Entirely out of keeping with the season, I’m thinking of spring. Save for houseplants, the Vermont world is entirely without a single leaf of tender green leaf — in utter hibernation — but the days are lengthening.
Groundhog’s Day holds no suspense here — that garden-eater always turns around and burrows back down for more winter. In the meantime, a spring haiku.
The spring breeze.
Being pulled by a cow
To the Zenkoji temple.
— Issa
Ooooo, midwinter.
After work, while my daughter memorizes French for an exam, I head out for a walk. A slight snow is falling, just a few lazy flakes as if nothing much is going to happen, just that little bit of snow. It’s my most very favorite snow, just lovely, and in the cone of streetlight I have that enchanting Narnia feeling — as if it’s just me and the lamppost and that snow, and maybe the mysterious White Witch might silently appear. In that twirling-down-slowly snow, Turkish delight might still be an untasted promise in my life, rather than the too-sweet candy I remember.
That’s it, from my end of the world. I’ve been “dividing my time” between desk and couch, finishing up a manuscript. When I submit it Friday, I’m planning to ski out the back door — snow willing — and paint my daughter’s room.
Then, on to the next month.
But land is land, and it’s safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.
― Long Day’s Journey into Night
Midwinter. Need I say more?
I remember a Vermont winter when I was in my twenties where January was sub-sub-zero. 25 below zero, in what seemed like a cold snap that wouldn’t snap.
Not so, this year. Rain, slush, ice. Some sparkling skiing days.
The cats drape on the couches, dreaming of tuna perhaps, their little furry faces rubbing our hands. Midwinter is that particularly good place for work — or at least the kind of work I do, much of it at a laptop and not re-roofing a house. My daughters and I talk about swimming, of wandering in wet sand along the ocean, of ice cream cones (so dull I am, preferring vanilla), but in January that’s all imaginary…. for the moment. In a warm, well-lighted house, that’s just fine.
Let’s pull some blueberries from the freezer and make muffins — and another little silver pot of espresso, too.
So much money made
by clever temple priests
using peonies
— Issa
Early evening, I pull on my winter coat and hat and walk down the hill and through the neighborhood. Snow falls so heavily my eyes blink as snowflakes accumulate on my lashes.
I walk from streetlight to streetlight, house lights muted through curtains of falling white. In one dark road bend, I hear a man’s smoker-raspy cough: that’s all for the sound of humanity. In those side streets, not even a car or a pickup with a plow passes me.
The swirling storm knocks wind chimes. Likely, the stillness brings those sounds to me, their tiny chimes usually muted beneath the humdrumness of folks going about their daily lives. But on this walk, it’s just snow and the variation of darkness and streetlight and the jangling chimes like an invisible rope tugging me along. Not even the dog walkers are out.
The best way out is always through.
―
Snow falls all night.
In the darkness, I lie awake thinking about a line from Karl Marx; “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.” The line figures predominantly in the book I’m writing — the initial draft nearly finished. More than that, the line is one of the main questions of my life.
In our dark house, the cat and I stand at the back glass door, watching the snow drift down in the cone of the porch light. Upstairs, one daughter reads, the other sleeps. For a little while, the cat and I read on the couch. Just before I turn off the light and head back upstairs, I glance at the pile of index cards penned neatly in my younger daughter’s hand. For school, she has to choose a poem, memorize it, and recite it aloud. I lift the top card and read, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….
Two summers back, I bought a gallon of paint for $10. At the local hardware store, the clerk had inadvertently mixed the wrong color and offered it to me. What a score, I thought. The color approximated the hue I once used to paint windows in a cupola — a color I christened Little Kid Yellow.
Not everyone in my household has been an enormous fan of painting our front steps bright yellow. Afterwards, even I wondered, Why do I do these things?
Likely, because of January. Because of November, too, and December, and February. Heck, March and April. By the end of May, tiny blue squill will sprinkle the greening-up grass.
But right now, color in northern Vermont is hard to come up. And the little bits of brightness — that’s gold.
The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell
— Buson
Stony Soil Vermont 