William Blake

This week, I gave away maple leaves, small shapes of pure maple sugar. For so many years, maple was queen in my life. Maple is all taste and scent, literally the life of the tree boiled into steam or crystallized into sweetness. Both my babies, when I carried them back to the house after long afternoons-into-night of boiling had a satiny patina of maple sugar glazed on their cheeks, from condensation descending through the sugarhouse.

For years, maple was livelihood in our house, but also a gift, particularly sugar which is harder and dearer to make. For numerous reasons, this year queen maple has laid her scepter down in my household – and yet, the other day, eating crumbles of this candy, I remembered this world in a grain of amber sugar: the immense fire’s roar, the billows of steam that stretched across the road, the daughters’ play tea sets and how they chalked on the cement floor and rough wood walls – and the satisfaction in drinking good syrup.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour….

– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Woodbury, Vermont 2013

Garden antics update by Gabriela Stanciu. Perhaps this could also be titled, One Thing I Did on My Summer Vacation.

So how this all started was my mom had a giant woodchuck in her garden, and we were trying to trap it. My Grandfather said do you have any skunks around here, and my mom said no I haven’t seen any up here and I have lived up here for 17 years. So we put a banana in the trap for bait. The first couple nights we didn’t catch it. On the third night we put a melon rind in the trap. The next morning me and my mom go out to see if anything was in the trap and something was but it wasn’t a woodchuck. Guess what it was–a skunk!!!!!!!!!!! So I ran up to get my dad. He said he would be right down from his cabin so I ran back down. My mom called our friend who knows a lot about animals and he said to put a blanket over the cage and then let it out so you don’t get sprayed. Me and my grandfather were looking at Youtube to see what to do. We were going crazy because we didn’t want to get sprayed and also we didn’t want to catch a skunk. We wanted to catch a woodchuck. So then my dad came down. He got a long pole, unlatched the doors, and then opened them up. It took the skunk a little while before it went out, but it finally did, and we put the cage in a different spot.

Augueries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death…

–– William Blake

Photo by Molly S.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Maple

The Very Unexpected Experience