a meeting at the library I’ll participate in when I stop in the parking lot. In the wetlands behind the library, a red-wing blackbird sings. I can’t see the bird. This isn’t a flock; a bird calls and chirrups, that old familiar, unmistakable sound of spring. I’ve driven, in years past, on the hunt, just to hear this bird.
A few years ago, by chance I met a friend outside the Woodbury, VT, post office. We stood talking about something we found mutually so enjoyable, while in a winter-bare maple tree, a flock of these beauties sang. Spring! we marveled.
This year, I remember how long and hard mud season is, most rightfully a season worthy of its own true name. Hence, love of little things like tiny birds.
When my daughter and I return from a walk tonight, we stand for a moment outside our house in the dark. The moon is a bit of a creamy curl over our roof. Mighty Orion stands at his guard in the constellations. Whoever dug this house’s foundation in the sandy soil, carefully set the fieldstones, and built this home has long since passed out of this world. People have lived and fought and loved and died in this house. It’s March and Mud Season hovers over us, freezing, thawing, freezing, and eventually the thaw will win out for the summer. Upstairs, my youngest daughter puts her face to a window. We go in, leaving the stars and the night to their own particular magic.
“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
This was a day when nothing happened, the children went off to school without a murmur, remembering their books, lunches, gloves. All morning, the baby and I built block stacks in the squares of light on the floor. And lunch blended into naptime, I cleaned out kitchen cupboards, one of those jobs that never gets done, then sat in a circle of sunlight and drank ginger tea, watched the birds at the feeder jostle over lunch’s little scraps. A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow, preened and flashed his jeweled head. Now a chicken roasts in the pan, and the children return, the murmur of their stories dappling the air. I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb. We listen together for your wheels on the drive. Grace before bread. And at the table, actual conversation, no bickering or pokes. And then, the drift into homework. The baby goes to his cars, drives them along the sofa’s ridges and hills. Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss, tasting of coffee and cream. The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton, the moon to a comma, a sliver of white, but this has been a day of grace in the dead of winter, the hard cold knuckle of the year, a day that unwrapped itself like an unexpected gift, and the stars turn on, order themselves into the winter night.
March in February — the fields are beginning to open, at least for this afternoon, for this particular moment. I park by the side of the road and take the long way where I’m going, by foot, my hat off, jacket unzipped, letting the wind pull at my hair.
I’m snapping a photo of a field and the sky when a car pulls over at the side of the road. There’s no one else around, and for a moment I wonder if he’s a landowner, angry or just curious what I’m doing. Wednesday afternoon, and no one is around.
He gets out of his mud-splattered white car, laughing, and asks for directions back to a paved road. He was visiting someone and took “the other way.” I laugh back, and we joke about where the other way in Vermont leads someone.
We stand there, joking, the dirt road both melting and already beginning to freeze again as we speak.
When he gets in his car and disappears down the road, I stand for a moment longer. I’d wanted nothing more than wind in my eyes, sunlight on my face. Fait accompli. Then it’s back to civilization for me, too.
On a rainy day last week, I parked on a Montpelier side street and walked into town to attend an opioid summit as a writer.
The last time I had been in the conference space in the Plaza Hotel was nearly precisely two years ago, when I attended a conference as a journalist, charged by my editor to “make connections,” and spent most of it drinking coffee and eating sugar cookies and talking with a para-educator at my daughter’s high school about his experiences. Like darn near everyone else in Vermont, he has a side gig for income, and runs a seasonal bakery.
I sat at a table with people I admire who I’ve met through writing. For those few hours, I had the nearly heady experience of meeting new people; I had remember that deep pleasure. Years ago, I traveled on a train from Charlottesville, VA, to Chicago, and sat beside a man from West Virginia. We talked off and on for those hours. It’s been so long since I had that experience of just listening and talking with people.
For a few hours, I listened to stories about addiction and struggle, about suffering and redemption, about profound loss and grief. Listening, my heart grew full. Our stories and words, the act of telling and listening, of sharing the hard and the beautiful things in our lives, bound us together. The summit began and ended with singing. I’ve never been one for group activities, for open sharing, but at that moment, I utterly understood; I got it. The melody of our language and experiences pulled us together, acknowledging both the beautiful and the terrible about human life, and made our world shine brighter.
…. Grateful to have a terrific piece about Unstitched run in the Brattleboro Reformer and the Manchester Journal by Gena Mangiaratti. And The Rumpus included my essay about the backstory of Unstitched in their Voices On Addiction column this month.
Sunday, we bought coffee and pastries in Montpelier (for a change of venue, a change of scene) and ate outside in the cold. There’s a pandemic, after all, and bakeries open on the weekend had closed their indoor seating anyway. None of us complained or even remarked — something I silently noted.
On this cold morning hardly anyone was walking. We passed a man sitting beside an apartment building, flossing his teeth. My youngest pointed out a bird gliding high above the state house. “Bald eagle.”
Bald eagles have recently been removed from the endangered species list in Vermont. I noted again how eagles are now part of our life. Last summer, in particular, we saw eagles frequently. I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw either an eagle or a loon my entire childhood. Now loons (also removed from the endangered species list) have always been part of my daughter’s life.
We walked up the street and then returned. The eagle was still silently gliding on its immense wingspan.
Stony Soil Vermont 