Hello, roses!
The day I bought this house, I realized roses bloomed beneath the dining room windows. Of all the things I scrutinized when house buying — location and purchase price and paint — I never considered these old, overgrown rose bushes. So early in the season, Japanese beetles haven’t yet set in with their hunger. The blossoms emit the sweetest fragrance, drifting around the back of the house.
Hello, gorgeous and ineffable summer.
There will never be more of summer
than there is now.
This morning, the world smells so good. With my coffee cup, I walk around the dewy garden in my bare feet. There’s weeding to be done and more sowing of seeds and plants. We’re in a long dry patch, and I’d love some rain. Every night, I water patches of my garden.
But this morning, for this moment, how good this all smells, the crickets singing, and this whole day spreading before us.
I recently remembered that, when I was a girl, I wanted to live on a farm with a blackberry thicket. I didn’t particularly want a cow, but how I lusted after fruit trees and garden rows and overgrown lilacs. Behind our house now, the wild blackberries are profuse with blossoms near that fox den.
The pandemic continues. The virus spreads. But, for now, we’re home and outside — and it’s glorious summer.
Photo by Gabriela Stanciu/Caspian Lake
In the evening, as the dusk moves in, we play hearts on the back porch, my feet wet from watering the garden. It’s dry, with no rain in the forecast but thunderstorms possibly moving in this weekend.
After dinner and dishes, before I water, the 15-year-old drives, and I sit in the passenger seat. She’s largely on her own these days while I’m at work. In the high school parking lot, I get out of the car and watch her park and back up and park again, over and over. At last, she stops and leans out the window. She’s taken an extra key and put it on her first key ring, beside our house door.
She grins at me, full of exuberance and joy. “Want a ride?” she asks, then pulls up beside me, leans over, and opens the door. “Let’s take the long way home.”
The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill.
— Eihei Dōgen
Home from work in the late afternoon, I listened to my daughter share about her last day of virtual high school. Good God. I mean, what else can I possibly say to that?
As a writer and a mother, I’m feeling up against the wall these days. Who isn’t, really?
There’s no antidote but to move on, I know, as thoughtfully as possible, while trying to be as decent and kind as possible. In my world, that includes the wordlessness of watering my garden, listening to the geese winging their way over my head from one patch of open water to another. Listening…..
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made…
— Rebecca Solnit
Photo by Gabriela Stanciu
Walking through the town woods after dinner, listening to what must be one of the loveliest sounds on the planet — the wood thrush — my younger daughter says quietly, “Cub.”
Just ahead, where we were about step into a hayfield, a small black bear wandered, sniffing. We stood for a moment, admiring, then slowly backed away and headed back through the woods.
Walking, we remarked on the proliferation of wildlife we’ve seen this spring — the cub, bald eagles, a den of enchanting fox cubs just behind our house. While the human world is fragmented, the animal world seems to be filling in those cracks, closer and closer.
In Vermont’s May, every day the world appear more and more alive — the leaves unfurled more, and the dandelions higher. Sure, invasive dandelions have their place — or the curse — in the world, but a field of dandelions? Joy — thank goodness for spring.
Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May…
At dusk — after eight, as we’re heading, day by day, towards the solstice — I sit in my daughter’s car with the windows unrolled while my girls are in the grocery store, getting just one thing but likely wandering around. The local police chief, off duty, comes out, and he and I talk about the weather and raising kids. For just a few moments, a kind of normalcy descends through that dusk, as I sit there, holding the car keys, my feet dusty from the garden on the dashboard.
The day has been an exquisite, sun-filled day, of work and gardening and dinner on the back porch. Memorial Day Saturday is generally the very busiest day of the year in our town, with a parade and fair and fireworks, but this year, it’s just the two of us in that otherwise empty parking lot, agreeing at the blessedness of this early summer.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind and on the radio an all-night country station. Nothing for me to do on this road but drive and give thanks: I'll be home by dawn.
From “Rest” by Richard Jones
Stony Soil Vermont 