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
As if there was any lingering doubt, yesterday’s first snowfall marked a definitive end to the swimming season. And a beginning to the Winter Boot Season.
Sitting in a meeting in Burlington, Vermont, I stare through the window at the clouds pressing low over the slate-hued lake, the snow spitting at first — flake by flake — then sprinkling like a giant basket of milkweed seeds and fluff turned upside down.
Already? I think. Winter? And in my next heartbeat, spring oddly feels not so far off. In January, of course, this will be a different story, our house banked in by snow, my hands longing to sink into the earth.
But for now, there’s just that snow silently drifting into the lake, melting.
I don’t know why it made me happy to see the pond ice over in a day,
turning first hazy, then white.
— Jane Kenyon
Pre-snow! Calais, Vermont
Here’s this in my sometimes too-much-adult world: my 14-year-old and her friends have been diligently doing odd jobs for weeks now — stacking wood, planting bulbs, painting, and raking leaves.
She showed me a photo today of herself and the friend she’s known for years leaping backwards into an enormous pile of leaves they’d raked. I sure hope the homeowner laughed as hard as I did.
We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.
— Robert Bly
We’re at the Burlington airport at four in the morning, in a rainy darkness, in that discombobulated airport way — where the everyone in town seems to be at the airport and then, outside, it’s just me and my teen driving through intersections amped down to blinking lights.
The way is familiar, but the night is so solid — and, honestly, I’m so tired — that we might be in upper New York state for all I know, and not Vermont, or maybe wandered farther away, all the down to mountainous Virginia.
The commuter traffic begins only as we’re nearly home. Then, with still an hour and a half before high school starts for the day, my daughter walks around the house, doing this, that, and finally stares at me on the couch. I close my lap and ask simply, Yes?
She looks out the window where the dawn is trying mightily hard to push away some of the dusk. Wanderlust, I see. There’s nothing more to say.
“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”
— Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (elegantly written by a former border patrol officer — I can’t recommend this book enough)
Photo by Molly B.
My oldest daughter texts me early this morning — she’s driven through slush to get to work. And so it begins, the snowy season. The days already burn low, dim by late afternoon. It’s Not the Swimming Season.
To counteract, I contemplate potatoes. Sausage and potato pie? I ask my youngest. Cook together?
Having lived in New England for most of my life, this side of the stick season is familiar to me, intimately so. During Saturday’s sunny afternoon, I coil up the garden hose, pull weeds from the garden, play soccer with my girl, then lie on the grass while she samples bitter apples.
My father sends good news — it’s Arkhipov Day — a celebration of a man who served humanity and not the nation-state. Read details here.
After a day of one thing after another, we suddenly arrive back at home together — my older daughter returning from a 12-hour shift, my teenager and a friend dropped off by another mother. I stand in the driveway talking with this mother, while my daughter runs in the house and hurries back with a gift of eggs from her chickens.
The little neighbor boys, munching dropped apples, wander over full of pleasure and wonder at seeing us, as only four- and two-year-old are. What are you doing? they ask. An existential question, I whisper to my friend. The teenagers are ravenous and cannot stop talking. Leftovers, I suggest. Put the leftovers in the oven for dinner.
Later, the girls have disappeared into the dark. I leave a sinkfull of dirty dishes and sit outside beneath the crescent moon. The neighbors have put their children to bed. It’s just me and the crickets and that autumn chill creeping in. Over the horizon, the sky turns a dark-turquoise shade of blue to impermeable black. Beneath this, the girls run up the road, out of breath, laughing.
In this autumn,
Why I get older?
The clouds and birds.
—Basho
Photo by Molly S.
Stony Soil Vermont 