On the train to Florence, we strike up a conversation with a couple from Australia who are traveling with both their mothers. He’s interested in American universities and chats with my daughter about dorms and loans and degrees. He’s in banking. His wife works from home and hasn’t gone into the office in two and a half years. Sometimes, she says, she stands in the backyard and talks to the birds for company.
In Florence, our windows look over red roof tiles. Pigeons nestle in the ivy.
We leave our dear friends in Switzerland. That morning, we walked in the forest among mighty mountains with their cat.
In Italy, the trains are jammed. We enter the wrong car. In a mixture of languages, people pass luggage back and forth. Lemons bend down tree branches here. We eat creatures from the sea. Such a long way we have come, to this world of color and wisteria fragrance. Cats sun themselves on ancient stone walls.
A very long way we have traveled, the youngest daughter and me, stocking up on new sights of very old places, and now headed to dear friends.
In this enchanting, beautiful city, we drink coffee and walk until our heels are bloodied. This enormous world. On a rooftop garden, we discover a snail in a rainbow of blossoms, watch a wedding.
My father’s physical therapist tells him to keep moving. No matter what, keep moving to keep alive. My dad, thankfully, keeps moving.
My youngest and I are about to be on the move, too. We’ve left our cats and our house with competent and caring people, and are headed out for a spell. I’ll send a few photos along the way.
On the precipice of young womanhood, she’s game. And me — I’m somewhere in the Dante dark woods of what I hope will be a long life yet to come. It’s been a long pandemic, a long haul, for me, and certainly for you — for all of you reading my words.
Keep moving, keep alive in body and soul. I’ll be home to plant a bed of spring flowers.
Rainy afternoon. I wander through the neighborhood where I once considered buying a house. Someone else lives there now. With new paint and two rocking chairs on the front porch, I need a moment to recognize the house, to remember the kitchen door I went through, envisioning in those days how my life might bend.
These years, walking by, I’ve watched the vehicles’ license plates change from Maine to Vermont, a tricycle appear, a front step break, two hydrangeas expand in the front yard.
April: season of mud and rain, snow and patience. Some reasons are obvious. Snow vanishes first on south-facing slopes, but other patches around us aren’t so readily knowable. Why does snow cling to some fields and not others? Quickly running water beneath, perhaps, the softening of what our human eyes can’t see, the knowledge gained only by years of our wandering footsteps.
So it goes. April, thaw, brown to pea green.
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun…
From Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
At the co-op, the words are: dirty March. So much snow, rain, the deep ooze of mud, what feels like the very faraway promise of green. Returning home, the teenager has burned herself reading on the back deck. One cat let the other eat his dinner and yowls plaintively, furiously, at household injustice. Stove ash and common dust have invaded the house. Sunlight spills through the windows onto the floor.
March: the season of radiant joy, sullen unhappiness. I lie awake and wonder about my own private death: next week, next month, or four decades from now? I decide the only reasonable course is to bargain for forty more years on this planet, and inevitably take what comes.
Thursday, the day dawns with the scent of loosening mud. The rain slides in. Midday, redwing blackbirds.
A good day for a poem:
Flowers, by Cynthia Zarin
This morning I was walking upstairs
from the kitchen, carrying your
beautiful flowers, the flowers you
brought me last night, calla lilies
and something else, I am not
sure what to call them, white flowers,
of course you had no way of knowing
it has been years since I bought
white flowers—but now you have
and here they are again. I was carrying
your flowers and a coffee cup
and a soft yellow handbag and a book
of poems by a Chinese poet, in
which I had just read the words “come
or go but don’t just stand there
in the doorway,” as usual I was
carrying too many things, you
would have laughed if you saw me.
It seemed especially important
not to spill the coffee as I usually
do, as I turned up the stairs,
inside the whorl of the house as if
I were walking up inside the lilies.
I do not know how to hold all
the beauty and sorrow of my life.
Stony Soil Vermont 