My daughter, nearly 14, criticizes most photos I take of her, although digital image is proliferate around these kids.
On the morning the crocuses bloomed, the garlic emerged, and the chickens trundled around the side of the barn, girl and trampoline.
Look very closely:
only impermanence lasts.
The floating world, too, will pass.
— Ikkyū Sojun
On this unsurpassable, sunny, snow-melting April afternoon, I prop open the library door and stand on the walk. My patrons — a teenage boy, a near retirement age woman — stand there with me, the three of us collectively thinking, what the fuck?! about this winter — as if a months-long temper tantrum has just passed by.
The school field is still a foot-rich with snow.
Later, as the evening cools, I walk through the crusty patches of remaining snow behind the house, discover there’s a patch of the garden open where I may plant my pea seeds.
I’m back in the cemetery, in my own sacred spot in this town. From the crest, I see the Dollar General with its faux brick and Woodbury Mountain, where bear live. Someone in the trailer park nearly concealed in a hollow is burning something, and smoke rings the mountain’s base. Overhead, a hawk catches an air current so fine the raptor sails out of my sight without a single flap of its wing.
The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill.
— Eihei Dōgen
spring kid crafts
I’ve been knitting the same three balls of yarn over and over in different patterns for months now — perhaps a silly amount of time. I’ve knit half a vest, decided the shaping was off, abandoned that vest, begun a sweater whose gauge I never measured correctly, unraveled that and began again.
Sometimes at night, as I say good night to my daughters, I wonder about this day we’re closing our eyes to — and maybe this illuminates nothing more than my own crazy mind — but that day’s gone, over.
So many of my parenting days when the girls were young, I greeted the night with relief — the chance to close my eyes and be still. But there’s no re-dos on life, no taking apart and casting on again. That’s obvious maybe — that my life is not a ball of yarn to knit and knit — but those obvious things can be so difficult.
Hence, this early morning, gifted with a few more inches of wet white snow, I’m in my bare feet on the back porch, listening to the wind chimes, for the robins’ first clear notes of the long day ahead.
...It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing...
From Jack Gilbert’s “Horses at Midnight Without a Moon” — a short spring poem well worth the read…
I’m nearly sure to lose our household bet of what date the garden will be freed of snow — our variation of “ice out” on the lakes. I’ve picked Monday, April 15, both tax day and the anniversary of Lincoln’s death.
April’s the season of running water in Vermont, the carrying off of snow to Lake Champlain. Nature’s licked us — once again proving the futility of competition, industrial revolution notwithstanding.
On our evening walk up a nearby dirt road, snowmelt reveals a winter’s worth of Bud light cans. We see three deer, maple trees stitching together the sky and the great hayfields brown and drying in the spring breezes. Spring, going about its business.
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
The snow’s back, keeping the population in Hardwick predictably low.
This time of year is both ugly and tantalizing — the trash bleeding up, the tree buds fattening, robins chittering. And yet, the snow lies ubiquitous.
What else would we complain about? a friend asks at a middle school concert. We sit in the very back row — she and her husband, myself and my knitting I take out of my bag, but no further. Quickly, we’re laughing, giggling, silly, admiring our middle school daughters, intrigued at their age and maybe a little afraid — so new, so new; everything about adolescence shrieks of heading over the nest’s carefully mudded wall.
Often, I think of Robert Frost’s line: In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. So it does. But, like anyone, I’d prefer life to go on better, rather than worse. So, perhaps, grousing about the weather is nothing.
Despite the snow, the lakes have opened up. The herons are back, their great wings cutting across the gray sky.
What I’m thinking of….
On this spongy, springy April day, may Fortuna smile a little more warmly on northern Vermont…..
With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious.
— Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
Stony Soil Vermont 