We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
— Jack Gilbert. “A Brief for the Defense”
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
Risking Delight.
Vermont
Stitch, Stitch.
As the days shorten, I appraise my woodpile. Borrow knitting needles. Read outside in my coat, the sun on my face. Our cats sprawl before the wood stove, savoring radiant feline bliss.
My brother comes to visit for my daughter’s final soccer game. Nine years of games and uniform washing, and I still don’t understand fully the rules of the game. Vs of geese cross the sky. As we idle afterwards, talking, a flock of starlings sweeps low over our heads and disappears around the school.
Back at our house, I gather my things from the car — my jacket, her gifts of balloons and chocolates, the signs her sister made. Photographs. Near sunset, the sky is a luminescent pink that will endure for a few minutes, no more. Their coach, son of glassblowers, made each of the senior girls a glass. In our kitchen, we admire my daughter’s beautiful gift. I wonder how she will fill it.
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
― Vincent Van Gogh
Mid-October.
In the night, a wild wind throws rain through my bedroom window. It’s before midnight. At twilight, the maples shimmered with a rosy-golden light, but our world has shifted. The wind’s tempestuous, shaking the storm against my house, driving away that autumn dreaminess.
The cats and I are awake. I lie on the couch, reading Ducks. Our little world has seen a proliferation of cats recently — a gray one the neighbors’ boys named Follower, a glossy black, a white-and-brown tabby, a tortoiseshell. The light on the back porch kicks on when the cats, one by one, appear, sodden, and then race off again. A raccoon sniffs my sandals I’ve left out beneath the overhang. My two cats stare through the window, mesmerized.
All night long, all day long, leaves fall. The butternut tree I planted a five years ago is skinny trunk and branch. Magnificently golden, the neighbors’ maples shed their leaves into a giant carpet. Their little boys rake and burrow. As their top branches reveal their starkness, the height of these trees soars above our houses.
October, and midday the light is tinged with sootiness as the sun bends away from my place on the earth. Whether it’s the pandemic or where I am in life, the old patterns I knew for years have splintered, fractured. To my list I write long before dawn, I add: cover the garden with leaves.
The water wheel spins
– Kawasaki Tenkō
holding up the milky way,
and then spills it out.
Voyages, Tiny & Massive.
As has been noted repeatedly in our house — the cats live in their own sleeping and dreaming schedule, small world within our world. My daughter, heading out early to work, remarks about this again.
October, and the days shorten daily. I’m awake in the dark with the full moon and a radiance of clouds passing over our house. The cats appreciate their full bowls, and I stir the wood stove’s ashes, grateful for the bone-dry wood I lay on the embers.
As I make coffee, I remember strands of a conversation I had yesterday with someone I’ve known peripherally for years. His parents met in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. We swap stories for a bit, and I tell him about my grandparents who immigrated from Romania. He spoke Hungarian as a child and later returned to the country and relearned, to an extent, his original language.
My cats oversee what I’m doing with the wood stove (proprietary as always about their heat source). The acquaintance and I mused for a bit about the loss of language in the Great American Empire, the great push for conformity. But that’s facile, too. Our ancestors lived in harder times and sought reasonable things — a steadier life, a solid home, maybe even peace.
All afternoon, I pull up frost-killed flower stalks and bury hard knots of bulbs — narcissus and crocus. My hands stain with soil. The sunlight is radiant but thin now, scant. The fatness of spring looms so distantly that these bulbs I plant don’t even seem a promise. Walking around, appraising, I note the barn needs painting. Next spring, I think. Get on it then.
…. And a quote from Laurence Bergreen’s phenomenal book Columbus: The Four Voyages.
To his Sovereigns and their ministers, it was intended as a landgrab and a way to plunder gold. Instead, it became, through forces Columbus inadvertently set in motion and only dimly understood, the most important voyage of its kind ever made.
Autumn, Moon, Small Town.
While my daughter washes the dinner dishes, I head out for coffee. That morning, I finished the last of the grounds. I pull on a sweater and cut through the back woods to the cemetery. A gibbous waxing moon hangs like a splash of cream over the cemetery and keeps me company as I cut through the elementary kids’ ballfield.
As I walk down a side street, I see the co-op below, lit in the falling twilight. Last year, the co-op moved from its tiny Main Street store — packed literally to the ceiling with stuff — to a much larger boxy grocery store around the corner. A number of years ago, the co-op quit selling bottled water after a staff member complied compelling reasons to quit. Instead, the co-op offered cups of free water. Now, the co-op sells local veggies and cheese and meat and wine and so on — and Cocoa Puffs.
As a long-term co-op shopper, I’ll simply note that people don’t know how to use this larger parking lot. For whatever reason, we keep tangling up ourselves, backing out into Route 15, nearly colliding.
In the parking lot, I stand for a moment, admiring the moon and the scent of autumn. All day, the sun has shone brilliantly, unseasonably hot, and rain will be pushing in Friday. The man who lives in the apartment across the street opens the co-op door and gestures for me to walk in ahead of him. We stand talking for a few moments about that drop-of-cream moon and how the scent of fallen leaves reminds us of childhood.
Peak Foliage, Thursday 1:35 p.m.
… or so I predict. Such a silly thing. The branches of some trees have already blown bare, others are just beginning their radiance. It’s later that the torches of tamaracks will begin.
On these stunningly beautiful autumn days, the cats and I wake early. They’re easily satisfied with a few morsels of cat food, a rub on their furry heads, a few more sticks in the wood stove. The two of them stretch on the rug before the stove, worshipping.
Daughter and I go about our day. Coffee and dishes and firewood. At night, I dream of spring peepers.
Here’s not the famous lines from Robert Frost that rattle through my mind these days. Instead, Ezra Pound:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
— Ezra Pound
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Stony Soil Vermont 