Oh, ode to June in all her lovely greenery.
Remember being 19-years-old? Remember desire, desire, desire?
The summer river.
It’s happy to walk across it.
My hands with zori sandal.
—Buson
Dog River, Berlin, Vermont
Age 19
travel
Female House
The summer my second daughter was an infant, the season was particularly hot and sticky — at least in my memory it was. That summer I just didn’t do certain things — I washed clothes and probably even folded them, but I rarely put them away.
Domestic chaos? Maybe. But I knew I would never have another baby, the irreplaceable sweetness of a nursing infant in arms.
We were at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that summer with our 6-year-old for a very minor procedure, and my then-husband and I took turns walking up and down the hospital hallways with an infant. At one point, I stood swaying with my sleeping baby from foot to foot, reading the posters on the wall.
One watercolor was a purple hyacinth blossom with the words beneath: Choose joy.
When I drove away from the hospital, with all four of us, and crossed the river back into Vermont, I was so light-hearted, so happy. It was such a minor thing that had occurred, and we were all together and well.
Now that infant daughter is a teenager, the oldest daughter a young woman. Like all families, we’ve lived through the gamut of happiness and grief and rage. Every now and then, I remind myself, slow down, breathe deep, and finger the strand of life that’s joy.
You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.
— Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980
Lady Lupine
Here’s a line from a children’s picture book — my younger daughter’s favorite — You must do something to make the world more beautiful.
Last evening, I overhead the girls planning to spread lupine seeds gleaned from the flowers blooming before our house. Maybe that thousand and one readings of Miss Rumphius sowed deep, or maybe spreading these blossoms is just instinctual, part of being alive.
Photo by Molly S.
Constellations
11 at night, I’m at the high school, waiting for my daughter to return from a band/amusement park trip. The sun set hours ago, and I grab an extra sweater on the way out. It’s cold, cold enough I’m surprised I don’t see a ghostly cloud of my breath.
I get out of my car and hurry down the steep hill to the soccer field. Away from the lights in the school’s parking lot, the constellations appear, this silent beauty. I walk all the way around the field, to the far end where the woods begin. These fields, one of the most well-used places in Hardwick, are empty. On the rise of land above, I see moving car lights as parents pull in.
If the grass weren’t drenched with cold dew, I’d lie down. I remember being 19-years-old, the first year I lived in Vermont, and hiking in the middle of the night with a friend to a field. Rural Vermont, there were no human lights surrounding us at all. It was November and quite cold, but we were well-dressed and very young, and we lay down in the field and talked and talked.
I could feel the universe’s energy come up through the not-yet-frozen black earth, through the glacial pebble and tangled root, through my vertebrae and flesh, all the way up to the countless stars overhead.
Vultures/by Molly S.
Three Quarters Through the Night
It’s a bird-eat-bird world the young woman with a hawk on her arm tells the kids in my library. The kids ask question after question, from Why is the bird’s head bobbing up and down to Why is that little screech owl in such a big box?
That bird-eat-bird world is a hungry world.
Returning home, my older daughter rolls out pizza dough. The chickens have been squawking at a woodchuck running behind the barn. I eye my newly-planted garden. The younger daughter appears with six eggs in her basket. Overhead, the turkey vultures glide in spirals.
This morning, in the early dark, rain falls. I stand on the porch in the dark, listening, too early yet for even the songbirds to have risen. The darkness smells of wet earth. I think of my bean plant seedlings, their first leaves unfurling, stretching out further, drinking in this June rain.
Green, how much I want you green.
— Lorca
Farm Kids
I left early yesterday morning, giving my daughter in her bed a cat and a kiss, and heading to a rural corner of Vermont where traffic wasn’t a problem — as if traffic generally ever is in Vermont.
I was checking out a high school ag program to write about. The students were funny, a little rough around the edges, the boys joshing each other. They cheerfully answered my questions — it took nothing more than for me to ask, Tell me what you’re doing, and the kids started their stories, knowledgeable and ready to share their know-how, as farm kids often are.
The landscape in that part of Vermont spreads flatly around enormous Lake Champlain, as if there’s so much more terrain than in my mountainous part of Vermont. Driving home, I thought about those kids, one girl who was determined to be an artificial inseminator technician, another who was headed to cosmetology school, all so young, just beginning their lives. One boy struggled with a steer, tugging with all his weight on its rope. A girl came over and took the rope from his hands, said Hey, now, and the steer followed her.
I left with a dozen pepper plants from their greenhouse. I’ve buried their roots already in the last bit of open space in my garden, with a silent prayer, Thrive.
losing you
was the becoming
of myself.
rupi kaur, milk and honey
