Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!
I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….
Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?
Why not?
A single day of rain has pushed up green.
As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….
This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —
— Issa
Come what may — more April snowflakes, cold rain, glittery frost in the weeds against the barn — in our corner of Vermont we’ve stepped across the line to spring.
Yesterday, in a chilly rain, my daughters and I peered beneath the pear trees and along the thicket of roses, now merely a brown tangle of prickly vines. But the earth reeked of thaw, of soil melting its cold frozen heart, releasing its mysteries of worm and grasping root.
Thaw begins not with warmth, but with the subtle gradations of less cold. And how darn good our earth smells, breathing.
Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.
— Buson
Early morning, waking my daughter for school, I see a fox through her upstairs window, dashing across the lawn, darting between the trampoline and compost pile, and disappearing behind the apple tree, down into the honeysuckle.
It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a fox, one of these brushy-tailed beauties.
I remember years ago, having a prolonged discussion with my children’s father, in a car parked at the foot of our road, down by the river. We were there so long, verbally going around and around, that the dusk settled in. Three foxes appeared from the dim landscape, weaving around our car. We sat there, watching, until that family disappeared.
Even further back, my five-year-old and I saw a silvery fox one winter afternoon. I was driving home on our back road, and we stopped. The fox leaped on a high snowbank and sat there. The day was brilliantly sunny, full of sparkling fresh snow and cold. The fox was so beautiful we might have imagined her, had both of us not seen her.
About that April is the cruelest month line…..
Wind tore around the house last night, howling. I left this morning in the dark, with clouds rushing over the waning moon. It was so early the sky was yet that deep blue, nearly black, just before dawn.
The nights are cold enough the warm house is welcome. The 12-year-old, teetering on that cusp of childhood and teenage-land, revamps her cardboard cathouse creation, from a Victorian three-story into a sprawling mansion. The cats, bored with me when I’m not feeding them, clamber excitedly through her construction zone.
April is that in-between month, too. Winter dying — hard, reluctant — the soil not loosened for planting peas. Every day is longer, the sunlight rushing headlong back to us. Bring it on!
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
I’m reading Ruth Stone in bed when my daughter comes up the stairs in her jacket and says I must go with her to look at the moon. It’s nearly eleven. We leave the younger sister sleeping with the cats, cross over the snow above my sleeping garlic, and leap the fence into the cemetery.
The moon shines like an enormous drop of cream, nearly round but not quite, waning. The two of us stand in the granite stones, over the sleeping dead, gazing up at the constellations sprawled over the dark sky, and the village below us, cupped in night-black mountains.
While my daughter sits on the ground with her camera, we talk about the landscape around us, and our family landscape. She’s so grownup now, so fully a young woman, that the terrain between us — always intimate, close — has opened like this starry sky.
On our way back, I’m tired, it’s true, and I carelessly place my Sorel boot sole on the jagged wire cresting the fence and not on the smooth bar. Carelessly, my eyes blinded with night, I ignore my own cautious worries about breaking a wrist and jeopardizing our slender livelihood. The wire snags my sole, and I fall to the cold ground at my daughter’s feet, my bare fingers in the snow. For a brief moment, the world turns upside-down, and I lie there in the beloved, beautiful moonlight, completely still.
And then life goes on. Isn’t that lesson enough? Life goes on.
Now snow falls again in ragged, loose flakes, and spring won’t hurry with my exhortations, but arrive when it will.
You have to take comfort where you can — in the nuthatches coming to the feeder, in the warmth of the wood stove, in the voices of your lovely grandchildren. You have to allow yourself to take joy.
— Ruth Stone
A sign of spring, I suppose, is small-talking with the other parents on a slushy soccer field, watching our kids in a nordic ski relay. Sure, that’s spring in Vermont, borne with the usual good-humor of nordic ski families, and well compensated by an eclectic and unbelievably delicious potluck. At how many potlucks do you find a wedge of homemade sheep’s milk blue cheese?
But a more heartening sign is breaking out the lawn chairs for afternoon in plein air studying. Note snow.
Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
— Rumi
