fall 
fall In our century-old farmhouse on five acres, we live with blessings bestowed by the old-timers who carved out a homestead from a verdant but harsh environment.
Without central heating, vinyl siding, or air conditioners, the old-timers found other ways to minimize the impact of the elements. They used common sense and weather wizardry with wisdom arising from their connection to the land.
Our house sits sideways to the road, an oddity to my suburban-bred sensibilities. The people of the land were more discerning than housing development designers. Situated as it is, the narrower side of the house meets the buffeting north wind—an asset I appreciate anew each December.
The front of the house overlooks an open meadow to the east. The back faces west, where the brook borders the forest. As the summer sun gathers afternoon intensity, the natural air-conditioning of water and woods insulates us from the heat. In the bare-branched winter, the house is warmed by the morning sun rising across the open meadow and by unshaded afternoon sunshine.
In the environmentally conscious 1970s, architects and builders began advertising house designs that make the most of the lay of the land, a trend that continues today. They tout such energy-efficient consciousness as if they’ve discovered a new science. North Country old-timers were way ahead of them.
When we first bought our house, I suffered from the arrogance of a “modern” mind. Certain odd, old-fashioned elements were immediately “improved.” Some of the things we changed would have been better left alone. Through the seasons, I have come to understand that the rhymes and rhythms of an era past provide comfort and practicality.
I live amid a rich legacy of people before me who were poets of the land, and I have learned to listen.
The stereotype of simple, slow-speaking, slow-moving country hicks resistant to change belies a deeper, more enduring truth. The test of time is essential in a climate that tries the mettle of body and soul, in a region where wealth has always been abundant in nature and scarce in dollars.
I live with the ghosts of people who daily turned their hands to a range of tasks you’d need an army of carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, and home designers to perform today. They pondered and puttered, contemplated and cobbled together a life against all odds. And they held it together with forbearance beyond the reckoning of later generations, who have been nursed on the milk of instant gratification.
I am not unhappy to be haunted by these ghosts. In beam and barn board they teach me still, though they have long since been laid to rest.
My soul has been touched by their spirit, and my heart sings that it is so.
We live on the edge of wildness.
I was hanging out clothes on the back porch when I caught a glimpse of something brown slinking through the woods. Though camouflaged by underbrush, the creature was clearly too small to be a deer, too large to be a fox. I suspected it was a coy dog or coyote.
As I peered in vain to get a clear view through the dense, green, leafy screen across the brook, I felt as if I was being watched. A sentry was patrolling his territory, keeping an eye on me—an intruder on his turf.
Sitting down among the flapping towels, I gazed out at the woods sweeping around the back of our house. I felt the force of its secret life.
We think we own this land. We think we are at the center of life here, but we merely hold small spaces against the tide of wilderness around us. Anyone who has cleared a piece of land in the North Country and tried to keep it open knows this well.
An aerial photographer once took pictures of our home and came by to sell them to us. From his bird’s-eye view, the clearings around our house and our neighbors’ homes were small interruptions in an expanse of field and forest.
As we go about the business of our days, it is easy to forget this. Wrapped in our cloak of Homo sapiens self-importance, it is easy to deafen ourselves to the whispers in the woods. Easy to ignore animal trails and burrows in the labyrinthine landscape we inhabit.
Sometimes we are unpleasantly reminded. We’ve lost three cats in nearly as many years. Healthy felines who simply went out and never came back. No furry corpses on the roads nearby, but coyotes scream in the night.
The dogs slip away from the discipline of our domain and return from their foray into the forest with faces full of porcupine quills.
Sometimes we are pleasantly reminded. One night, I find a large dragonfly on the screen door. It is so absolutely still, I wonder if it is dead. Iridescent wings fully spread, green-eyed head glittering in the porch light. I examine it in detail, then carefully open the door, slip inside, and get my camera. It is unmoved by my return, faces the flash without flinching. Come daylight, it is gone.
I awake early one morning and step quietly outside under lightening, predawn skies. A deer and I surprise each other as it munches on flowers just beyond my door. It is the tallest deer I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it just stretched its neck in our unexpected encounter, but in the flick of time before it flees, my impression is all long legs and height like a baby giraffe. With a flip of white-tailed alacrity, it turns and gallops down the yard, drumming hooves thundering after it is out of sight.
We live on the edge of wildness.
When the power went off during a spectacular storm last week, I filled a room with candles. Neil and I then sat back to watch the show.
Bolts of lightning were so silver-blue you had to quickly shut your eyes. Pink sheet lightning illuminated the whole sky like dawn’s early light. Crashing explosions of thunder rocked our house to its foundations.
The animals gathered around. They don’t like storms and huddle close or follow us from room to room should we rise. Their fear reminds me of my own childhood storm trembling. I remember my grandfather reassuring me that the fearsome thunder was only God bowling.
“That was a strike,” he’d say, nodding sagely at an especially shattering round. Just as Granddaddy intended, I would be distracted from my fear, my imagination casting images of the Divine Bowling Alley.
It takes a lot of candles to barely light a room. But the soft golden glow quiets me from the inside out. The television is just a big black box, two flames reflected in its inky depths. The refrigerator does not hum.
Sitting in the tranquil radiance, I find myself envying my pre-electricity forebears. Without live current running through the wires, the house seems serene to its very core.
Disconnected, I feel my breathing slow. A restfulness steals through me like the luxuriant laziness of a leisurely soak in a warm bath. Despite the roar of thunder and crack of lightning, the haloed flames bestow peace.
We do not speak much, Neil and I, as we watch the wild night from our gently illumined room. An “ooh” or “ahh” at an especially wondrous display. A crooned phrase for a startled beast. And yet, we commune more intimately than words would allow.
Then the power surges on. The house leaps to life. Light-bulbs flare. The water pump resounds from the basement, echoing through the ductwork. Plugged in again, my pulse quickens with the call to action.
The candles fade, their magic lost in the glare. Edges are sharp. I see dirty spots on the carpet. The papers stacked on the kitchen table are in clear view. The refrigerator hums.
I rise with a sigh to blow out the candles. But somehow, instead, I turn off the lights. I return to the couch. Neil smiles. A shocking pink bolt splits the sky.
“Ooooooh,” we breathe together.
Rumbling above, a tumultuous roll of thunder. The dogs look up at us, deep concern reflected in their eyes. I reach down to pat furry heads …
“Don’t worry,” I say softly. “It’s only God bowling.”
The thermometer on my back porch registered below sixty at noon today. The sun broke through the clouds occasionally … brief, bright blessings in the early-September gloom.
Summer is passing. The cats come in at night now, as if to reassure themselves of their permanent place at hearth and home. Feline affection quotients rise in direct proportion to the drop in temperature.
Nestled among all the other still-green trees, one young maple on our land is always the first to turn. Today I notice its foliage is fuchsia, a shocking pink more shocking amid calmer cousins still wearing their summer clothes.
This tree is a leafy messenger, the herald of days to come. Of hillsides in Crayola colors, wanton in a wild dying beauty, the prelude to snow and cold and mud. The messenger carries a heavy burden.
But this is the time between. No longer summer, not yet truly fall, and today I saw the leaves dancing.
Summer leaves do not dance. Warm summer breezes rustle the leaves. Air wafting through the woods sounds like the distant rush of an ocean’s ebb and flow. Summer storms tear through trees, flailing whole branches, tipping treetops in trunk-shuddering groans like muscles protesting unaccustomed exercise. The leaves go mad with movement.
But today, in this time between, I saw the leaves dance. On tranquil trees, each leaf twitched and twittered, turning and twisting, quickening on quiet branches. A flock of leaves, like birds fluffing their feathers with shivers of motion.
If leaves could be said to be excited, today they were beside themselves with glee.
At my kitchen sink, I stopped mid-dish at the sight. Watching, I felt the delight of a child when the circus comes to town. In the rush of joy, the heaviness borne by the glorious messenger tree was lifted from me. In that moment, the “before the snow flies” agenda I’d begun to cart around was suspended.
The awareness of the cycle of seasons can be comforting—winter will come and go and once again fold into summer—but focusing on the future can also be a burden.
The dance of leaves reminds me that this time between is a season unto itself. With its own gifts and glories, a time with more to offer than the countdown to festive foliage. This time offers more than a winter preparation period, more than summer’s last gasp. Neither summer nor fall, this time between does not even have a name to call itself. But as I watched leaves dancing, I resolved to honor it. I will not surrender this time to summer regrets, fall’s promise, or winter’s intimidation.
I will dance with the leaves the time between.
If you missed last week’s column, you don’t know the details of my Labor Day fall. Suffice it to say, I’m still laid up with a badly sprained ankle and assorted aches.
I’m talking on the phone a lot, at all hours. My local friends keep me company throughout the day; the night shift is shared with my California friends. That three-hour West Coast difference is a blessing in my sleepless crippled state.
Given my fresh empathy for the lame and halt, I’m ready to launch a grassroots movement demanding drastically reduced phone rates for the housebound. Phone conversations are not a luxury when you’re shut in. Healing is directly proportional to one’s sanity, and whispering to the walls is not conducive to recovery.
But I digress.
I have a friend in San Diego who loves North Country anecdotes. Bob says they give him comfort, reassurance that somewhere life goes on with a personal quality absent from the fast-paced, bureaucratic detachment of his city. One ankle-aching night, I told him one of my favorite small-town stories.
We’d forgotten to renew the dogs’ licenses. If you miss the deadline, you pay a fine. I happened to run into Marsha, our town clerk, and she got this faraway look in her eyes. Then she said, “You haven’t been in to register Devin and Teddy, have you?” I thanked her and later that day scuttled down to her office to do so.
“Unheard of,” Bob breathed reverently. Then he paused. “You know your town clerk’s name?” he marveled.
Then he paused again.
“Your town clerk knows your dogs’ names?” he exclaimed. When I relayed his response to Marsha, his appreciation struck a spark in us. A warm, fuzzy pride. The glimpse from Bob’s outside view renewed our awareness of a simple fact …
Everywhere ain’t here. Remember the old television show Cheers? It was a hit because people loved the idea of going to a public place “where everybody knows your name.” Here, we have whole towns like that.
People do complain about small-town life. Everybody knows your business (and talks about it, too). There’s a sense of confinement and restriction in the midst of such small circles. Granted. But sometimes, familiarity is a good thing.
Like this week … My laptop went into hissy fits again, while I was on deadline, of course. The nice folks at Woodsville’s Paige Computer made an emergency house call, no extra charge, because they knew I couldn’t drive.
Bob will love that one.
Given the mess the world’s in, I can’t help but wonder what a difference it would make if we knew our adversaries’ names … and their dogs’ names, too.
It is September, and one morning it was forty outside but we didn’t turn the furnace on. Never mind what the indoor temperature was, or that I saw my breath in the basement where I foolishly ventured to do morning laundry.
We didn’t turn the furnace on because this is Vermont and this is September and it just isn’t done.
We refuse to turn on the heat, as do many Vermonters. No matter that a couple of months from now we would no more let our thermostats drop below sixty than we would strip in public.
It’s September. No self-respecting Vermonter will give in to the weather.
Turning on the furnace or firing up the woodstove for the first time is an act of surrender not taken lightly by hardy North Country folk. Forget Labor Day: Heating the house is the defining moment when summer ends. Until then, we bask in the afternoon heat and pretend the chilly mornings and evenings don’t mean what we know they mean.
Turning on the heat is an admission that the seasons have shifted. Winter stalks us for real.
Then there’s the winter wimp issue. Can you take it when the air turns chill? How cold can you get before you give in? Get used to it. It’s going to get a lot colder than this. If you give in now and turn on the heat, how will you cope when it really gets cold? This is Vermont machismo, practiced equally by both genders.
If you do break down and turn on the heat in early September, you would never admit it in public, possibly not even to your closest friends. Doing so would entail a terrible loss of face. Your friends may also be shivering and burying themselves under not-yet-aired quilts, but if you admit to turning on the heat, they will never let you hear the end of it.
Twenty years later, you would be known around town as the-one-who-turned-on-the-furnace-in-September.
It is acceptable to complain about pulling out blankets, sweaters, and sweatpants. From morning to night, the weather dances from fall to summer to fall. You may grouse about this awkward time of the year when fall and summer clothes clutter closets and drawers.
But turn on the furnace you must not.
Having been steeped in this tradition by my native North Country neighbors for twenty years, I was stunned this week when two of my multigenerational, dyed-in-the-green Vermont friends admitted they’d turned on the heat.
The first confessor said so with a defiant lift of her chin, as if challenging her ancestors with every word.
The second apologetically explained she’d built a fire “just to take the chill off.” (Not to actually heat the house, mind you, just to take the chill off.) But as we talked about this defiance of Vermont tradition, she gave me a sideways smile and said, “You know, as I get older, I care less about that, and more about being warm.”
They say wisdom comes with age. It also comes with a little help from the cold.
The fine summer weather we were denied in strings of rainy, humid days is now bestowed upon us in September. For several days, the sun has shone with the special golden glow of this time when leaves begin to turn. The wind is summer-warm. Absent is the chill kiss of winter to come.
I have been torn between pleasures. There is the joy of staying at home, windows and doors thrown open in a sweet orgy of fresh air made more delicious by winter whispers stalking my thoughts.
But there is also the impulse to jump in the car, crank the windows down, and hit the road. I ache to be out. Drunk with the wine of wanderlust served in goblets of crystal sunshine, spiced with the bouquet of changing leaves’ enchantment, I cannot sit still.
So I have alternated my pleasures, puttering through chores at home and venturing abroad to accommodate the wild whims born of these startling September days.
One home day, I was running washer-dryer marathons to the basement. While blankets flapped on the clothesline, I went out into the meadow to gaze at the distant mountains. Sitting in the emerald grass, arms hugging my knees, I became aware of white wings flitting through the green around me.
I held my breath and held still.
White butterflies. The small angelic creatures flew, came to rest, and flew again. Perhaps a dozen of them, pristine wings lighting on blades of grass and leafy bushes. They performed a dance of flight, punctuations of purity on the good green earth.
Enchanted by their ethereal presence, my eyes burned with gathering tears of wonder. I am, perhaps, a hopelessly sentimental sap … beauty often moves me to tears. When words fail in the face of grace, tears speak.
Butterflies are rich in lore, legend, and metaphor. In some traditions they are symbols of divine inspiration. They are also recognized as totems for Nature herself. Because of their caterpillar-to-winged-creature transformation, in many cultures butterflies symbolize the process of creation.
The Aztecs believed butterflies were the happy dead who visited living relatives to assure them all was well.
I do not know which message the butterflies meant to bring. Were they whispering blessings? Or were Mom and Dad dropping by to say hi?
I do not know. It is enough that they came, like fairies dancing on the wind.
It is a sweet vision to hold close for darker times—the day the white butterflies came to me.
Someone is stealing our rocks.
I don’t think this theft is destined for or worthy of headline news, but isn’t it a puzzling bit of human behavior?
There’s an old stone wall up on piece of our land beyond sight of the house. It draws the southwestern boundary of our property, and is a monument to farmers who once made more of the land than we ever will.
Like many old stone walls, only a shadow of its former glory remains. More rock pile than wall now, it whispers reminders of the practical, artistic genius who built a rhythm of stones outlining the land.
I suspect the wall was built to keep cows out of an orchard. Amid thorny puckerbrush, some ancient trees still bear fruit, though only deer gather the harvest now.
The end of the wall comes near a dirt road and it is there, while walking the dogs, we noticed that someone has been stealing the stones.
Like a small bomb crater, earth naked, the depression where a rock had lain was immediately obvious. No small stone this. Its footprint was some two feet wide, almost a foot deep. A quick check confirmed a rock of that size was nowhere to be seen. It had not merely rolled away. It was gone.
Who would steal a stone, and why? Who would mar the rhythm of the old wall’s fallen rhyme?
In a world where so much is beyond our influence—screaming headlines and petty politics—the poetry of old stones soothes our sensibilities. The song of stones is patience, endurance. Of time measured in earth cycles, not sound bites. Of things that last, even as they tumble.
The stones stand, even as they sink deeper into the earth. Though covered with lichen, past their purpose, still their anthem rings, a hymn of human need married to nature’s gifts.
The stones stand, and I am reminded that rocky obstacles in the field can be put to good use. Reminded that beauty can be wrought from practical need.
The stones stand and I believe.
Steal my stones, and still I will believe.
No matter how cranky or distracted, everyone I know pauses amid life’s trials and tribulations to appreciate the beauty of foliage season.
Many North Country natives would rather give up hunting season than publicly admit their cantankerous home turf has a natural beauty that makes living here worthwhile. But these days, even they are walking around like kids with a Christmas-morning look in their eyes.
Familiarity may breed contempt, but when the trees perform their fall magic tricks, it doesn’t matter how many seasons you’ve witnessed the transformation. Every year nature paints the trees in utterly unique compositions. I’ve heard grizzled, taciturn old-timers rejoice over reds, and have listened to reverent reflections on the ratio of gold to orange.
Unlike winter weather discussions, foliage critiques don’t compare past with present. Natives will say, “There’s never been a winter like the one of …,” but I’ve never heard anyone insist that one long-past fall puts all others to shame.
This is a region where people have memories an elephant would envy. A place where the present is measured by the yardstick of how-things-used-to-be and generally found wanting. But fall sprinkles a twinkling of foliage fairy dust, enchanting people into pure appreciation of the present.
When the wonderment of leaves is accompanied by startling-bright, summer-warm days, people are downright giddy. They meet and greet and chatter uncharacteristically, silly grins on normally reserved North Country countenances.
“How ’bout this?” they babble. “Isn’t this something?”
In some ways, fall magic is better than Christmas. There are no presents to ponder and purchase, no big meals to plan and cook, no enforced intimacy with people one might not otherwise choose to sit down with. The gifts are free, require no wrapping, and are always a delightful surprise.
Those of us who live in the North Country are privileged to witness the full range of fall’s glory. It is a present that continues to unwrap itself—from the first leaf that turns, through ending days when leaves fly thicker than snowflakes in a blizzard. Visitors get a snapshot … one scene in a panorama of beauty. For them, it’s like seeing only one part of a movie. They might catch the thrill of the opening, interesting plot twists in the middle, or the exciting conclusion.
But only we get the whole adventure.
Fall is, no doubt, breathtaking to visitors, but every time I see a busload of leaf-peepers, I can’t help feeling sorry for them.
I’m sure the foliage is worth the trip from places where nature doesn’t throw this annual extravagant party. But it can’t compare to watching the trees put on their daily show of ever-changing hues.
“You are so blessed to live here,” a recent visitor told me in dulcet tones of undisguised envy.
I opened my mouth to catalog the vicissitudes of winter, the limitations of life in the country, then closed it again.
“Yes,” I finally said with a smile. “I am.”
In those glorious days last week when summer kissed fall good-bye, I began cleaning out the gardens.
I had modest ambitions. The sedum was in full magenta flower. The asters called bees to their spiky blooms. But in my gardens run rampant, these beauties were crowded by their dead and dying neighbors. I wanted to clear space around their final fall vibrancy.
There is something pathetic about summer flowers gone by. Bee balm stalks still stand straight and true, but their naked brown heads evoke memories of butterflies long gone.
The thistle’s blue has passed its prime, sharp-edged leaves faded and wilted. Stalwart soldiers of the garden, they are battle-worn and silvered like old vets valiantly marching on parade.
Messiest are the daylilies. Green leaves tangle with crisp, brown, twisting dead threads and yellow strands. The once-proud stalks on which blooms bragged bright orange are now rigid, beige hollow tubes.
It is hard to honor my initial ambitions. I find myself working stretches far from the sedum and asters … Getting down into the rich, bare earth is deeply satisfying. I rip at invading myrtle. The loamy scent of damp soil is a musky perfume. Hypnotic.
When I was decades younger, I could clear a length of garden in a day. Now my knees scream.
I am not a total fool, however. I take frequent breaks, facing the woods where maples glow in yellow-gold-orange profusion. The trees are backlit by the late-afternoon sun. I am awash in a sea of golden radiance as the wind moves through the leaves like a gently rushing tide.
It would take a better poet than I to capture the smell of raw earth and leaves already composting on the grass, spiced by the pungent bergamot of newly cut bee balm. Such a heady mix, enough to drive a perfumer mad. Worth a fortune if bottled for the winter comfort it would give.
When I have done all I can do, I step back to survey my work outside the wall that runs along the road. Stripped to bare earth in some places, the long garden sports lingering green in others, and one tall stalk standing like an exclamation point.
It is a lone hollyhock.
Somehow, through the first frost and hard fall rains, a single pink flower trumpets from the top of the stalk.
Its bloom delicate, the blossom sings of summer. A frill in contrast with the sedum’s chunky heads and the asters’ spiky petals.
Pink and frivolous, she chimes fairy notes against the earth tones of fall.
She dances on the swaying stalk, gleefully defiant, playful. Days later, when the rain comes and wind blows the golden sea from the trees, she remains.
What garden magic this is, a sparkling touch from summer’s wand.
We need a new well. After a long dry summer, we’re certainly not alone. As we wait for the well drillers to fit us into their busy schedule, we count our blessings. The old dug well—down the hill, across the brook, and in the woods—hangs on with some twenty-nine inches of water. It’s paper plates and quick showers at our house, but the toilets are still flushing.
It is the end of an era.
Our house was built in 1840. We suspect the well is as old as the house, and that’s not just our opinion. Some years back, a mason came to repair the brick above ground level. “Haven’t seen one like this,” he said. “Has to be over a hundred years old.” The plumber agrees.
For a city boy and a suburban girl, it is a strange and awesome thing to have a well. Growing up, we never thought much about water. Turned on the tap and there it was. We were not country kids. We made no connection between rainfall and the water we used.
Living with a dug well brought us into an intimate relationship with nature. Many’s the summer we’ve prayed for rain. Walking in the woods always included a side trip; we’d lift the heavy well cover and check the water level. Respecting natural resources comes easily when you watch your water source change—you see the need to adjust your consumption.
We have felt closer to the land because of this.
Our dug well also brought dowsers into our lives. Go ahead and laugh, disbelievers. But several years back, when we were down to only eighteen inches of water, a dowser diverted a new vein into the well. We watched the water come up to ground level over the next two (rainless) days. That fix held steady for years.
When this summer’s dry days stretched on, the water level dropped to about four inches. Another dowser came, diverted another vein that raised it to the present twenty-nine inches—enough to limp along. But, he said, that’s as good as it will get because there is no other “mother lode” vein to feed the well.
“The veins are old and tired,” he said.
When the well drillers set their bit to the ground, it will be in a dowser- recommended spot.
Once upon a time, some settlers trooped out into the woods, located the source, and dug that well—with picks and shovels, no doubt. We are awed by the fact that, more than a century later, their labor has sustained us for all these years.
So we’re a little sad at the end of this era. Sentimental about breaking our link to the past. We won’t miss dry-season, water-watchdog routines, and a worry-free water supply will be a luxury. But an artesian well will bring an elemental change to the old homestead.
After more than a hundred years of service, the dug well deserves to retire. “The water veins feeding it are old and worn,” the dowser said. That’s easy to believe.
But we let her go with sad gratitude. We tip our caps to the old-timers whose labors served us long after they were gone … They gave us more than water.
I know I should be counting my blessings, and I am … but not without a few grumbles tossed in.
Out of Lyndonville, the good men from Goulds came. They delicately positioned a humongous drilling rig between our house, the rock wall, and the crab apple tree as if it were a Volkswagen bug neatly tucked into a tight parking spot. The drill shaft towered above our two-story home, with mere inches of clearance between it and the eaves.
The artistry of men and big rigs is a wonder to behold.
There’s something very special, too, about talking with men about work they love. John Gould and his son (also named John) revealed the mysteries of water. They spoke of slate and shale, granite and quartz, and the geological reasons why water pools where it does.
I cannot remember all the details. What I remember is the animated way they talked, their enthusiastic fascination with their craft. I remember son John’s almost affectionate description of his quartz collection—jars of jewels from the earth, rainbows of rock.
The Goulds were receptive to the advice of our dowser, Dave Royer of Orleans. “I’ve seen ’em hit it right on, I’ve seen ’em be totally wrong,” the elder John said. The exact well location was determined through a harmonious blend of Dave’s arcane art of dowsing from a distance, Neil’s and my on-site dowsing, and the Goulds’ technical know-how.
Dave said we’d find seven gallons a minute below two hundred feet, but above three hundred. At 260, we hit six gallons a minute.
Everyone was happy.
Before the Goulds could install the pump and run water into the house, they were called to answer a water emergency. Our old well was giving us enough to hang on, so we didn’t begrudge the delay while they responded to the needs of the waterless. But for four days, our yard looked like a mini-strip-mining operation—complete with slag piles and yawning pits of scummy water.
We were grateful when they returned. Finally, after two days of flushing brown and heavily chlorinated water through our pipes, I’m happily doing long-delayed laundry at home, with nary a worry about the well. I’m savoring the new quiet of a water pump buried deep in the earth rather than loudly resonating from our basement.
But we’re surrounded by a moat of mud, from the north end of the house, up our driveway, and along the full length of the front yard. It’s going to be a looong winter. We’ll be hoping for deep snows. Otherwise, it will be months of mucky dog paws and mire tracked into the house.
Change is not neat and tidy. If you dig deep, you’re going to make a mess. The alternative is to limp along with an antique well long past its prime.
Better to get down to deep waters, where the flow is fresh, pure, and plentiful.
Living off the beaten path in the North Country makes Halloween a chancy affair. Some years we get a clutch of kids. Other years there have been none. But still, every year I buy candy in hopeful anticipation … and with practicality.
I always choose candies I like. I may have to eat them.
As Halloween looms, I feel like a kid when Christmas approaches—all aflutter to catch a glimpse of Santa or hear reindeer on my roof. Not knowing what gifts might appear makes pre-Christmas the most magical time. Anything, everything is possible. With delight, I imagine each prospect in delicious detail.
It is in this spirit that I await Halloween. What might show up at my door? Fairies? Bums? Witches or princesses? Ghosts, goblins, or gory ghouls?
The young ones are so cute, tripping over hastily hemmed costumes. They often turn shy at my door, but I’ve heard their boisterous laughter as they scamper back down my driveway. Excitement barely repressed—they’re out at night!
Some Halloweens are bitter cold and snowy. Little ballerinas arrive wrapped for warmth, gauzy tutus peeking out of winter coats. Earmuffs snuggle under princesses’ tiaras.
I was once visited by an infant mouse swaddled in a fuzzy cocoon, held in Mother’s arms. Wide-eyed with whiskers delicately drawn on baby skin … we’re never too young for fun.
Nor are we ever too old. Some parents play along with their kids. From a simple witch’s hat to Broadway-elaborate creations, grown-ups bring their thrills to my door.
Teenagers come with a swagger declaring they’re just out for a lark, but their eyes shine with a child’s joyous spark. You’re not fooling me, I want to whisper. I know some of your friends must say it’s not cool—but I’m glad you’re not letting them make the rules.
Some years I lined up my pumpkins, turned on the outside lights, and did not see one trick-or-treater throughout the lonely night. It’s the silliest thing, but I feel so sad … as if I missed a party the other kids had. I don’t care how much candy I get to eat—the evening is empty of the very best treat.
I console myself with chocolate, but I only want more … I want the night’s magic that didn’t stop at my door.
So next year, please put on your costumes and come to my house … I’d even be happy with one baby mouse.
At the edge of the meadow beyond our house stand two ancient apple trees. The bark of each is nearly black, and rough like the leathered skin of lifetime farmers too much in the sun.
The trees are not graceful. Dead and gnarled branches reach skeletal arms in all directions and clack in the wind, as if possessed … haunted creatures from a Stephen King story.
The apples grow on high, impossibly out of reach. Gravity plucks them for us, tossing them to the cushioned, grassy ground.
Every other year, the trees bear beautifully. Ankle-deep in apples, we stumble amid the windfall. We choose the best, leaving for wildlife those already sampled by deer. They seem to nibble once and move on, shopping for the sweetest spot among the lot.
Like the trees that bear them, the apples are flawed. Often oddly shaped, always blemished and bruised from their rough harvest. Many have a small circle of exposed flesh, as if some tiny insect has sampled a delicate bite.
If these imperfect apples were stacked in a store, I would pass them by. I would be indignant at the notion that I should pay good money for such unattractive specimens. But at home, I happily gather them in the morning, still cold from the ground.
Peel away the blemishes and the bruises are shallow, easily sliced off. Where insects have sampled, there is no trace. Once I have done my magic with the knife, what remains is white, unflawed fruit.
If beauty is only skin-deep, then so, too, are many defects and deformities.
Beneath their unattractive exterior, the apples present a gift. Untouched by chemicals, untrucked and safely stored in nature’s night-cool refrigerator, this backyard bounty offers a taste and vibrant freshness that triumphs over their perfect brethren.
I do not know what kinds of apples fall from our trees. I suspect they are old-time species that do not lend themselves to mass cultivation. One is dark ruby and neither soft nor firm. It is sweet, but with a slight tang. The other is pale with red streaks, tart and crisp. Even in California where I’ve encountered apples I’ve never seen elsewhere, none are like ours.
Apple growers are not to blame. They must produce what the market will bear, and even I have arrogantly demanded perfect apples when money is laid down.
This makes me wonder what trade-offs we make for perfection.
If there were blemished apples in our stores, would children still diet themselves into ill health and request nose jobs for Christmas?
Would we vote for the politician with the best ideas instead of the best hair?
Would bald men stop spending a fortune for hair transplants?
Would women find happiness with bodies that take shape naturally and turn away from the surgeon’s knife?
A heavy burden of thought to lay upon a simple apple, perhaps. But my mind does wander as I peel my imperfect apples.
One day recently, there was a commotion just beyond our house. Up at the corner where the dirt road leads down to Marsha and Fremont’s farm, a bunch of trucks had gathered and men were milling around.
The dogs went berserk, as they do when anyone crosses the invisible canine boundaries that mark their territory. Barking and growling, they ran from kitchen to living room, then sped through the house rounding up their human charges to defend the homestead.
Neil and I came from opposite ends of the house. We met in the middle amid the flying fur of boisterous beasts. On our way to the kitchen rendezvous, we noticed the peaceful assembly at the corner.
We were not alarmed. But to settle the dogs down, the clan must gather. We must look out the windows, acknowledge the interlopers, praise the sentries’ vigilance, and finally tell the troops they can stand down.
As we performed the obligatory window watch, Neil and I could not at first see why the men and machines had congregated. Then it arose, startling against the naked landscape of late fall.
A silver pole gleaming unnaturally against the vista of hill and dale, precise white letters glaring from a green background unlike any green produced by nature …
The pole, uniformly round. The sign, geometrically rectangular. It stood stark against the overlapping lines and curves of the countryside.
It’s the strangest sight I’ve seen in some time. A thing so patently out of place, like donkeys gathered in a high school gym for a laughable basketball game.
I am not unfamiliar with street signs. I’ve lived in places where they abound and have taken no more notice of them than I do of fall leaves drifting to the ground. Street signs are associated with suburban housing developments and the concrete corridors of cities. I am accustomed to them also in our small towns, where handfuls of streets have agreed to meet between acres of open land.
But in the country? Street signs? We don’t even have streets out here, not really—we have roads. A whole ’nother thing altogether.
I am aware that our new street signs are benevolent. They will guide emergency personnel more swiftly to save lives and property from catastrophe. But the signs just look funny.
Silver poles among towering pines. Street names at the head of unpaved paths into the forest where a single house nestles out of sight. Weird. Signs speaking along meandering back roads where, before, nature whispered wordlessly. Strange.
I have a sneaking suspicion that when my city friends read this column, they’ll shake their heads at the image of two adults and two dogs gathered intently at the window to watch a street sign go up. They’ll tell me I really have to get a life.
Maybe I’ll just ask them what they’d do if three or four guys pulled up in trucks outside their apartment windows and proceeded to plant a full-grown pine tree next to their subway stop.
I still have street signs on my mind. I keep thinking about how many changes the signs portend.
Since moving to the North Country some twenty years ago, I’ve noticed that every time someone asks for directions, an oral history is created and maintained. In this simple act, the life of a town is chronicled, communicated, and registered in the unwritten archives of the community.
“Go over the bridge and past the big brown barn. That used to be the Fuller farm, but old Jake hurt his back and sold out when I was a kid. There was a fire there last year. Fire department got there real quick, but you can still see where the trees burned …
“Then go a quarter mile past the beaver pond. It flooded but good and washed out the road last spring. Road crews fixed it up fast so folks could get to town meeting, but the debris is still piled up. You never smelled such a stink as when that beaver dam broke.”
Where there are back roads, stories are shared. I’ve overheard our home’s history recounted in location conversations like this:
“They live just up from the corner at the old White place.”
“That’s the one with the rock wall running along the road?”
“Yup. They built that wall after a drunk drove right into their living room.”
“I remember hearing about that. Nobody was hurt, as I recall.”
“Nope. They will be next time if somebody drives into that wall. Took three truckloads of stone and ninety bags of mortar to put it up. Ran their well dry mixing the mortar.”
“That was the summer of the drought, wasn’t it? Farmers hauled water from the river for their herds …”
So it went. Now it will go like this:
“Take a left at Witherspoon. They’re the last house on the left before Scotchburn.”
Will the stories be lost? What else will be lost now that there are mapped solutions for what used to be the puzzle of back-country roads?
There has always been a certain mystery on back roads. It has been a favorite fair-weather rite to follow them just to see where they lead. We took a dirt-road drive one day from Ryegate and ended up in St. Johnsbury by a route I could not describe even under torture. But we found beautiful places buried in the hills: farms and ponds and fancy houses we never knew existed behind forest curtains.
Sometimes, it’s more fun not to know where you’re going. It’s a treat to wander where the only traffic is a farm truck or two, where only back-road residents travel the labyrinth of lanes winding through the woods.
With every road mapped and named, the secret will be out. We’ll lose that sense of adventure I’ve always found so sweet.
“You can’t get there from here” may become an obsolete phrase now that street signs mark the way.
In a world of turmoil and trouble, this is a small loss. But permit me to ponder, with sentimental regret, the day street signs came to the country.
Even the unflappable old-timers concede that this fall’s refusal to surrender to winter’s domination is unusual. I haven’t heard one of them say, “A-yuh, but this is nothin’ compared with the year …”
It’s mid-November and everyone’s talking about leaves.
As I write, snow falls lightly on russet foliage. It’s the third time we’ve had a dusting, and the leafy phenomenon continues to the delight of North Country citizenry.
The stubborn leaves are a fascinating gift. As long as the trees aren’t bare, we can pretend the snow is an aberration of late fall rather than a sign of early-onset winter.
If this just sounds like word games, you’ve never lived in this neck of the woods. You must be a distant friend or relative who receives our hometown paper to keep up with Johnny’s basketball team.
Here in the North Country, anything that keeps winter at bay is a blessing.
Nature’s standard practice goes like this … After peak foliage weekend, early in October, a hard and windy rainstorm usually sweeps the leaves from the trees in one fell swoop. That’s it—the swan song of fall. One day, the trees are dressed in all their final glory. The next morning, we’re confronted by skeletal branches scrabbling into leaden skies.
It’s a sad day, heralding the interminable cycle of winter and mud season ahead. We take a deep breath and psychologically dig in for the long haul. Faces get a little grimmer, footsteps get a little slower as folks shoulder the burden of what’s-to-come.
Customarily, we’ve hoisted the winter millstone by Halloween. This year, instead, people are merrily talking about the leaves.
This year, trick-or-treaters had to bundle up against the cold, but they skipped down streets where maples still glowed golden in carved-pumpkin candlelight. Weeping willows waved them on their way with unseasonably green and graceful branches, ghostly arms in the twilight.
On Election Day, Ryegate was a study in winter picture-postcard, snow-frosted, pine-tree perfection … with lingering touches of foliage dressing.
I bet some naturalist could explain why the leaves have triumphantly sustained assaults by wind, rain, sleet, and snow. It might be interesting to find out—but no explanation would change my utter delight.
Science would not dull the unexpected magic of sunshine on snow-kissed hillsides while green still fills the blanks between bare trees. Facts would not blunt the joy walking beneath not-yet-bare branches, shuffling my feet through freshly fallen leaves while catching icy flakes on my tongue.
Even if today’s storm forces the leaves into a final winter surrender, I will feel this strange November lightheartedness.
I have been spared a month of stark, leafless landscapes.
Despite the north wind’s early bitter cold and snows, the Winter Witch has been cheated—just a bit—from her usual wicked grip.
winter I woke this morning to powdered sugar frosting every leaf and limb … and contemplated winter slipping onto center stage.
The very thought of the months ahead tightens my jaw and sets my spirit in grim determination against battering elements to come. Once again, we will be at the whim of weather. The best-laid plans subject to disruption by icy roads.
Baby, it will be cold outside. The indolence of warmth will wrap itself around us, keeping us cuddled close at home.
Going and doing becomes as complex as maneuvers in a military campaign. The weapons of winter—scarves and scrapers, boots and battery warmers—will clutter closets and hallways. Mothers with children will plot strategies a general would envy to get tiny troops outfitted for the field.
If we had the good sense of our forest friends, we wouldn’t fight the lassitude of winter. We’d simply hunker down in our caves and hibernate till spring.
And yet, in each of us who chooses to live here, there must be some whisper of winter running through our veins. Something that secretly celebrates the still solitude of the season. What other explanation is there for our voluntary surrender to a climate such as this? Here, where spring, summer, and fall combined barely match the number of months in winter’s grasp?
Winter’s quietude holds us with its spell. Were it not for our willingness to be so entranced, surely we would have left long ago.
I remember a conversation some years back, just as the last snows retreated into deep forest shadows. We were sighing, a farmer friend and I, at the prospect of all the fair-weather chores ahead. Of fields and flowers to be tended, of dry roads and social obligations. Eyes shifting, voices lowered to protect our confessions, we were a secret sisterhood of spring regret.
“I’m just not ready to give up winter,” she whispered.
“I know,” I commiserated. “I’ll miss the quiet.”
Unbeknownst to us, another friend had moved within hearing. Her winter-crazed cackle gave her away, and we turned to see her gaping at us in disbelief.
“You guys,” she pronounced, “are crazy.”
She backed away as if we might infect her with our madness.
Alone again, we shrugged and smiled. Unspoken images of a countryside hushed with snow danced between us, the tang of wood smoke in the air.
Crazy? Maybe. But I suspect that here in the North Country, confessed or not, there are others like us.
Others who embrace winter grace.
I have scrupulously avoided addressing our presidential un-election. I figure folks get bashed by hard news from other sources—I do my small part to provide a peaceful alternative to shouting headline issues.
However, a few small-town perspectives occurred to me, so I’m going to plunge into the election mire with two cents clutched in my grubby journalistic paw.
What got me started was an article in The New York Times. They interviewed the makers of various automated voting systems. Each and every one of these experts flat-out said that manual counting of votes is more reliable than machine counts. The standard margin of error in their machines, they pointed out, is modest in proportion to the numbers of votes cast … but in this election, it could determine who moves into the White House.
They hastened to add that in most elections, erroneously tabulating a few hundred votes doesn’t make a difference. Not so now. They advocated manual recounts of all ballots in areas where results were close.
The voting machine experts say research has repeatedly proven hand counting is significantly more accurate than automated tallies.
Didn’t that make me smile.
Even before personal computers became common house-hold items, there have been people who predicted that, one day, machines would take over the world. They were laughed at.
In our present mishmash, regardless of who is declared the winner, I’ll wonder who really elected the man. A president of the people, elected by the people—or brought to us courtesy of machine margin of error.
By contrast, I thought about voting here in the North Country. I troop into the town hall and get my ballot from Beulah, who recognizes me on sight and checks me off the list. We exchange pleasantries. I go into the voting booth, pick up a pencil, and put my mark in the appropriate boxes. If I have any questions about the ballot, I just peer out from behind the curtain and ask.
When I’ve finished, I fold up my ballot, stuff it in the wooden box, and get my name checked off again.
After the polls close, a bunch of people I know open the box, sit down, and count the votes. It’s a big job, and they deserve lots of credit for their efforts. Some ballots are hard to read, no doubt, with incompletely erased changes. Those confusions are a whole lot simpler to resolve, however, than deciding when a punched hole is not punched enough.
There are no chads, pregnant or otherwise, up here in the North Woods.
So here’s what I think. Everyone should pick up a pencil and vote. And those votes should be counted by living, breathing human beings. We may be flawed, but we’re better than machines.
Just ask the guys who make and market the suckers.
Courtesy of an errant jet stream, I happily tug and cut the last bits of dead growth from my garden. The wind is cool but not raw. The sun dances in and out of fluffy clouds; the brook sings merrily in the background.
It is the first day of December.
From the Pacific Northwest to Arkansas, people are buried in snow and slipping on icy roadways. Our turn will come—perhaps by the time this column appears. But for now, our unusual Indian summer has become an amazing Indian winter, and I’m doing yard work.
I opened a few windows before grabbing my pruning shears and cranked up the stereo. The last of the phlox fell to the tunes of Rubber Soul.
George Harrison is dead.
As pungent yarrow spices the air, I wonder how Ringo and Paul feel. There were four, then in a shocking moment there were three—now there are two. I hope they hold each other tight. I hope they cry.
In the wake of 9/11, I do not mourn George as if his loss is more significant than terror’s victims or the casualties of war. This is simply different.
With George’s passing, memories flash across my mind. I am just thirteen. My boyfriend’s name is, coincidentally, George. Our song is “We Can Work It Out.” I still remember all the words.
I still remember how thrilling it was to dance in a bear hug just out of the chaperones’ view. Yes, Virginia, there was a day when dances were chaperoned, and imperious hands would insist on a palm’s-width distance between young bodies.
My generation was not the first to mark memorable moments with music. Bobby-soxers screamed and fainted for Sinatra at the Paramount a generation before Elvis, long before the Fab Four shook their mop tops at screeching girls, courtesy of Ed Sullivan. I never understood how grown-ups could be quite so disapproving of Beatlemania, given the fabled hysteria of young Sinatra fans.
I grew up with the Beatles. I watched the Beatles grow up. In the turbulent ’60s, when everything was changing faster than lightning, the dapper suits they brought across an ocean gave way to beards and beads and all manner of strange dress. The simple chords of “She Loves You” took a magical mystery tour by way of Eastern mysticism—largely thanks to the quiet Beatle—and we stopped guessing what the boys would come up with next.
We just knew we’d be listening.
More decades later than I care to count, I am on the opposite coast from where I first put a Beatles album on a turntable. A remastered CD resonates from speakers I could not have imagined back then, bringing “Norwegian Wood” from my house into the garden at the edge of these New England woods, on a remarkable December day … while I remember George.
Isn’t it good?
Our remarkably mild November was surprise enough here in the North Country, but December’s Indian summer strained the bounds of believability.
With the cold airstream stalled somewhere over Canada, we enjoyed weather we’d be lucky to have in May. Prudently donning hunter-orange caps, Neil and I walked in the woods with our jubilant dogs. The ferns were still green among fallen leaves.
The primroses in my garden were confused, reaching out with new leaves in the unseasonable warmth. We pondered our choices in the Christmas tree lot without the customary ache of cold toes to hurry us along.
I opened windows, relished the silent oil furnace, and left the fire laid but unlit. Even as I gloried in this and rejoiced in the freedom to go and do unhampered by winter weather, I was unsettled.
No matter how I counted the blessings of balmy days, the naked brown branches and leaf-strewn ground dragged at my spirits. Just as I was getting into the swing of the holiday season, I was distracted by temperate days.
There are always fall chores left undone. Once the cold and snow arrive, we let them go with relief … But this year, leftover fair-weather tasks could still be undertaken. Those demands clashed with impending Christmas chores.
Then everything changed. On Monday, December 7, the thermometer at the north end of the back porch registered nearly seventy in early afternoon. Within hours, I watched the temperature drop twenty degrees. By nightfall, it was cold enough to light a fire. On Tuesday, it snowed.
The countryside is transformed by a dusting of snow. No matter how long I live here, no matter how often I see it, it’s magical. Harsh lines of skeletal brown branches are softened. Dead leaves are blanketed, hidden from sight.
All is clean and pure and peaceful.
Grumbling about the trials of winter is a time-honored tradition. Meeting the challenge of snow and ice is a source of secret pride, the steel in Yankee spines. But appreciation of winter’s calm is a deeper secret still.
I am not alone in welcoming winter’s maiden snowfall. The storm caught me in St. Johnsbury, shopping at the bookstore. Back in the stacks, I missed the first flakes.
“Ohhhh,” I heard a breathless customer exclaim, “it’s snowing.”
There was a rustle throughout the store as people turned to the windows and passed the word, delight ringing in each voice.
Café clatter hushed. Cash registers stopped clicking. Grownup, weekday shoppers turned into kids before my eyes. Faces lit with enchantment.
Winter’s here.
I have this thing about football. A well-timed tackle is sweetly satisfying. When the quarterback lets loose a long one arcing down the field like a homing device into the outstretched arms of a receiver who dances into the end zone, it’s purely a thing of beauty.
But I couldn’t tell you who’s injured this week, or how many games a team has to win to have a shot at the Super Bowl. And while I have a sentimental affection for the San Francisco 49ers, I follow no particular team with passion.
I generally root for the underdog. The excitement of surprise thrills me: valiant David toppling Goliath in front of deliriously cheering fans. I just like to see a good contest, no matter who’s playing.
Blame it on my dad, this love of the game.
In his college years, Dad was a sports announcer. He knew football. The history of players and teams, and in those days before on-field microphones he translated the referees’ arm-waving signals for me.
My mother and sister were not seduced by the siren song of pigskin. Watching football, I had Dad to myself.
Dad hated chatty announcers. He’d bring the portable television up from their bedroom and set it next to the console TV in the living room. Turning off the sound, he’d announce both games, complete with background history and stats for players and teams.
I cannot watch a football game without feeling close to Dad, though he’s been gone now for over a decade.
One recent Monday night, I wandered over to the Shaeffer Stadium in Woodsville after a frustrating day at the keyboard when words would not bend to my will. I hadn’t planned on more than a quick dinner and a quiet drink before heading back to the word wars.
But I ran into some friends there, die-hard Patriot fans, gathered for the game against the Dolphins. Before I knew it, I was wrapped in the magic of football fellowship.
Like Dad, they knew football. I heard the stats and stories between plays—the only time it is acceptable to talk with men watching football. I found out why Boomer was on the announcer’s team, and why Frank Gifford had left.
We watched and whooped and hollered. By ten thirty, I was the only female left in the place. A technicality really: I wasn’t female anymore; I was just a football fan.
It was a great game. A nail-biter to the very end, filled with high drama. Interceptions, bad calls that worked both for and against us, broken plays and perfect plays choreographed like ballet.
The tensions I’d walked in with had dropped away. It was a different world. A world of pleading, exhorting, cursing, and celebrating figures flickering on screens all over the room.
Bledsoe injured his fingers in the final moments of the game, so when he tossed the ball for the Patriots’ winning touchdown with only seconds to spare, we all exploded from our seats in sheer joy.
Sheer joy. Football fellowship.
Thanks, Dad.
The recent combination of arctic cold and the high cost of heating oil have brought me into intimate interaction with our wood-burning furnace.
In keeping with fine North Country tradition, this furnace is not a high-tech wonder. Its brand name, if it had one, would be Jury-rigged. It consists of a three-quarter-inch steel firebox lined with firebrick, encased in sheet metal.
Don’t laugh. Before we upgraded the original, its heart was an old oil drum.
Like much of life in our rural environment, this setup is simple but functional, powerful but not easily mastered, efficient but cantankerous. You do not just load her up and leave her be. She demands constant care and feeding.
If you do the job right, and the north wind doesn’t howl down off the hill too maniacally, you might get two hours between tendings.
She resides in the basement, a trek down two flights if I’m on the second floor when duty calls. At the bottom of the steep, narrow basement stairs, there’s a door to be opened, then a left turn, a step down, another door, a narrow path around the oil furnace, and finally there’s the wood furnace.
The furnace opening would challenge a Munchkin. Even for one of my petite stature, the steel door just above floor level requires crouching on one’s haunches while holding heavy hunks of wood and, from this precarious position, shoving them into the furnace’s insatiable maw. A full loading routine then requires standing, turning to heft another log from the woodpile (being careful not to bonk heads with the conveniently located septic pipe), and crouching again to strategically place the wood according to the furnace’s persnickety requirements.
So it goes. Endlessly. You can understand why, contrary to conventional wisdom, I lose weight in the winter.
Given the consequences of failure, it’s critically important to get the fire off to a good start. This involves lots of scrap hardwood and stacks of newspaper.
The burn quality of newspapers varies as much as their editorial content. For those wood-heating neophytes among us, I offer the following observations …
The Times Argus goes up in a flash, with little effect and much fire-smothering debris. The Caledonian-Record is only slightly better at generating heat and produces an equal amount of undesirable residue. The Burlington Free Press burns with more substance and reduces more neatly. The Journal Opinion is one notch better still on both counts.
But the Sunday New York Times is the newspaper to be reckoned with. This is a paper with substance. It burns hot and slow and clean. It’s a newspaper fire-starters can love.
Whatever other merits these newspapers may have, it’s the JO and the Times I want stacked next to our wood furnace.
Not the ringing endorsement the publishers have in mind, no doubt. But this is winter in a hundred-plus-year-old North Country farmhouse, and we do have our priorities.
Neither of my nearest neighbors has the last name Jones. And conventionally, this expression implies a superficial, materialistic competitive spirit. Your neighbor buys a new car, you buy a new car—probably a flashier car.
I’m not naive. There are places where people really do feel this pressure to keep up appearances, to play along with a standard of acquisitiveness set by their community. I just don’t think it’s a signature of life in the North Country.
The North Country version of “keeping up with the Joneses” seems to be a delightfully positive phenomenon. I can’t speak for others, naturally; this is just how it is for me.
Small-town life simply makes everything a little more personal.
In the spring, gardens gracing yards along the road to my house feel like extravagant presents. I know they weren’t planted for me, but I take such pleasure in them. This inspired me to plant my own garden along the wall that borders our road. Hokey as it sounds, I felt I was adding a touch of beauty to my town. I wanted others to experience the pleasure they gave me—drive-by gifts, random acts of beauty in bloom.
Keeping up with the Joneses.
Ours is one of three houses just beyond the heart of Rye-gate Corner. We’re good neighbors by North Country standards. We don’t disturb one another. We’re courteous on the rare occasion when we might ask for a favor. The night of the lunar eclipse, I asked Dave to turn off his floodlights. He cheerfully complied. When Steve had a family reunion, we were happy to allow our meadow to become their parking lot and playground.
In an unspoken but generous manner, we acknowledge that our proximity to one another means we’re immediately affected by each other’s activities.
Just after Thanksgiving, my neighbors declared the opening of holiday season with lights. I was inspired to do my own decorating. Keeping up with the Joneses? In a way. They’d given me something beautiful to look at. They brought dancing lights to the dark days of December.
I wanted to return the favor.
There’s a symmetry to the Christmas lights, now, in this trinity of homes. I look out my front porch, past the sparkling tree Neil and I put up there. Across the meadow, through Steve and Lori’s sliding glass door, I see a cascade of white lights. Beyond that are the colored lights on the chubby pine tree in Dave and Debbie’s yard.
Perhaps I am a sentimental sop. But these strings of light weave a sense of community for me. Here on this stretch of country road, three houses adorn the night—each separate and distinct, together singing a visual holiday chorus to people driving by.
After more than twenty-five years in the North Country, small-town life still surprises and delights me. Its qualities do not fade with familiarity; they deepen with each passing year.
I’ve never had an artificial tree. Even when I lived in California and a Christmas tree cost more than some of the presents under it, we always had the real thing. But last year, Neil and I caught a whim to have a white tree.
Not a fake-snow-flocked white tree, but a genuine—and therefore artificial—white tree.
We weren’t inspired by some fancy home-decorating magazine. We were just ready for something different. I thought it would be fun to decorate. A canvas of a different hue for family heirlooms. Neil dreamed of a clean-tree experience: no prickly branches, no needle droppings trailing from outside through the kitchen and piling up on the living room rug. No daily watering.
So we looked, but could not find one. The whim persisted, however, and this year we succeeded.
Instead of the annual trip to our favorite Christmas tree lot in North Haverhill, we marched into Rite Aid and came out with a long narrow box. No wind nipping at our noses, no cold feet as we tromped around seeking the perfect tree, no scent of pine and friendly conversation in the holiday spirit. Just a young clerk who fetched the box from out back and brought it to us.
A surreal tree-shopping experience.
At home, we began assembling it in the kitchen, fitting together the stand and three sections. Its white “needles” began to shed as we put it together. They continued to drop as we carried it through the dining room into the living room, trailing white confetti.
Then we began the intricate process of unfolding and arranging the branches. Let me tell you, there are many, many branches—large and small—on an artificial tree. If you think natural tree branches are prickly, try the wire ends of the manufactured version. After my first session, I had scratches all the way up my forearms. And the “needles” continued to fall.
Unlike pine needles, which don’t travel very far once they’ve dropped, the fake version gets charged with static electricity and leaps onto anything for a ride. Dog paws, cat paws, people feet—I swear they ride the thermals of the forced hot-air heat. I have little white strips from one end of the house to the other. I keep vacuuming, minus the pleasure of pine-freshened air cycling through the machine.
I’m sure it’ll be quite lovely once I get it decorated. It’s now a week after initial assembly and five days before Christmas; I’m still unfolding and arranging branches and branchettes in my spare time, armored in a long-sleeved sweatshirt.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about tree farming—that sustainable, environmentally friendly North Country business. I feel badly that I’ve taken my annual contribution away from the industry. I think I’ll buy a wreath to soothe my guilt.
The pine needles will be a pleasure.
Once upon a time, I told Peggy I had a hankering to try snowshoes. For years, I have missed walking in fields and forest during the winter.
Peggy is the librarian at the Baldwin Library in Wells River. She has chased down books for me from one end of New England to the other. She is a sterling member of that unsung-hero society of librarians.
But I digress. When I returned some books recently, Peggy said, “Didn’t you say you wanted to try snowshoes?” With that, she produced a pair from behind her desk. I’m accustomed to librarians accomplishing assorted feats of magic, but this was a new one.
It turns out that The Freeman Foundation had offered grants to libraries and Peggy wrote a proposal for loaning “non-traditional” items. Ergo, the snowshoes. (Also, please note, fishing poles, a tent, and binoculars.)
I hadn’t fulfilled my snowshoe yearning because I didn’t want to buy before I could discover if I liked the activity and didn’t know anyone who could loan me a pair. Life has taught me that lots of things are more fun in theory than in actuality.
Grabbing a walking stick, I took the shoes outside one sunny day.
I was tempted to put them on in the comfort of the sun-warmed enclosed front porch. A chilly wind blew and I didn’t relish the notion of fussing with fastenings out there barehanded. But even in my novice state, I realized walking down the front steps newly snowshoe-shod was a bad idea.
The steps were crusted with snow, so I couldn’t sit down. Thus, I fumbled with the nylon straps in an awkward bent-over position, stretching muscles unaccustomed to the demand.
I finally got myself all strapped in and realized I hadn’t brought my glasses outside. Forget it. The views would just be a bit fuzzy. Starting over was not an option.
What a thrill it was to walk on top of the snow over fields I’ve known for more than fifteen years.
When I got a good pace going, the soft thud of the shoes in the snow sounded like a heartbeat. Thump-thump, to a background symphony of the wind’s ocean song through trees. When I came to a stop, I was embraced by that unique stillness of land hushed by deep snow.
With the sun shining on my face, I enjoyed expanded mountain views from a rise I couldn’t have reached without snow-shoes. My nearsightedness did not diminish the beauty.
Exhilarating—both the physical experience and the fulfillment of a long-held hankering. I waved gaily to occasional cars passing by, feeling very hardy-mountain-woman. All I lacked was the coonskin cap.
Snowshoeing is one of my best presents this holiday season. May you receive a pleasure equal to the gift my librarian gave me.
’T is the season to be jolly … or so they say.
But even if we pin jingling bells to our lapels and savor deep peace from the sacred joys of the season, the holidays are touched with bittersweet moments.
Here is one of the mysteries of joy: Even as we behold the grace of gifts, our hearts turn to longing. Gathered in celebration, surrounded by people we love, we are visited by thoughts of those no longer with us. It’s impossible to participate in any ritual without thinking of other years, other times.
I cannot set my table without being assailed by memories. This soup tureen was my mother’s. I take it from the cupboard and hear ringing echoes of her laughter. This ornament was my great-grandmother’s. I know its story. My mother told me the tale as her mother told her, in a sentimental seasonal moment.
I have no children to tell it to, which seems especially sad as I decorate the tree with memories. Life takes the path it will. This is just one of the sighs of the season.
Christmas present is frosted by Christmases past.
There was a time when our tree stood tall, in the knotty-pine-paneled recreation room, laden with too much tinsel gleefully tossed by tiny hands. And I remember baking sheets of cookies I loaded with sugar sprinkles of red and green until they were nearly too sweet to eat. Colorful cards were strung across the mirror over the mantel; the crackling fire was scented with pine cones.
The delight of childhood Christmases was magic made by someone else. We were required only to look wide-eyed and rapturous, which took no effort.
The Christmas-morning rule in my childhood Virginia home was simple. My sister and I were not allowed to wake Mom and Dad until the streetlights went out in dawn’s early glow. It makes me smile now to see us perched at the windowsill, willing the darkness to fade into sunrise.
My dad was a kid about Christmas. He’d sit by the tree, giving out presents one by one, so each could be savored and showcased. The year he had his first heart attack, he willed himself well enough to come home for Christmas Day, and returned to the intensive care unit the day after. But that day he was home, he was his familiar jolly holiday self. The doctors marveled. They didn’t know Dad very well.
For me, the past is not a refuge from a threadbare present. There is much to gladden my holiday heart in this moment. But during these days when darkness turns toward the light of winter solstice, the shadows of days-gone-by play like dancers in the wings.
I am not uncomfortable with the sweet sadness.
Sorrow and smiles are entwined in holiday garlands. I am glad for the sadness, for tears sparkling like winter-bright stars.
Hark, the herald, memories sing.
With the snow and slush and cold of recent weeks, it is easy to curse the season. Cars are coated with sheets of ice. A trip to the store is a treacherous trek. Plans must be flexible, unless one is willing to risk life and limb.
Flocks of finches have desperately descended on our feeders. It’s so late for finches. Were they lulled by the unseasonable early-winter warmth and now cannot get south?
They are pretty, the finches, yellow or red. But they are contentious and scare away friendly chickadees. Nasty-tempered finches fight among themselves with frantic wings flapping, beaks flashing, and bitter territorial cries. Their bright colors bring me no pleasure.
The deep snow is crusted with ice. It breaks with small explosions under heavy boots. We cannot walk the dogs in the woods anymore. Small Teddy breaks through, then sinks into soft snow and cannot free himself for the next step. Crusty shards cut the pads of Devin’s paws.
The kitchen is cluttered with scarves and hats and boots and gloves. The outside stairs invite accidents, and we’ll need more wood before the season ends. Something large scurries behind the walls.
In the recent deep freeze, I nearly lost the skin off my fingers.
With hands still damp from a quick drying at the sink, I unlatched the metal hook on the back door. In an instant, the sub-zero temperatures froze the residual dampness on my skin. I pulled back fast enough to free my fingers, but felt that icy-sticky, stinging-numb feeling that brings to mind kids on a dare with tongues stuck to flagpoles.
It is easy to curse the season.
But one day I brave the cold to walk the dogs up the road in lightly falling snow at the tail end of a heavy storm. The hush is breathless. There is no way to describe the sacred silence of the countryside newly layered with snow. It makes you want to whisper.
And the air is piercing with freshness. It seems somehow new, with silken purity like a baby’s skin.
But the most amazing effect comes as night falls. The moonless sky is blue velvet and the snow is bright in the darkness, glowing as if daylight is captured in the crystals. The mountains and trees are shadows in the distance, but the snow shines its eerie blue-white light.
It is a sight that stops me at the window. If mythical beasts and beings appeared, I would not be surprised. Snowlight creates a perfect setting for unicorns and their friends. I would not be surprised.
In snowlight, anything is possible.
In snowlight the curses of the season vanish, washed white to bliss … if only for moments.
It is enough.
Just before New Year’s, I broke my old rotary phone. In a clattering cataclysm, I knocked it off the shelf, sending it crashing to the uncarpeted wood floor. The housing cracked, broke away from the base, and a critical plastic piece was shattered where the line plugs in.
I pride myself on my tinkering abilities, but it was clear that rubber bands and adhesive tape would not put Humpty Dumpty together again. At least, not functionally.
In our home, it was the end of the era when phones rang.
Language is such an interesting thing. We still refer to phones ringing, though in truth they no longer ring at all. They beep. They buzz. They make annoying noises reminiscent of irritating alarm clocks.
Even after I surrendered to the siren song of a wireless phone that could accompany me around the house—house chores are more fun during long conversations with friends—I kept my old rotary phone for the simple pleasure of hearing it ring. Set at “loud,” trilling chimes rose above the businesslike summons of the push-button mobile phone.
When the transition from rotary phones began, offices and businesses were the first to switch. So the noise of the new phones was forever emblazoned on my aural consciousness as official, work-related—not a sound I wanted in my home.
And I liked dialing. (There’s our quirky language again … We still speak of dialing a number, though most of us have not had our fingers in the holes of that spinning wheel for years. Somewhere, a child is asking, “Mommy, why is it called dialing when I push buttons?”) As the wheel went ’round, I’d collect my thoughts for the call I was making.
In those days, a real live person would always answer, or you’d get no answer at all. No machine pickups, no endless menu of choices recited by brainless, disembodied voices demanding that you choose a direction that never suits your needs.
Ah, it was a simpler time.
But mostly, I kept my old rotary phone not for the memories, but for the ringing.
What used to be the norm is now a specialty item. In fancy catalogs, I’ve seen advertisements for “nostalgic, old-fashioned rotary phones that ring!” You don’t want to know what they cost.
Clearly, I am not the only one suffering with phone nostalgia.
My new phone’s “ring” is less obnoxious than some. It is an electronic imitation of a ringing phone. It tries hard. Does its best. But like most imitations, it’s really rather pathetic.
Bells have joyous associations that cannot be counterfeited. And as the cracked carcass of my old phone revealed, there actually was a bell in its innards. A graceful, shining, curved metal cup that sang of more relaxed times.
An era when there was time to ponder first words. When people answered, or when you simply waited until they could.
Farewell, phone. Your lighthearted ring is much missed.
One day last week, it was ten below zero. As I was feeding our wood furnace, I was bitten by a mosquito.
What’s wrong with this picture?
How is it possible that mosquitoes thrive in a frosty, frozen world? Or is our basement an exclusive breeding ground?
Mosquitoes are the price I’m grudgingly forced to pay for summer-warm nights and fresh raspberries. But nowhere is it written in my North Country contract that amid the trials of winter I should also be searching for the AfterBite.
It’s bad enough that cluster flies awake on days when the sun is strong enough to warm the windows. Combine cluster flies with cabin fever and it’s nearly sent me running to the real estate agent.
Put the house on the market—I shall flee to a more hospitable (insectless) climate.
The January thaw moved in this week, complete with grimy snow and icy driveways. If I were really ambitious, I’d use this opportunity to finish last-minute fall chores that were buried under November snowdrifts. But I’m too busy battling flies and trying to figure out where those mosquito breeding grounds are hidden.
Now that temperatures have climbed to forty degrees, the biting creatures have fled, but I have a nasty suspicion they’ll be back when it drops below zero again.
Meanwhile, this dreary January behaves more like mud season than winter. Dead gray skies complement foggy afternoons, and I keep wanting to adjust the contrast knob on the picture outside my windows.
Turning on more lights isn’t an option. The power company has kicked in higher winter rates, and our electric bill has doubled. I’m left with the choice to live in the dark or brighten up and go broke.
I’ll have to search for the mosquito breeding grounds by flashlight.
Andy Rooney did a bit on 60 Minutes last week, disclosing that Vermont is among the five states that experience the least sunshine. Interestingly, New Hampshire was not listed in the sunless top five.
That does it for me.
I’m going to pack up my sunglasses, grab my beach blanket, and head down the hill into Woodsville to catch some rays.
Are we as busy as we think we are, or does thinking about how busy we are just create more busy-ness?
I’ve been cogitating this concept for some time, which I totally blame on my farmer friends. Farmers make me philosophical.
Since moving to Ryegate Corner, I’ve had the pleasure of adding farmers to my inner circle and have observed a baffling phenomenon. While farmers are without doubt the busiest people I know, they are also the most unflappable.
Racking my memory to recollect a farmer in a tizzy, a rip-snorting, floor-stomping, self-pitying fit, I can’t recall a one. Yet their routines are relentless.
Before dawn to after dark, day in day out, week after week, month after month. The frustrations of farming are high. Money is always an issue, machinery always breaks down, the weather always threatens, and the cows never go away.
Many local farmers carry the added emotional burden of trying to sustain multigenerational family farms. Theirs is a deep dedication to the land and to tradition. Despite their quiet ways, they are passionate about this way of life, a way of life beleaguered on all fronts.
Still, farmers are among the calmest, most uncomplaining people I know.
As if their own lives are not challenging enough, farmers are often at the heart of their communities. They are volunteer firefighters, town clerks, church trustees, school board members, town librarians, and good neighbors.
I think I’ve learned their secret.
Farmers don’t expect their work will ever be done. They don’t expect things will run smoothly. They don’t expect cooperation from nature, from machinery, from crops or cows. So what could be perceived as crises are considered common occurrences.
It is expectations that make us crazy.
Somewhere in the “oh, there’s so much to be done” despair of busy-ness is the implication that there’s an ideal end point. The notion that, given proper effort and circumstances, completion can be achieved.
Farmers don’t labor under this illusion. They know better. Farmers don’t think about being busy … they just put one foot in front of the other in a long-haul journey they know will involve obstacles every step of the way.
Lately, I’ve been cultivating the farmer frame of mind. Plodding along without idealized illusions. I’m setting out seeds, knowing the elements might not favor my efforts, no matter how conscientious I am. Tinkering with the gears of my to-do lists, shoveling the manure of interruptions and aggravations. And you know what?
I am less harried. I breathe more deeply. More gets done.
Life is hard and messy. So what else is new?
Let it be. Live with it.
Here is peace.
The countryside is clothed in snow.
I cannot remember when so much snow stayed on the trees for so long. Wind or midday warmth usually strips the branches bare soon after snowfall.
Day after day, I awake to picture-postcard portraits of a classic New England winter. I reach for my camera and long for black-and-white film. So many luminous shades of white and gray in the early-morning light—color film cannot do it justice.
As I savor the view of the woods, I realize the snow-laden branches are like trees in full leaf. Gone are the skeletal frames through which I could see deep into the forest, into places hidden by fair-weather foliage. Branches blossom with snow; our crab apple tree is as lush as if it were in full bloom.
When the sun breaks through, the light is refracted in each twig’s icy outline. Trees are filled with diamonds. The air sparkles with slivers of snow, like handfuls of glitter tossed on the breeze.
Such delicate beauty is so paradoxically heavy. Branches sag under the burden. Boughs break. The lilacs outside my sitting room window have shattered. Jagged, mortal wounds stand in a stark contrast to the surrounding soft white fluff. The chickadees, who usually perch in that tree to break open sunflower seeds, are unconcerned. They alight on broken branches we have not cleared away.
On a mercy mission, we trek to the remaining lilacs. We jostle bent and frozen branches, showering mini-blizzards down on ourselves. Gently. Feel the brittle wood, easily broken. Snow soft and light kisses my face, but snow amassed threatens the life of a tree.
In a state of winter contemplation, I stand at the kitchen sink watching plump mourning doves crowd the feeder. There is a crashing thump against the window. Reflexively I duck, frightened and confused. No small bird flying into the window could make such a racket. Behind me, Neil exclaims, “A falcon!”
We rush to peer over the sill, and there on our porch lies a magnificent bird. We hold our breath, hoping it is not badly injured. The head comes up, and we are pierced by the golden-eyed gaze of a wild predator.
I waste a few precious moments of this up-close encounter reaching for my camera. I barely have the bird in focus when it lifts off, gliding with broad-winged grace back into the woods.
Falcon or hawk? No birders we—despite this remarkably close encounter, we cannot distinguish between the two when we later consult our bird book.
It doesn’t matter.
What remains in my memory is the fierce wildness of that eye, as if condemning us for the window … that wickedly curved beak … the rounded, luxuriantly feathered body and the joy of flight.
Uninjured it rose, soaring into the snow-softened woods, my spirit rising on its wings.
As if there weren’t enough inconveniences imposed on us by winter, steady snowfall brings with it the perennial mystery of “when will the guy with the snowplow show up?”
Step right up, folks. It’s that time of year when we are targets for random acts of plowing.
Don’t get me wrong. A wonderful young fella plows our driveway and keeps the mailbox safe for the postal people. He generally shows up in a timely fashion; it’s just that you never know what time that will be. Could be seven in the morning, seven at night, earlier or later. It just depends. His arrival can coincide with the morning shower, the day’s first cup of caffeine, dinner, or a certain kind of private time better left unspecified in a column such as this.
All good citizens of the North know that, to get the greatest benefit from plowing, cars must be cleaned off, defrosted, and ready to pull out of the driveway. Plows prefer an open field for optimal play. It helps greatly if one is dressed, conscious and functional, ready to jump into boots and be off like a fireman when the alarm sounds.
Like everybody else I know with a plow on the front of his truck, our Rick is a workingman who picks up a little extra green by pushing the white around. Between one or two other jobs, I know Rick is out straight doing his best to take care of everyone on his route when the snow flies. And if he catches us at a bad time, he’s real patient about letting us catch up to him.
I have no complaint with Rick. It’s just the unpredictability of it all.
A friend of mine bought herself one of those snowblowers. She has rhapsodized about the joys of independence in driveway maintenance. When she wants it done, she just up and does it.
Our neighbor has one of those little plows that attaches to his riding mower. We often watch enviously as he clears his driveway whenever the spirit moves him.
We’ve thought about acquiring one of those rigs. But then, we think again. Between tending the furnaces (oil and wood), emptying the dehumidifier in the basement, refilling the humidifier upstairs, relighting the hot-water heater, walking the small dog who gets lost in drifts with the big dog who causes avalanches, feeding the birds, trying to get the fat cat to go out in weather she hates while trying to get the skinny cat to stop bouncing off the walls with cabin fever, I just can’t face the maintenance factor of one more addition to our happy home—be it mechanical, feathered, or furred.
Thanks anyway. I’ll stick with Rick.
So if you should see me out in the driveway some morning and catch a glimpse of nightgown below the hem of my coat, be kind.
I’m just the victim of another random act of plowing.
My friend Dee recently introduced me to bleach. Clorox-friendly women of my mother’s generation may not understand why this is noteworthy—but baby boomers are afraid of bleach.
By the time I was old enough to take laundry seriously, I couldn’t touch the stuff. It rots your clothes, don’t you know. Eats holes through fabric any moth would envy. Kills elastic deader than foliage in winter. Makes colors run a marathon. Fearsome Bleach, the fascist of laundry products.
My first clue that maybe bleach wasn’t so villainous came after we moved to our country home. Some hapless rodent found its way under the well cover and fell to a death by drowning. We only discovered this when our water took on a terrible stink. I got in the shower one morning and nearly passed out from the fumes.
I asked a native Vermonter about this puzzling phenomenon. He looked at me as if I didn’t have the sense God gave little green apples and replied with a knowing snort, “Huh. Somethin’ dead in yer well.”
Solution? “Fish out the carcass and pour some bleach down ’er.” The well, of course, not the carcass.
Bleach? In my well? My water supply? Surely you jest.
“That carcass will take a long time to decompose,” he pointed out calmly.
Right. Neil fished and I poured.
I poured far too much. Turned my hair nearly a shade lighter and, boy, were my fingernails white. We drank bottled water until it flushed through, but the sinks and tubs were really clean.
Even then, it didn’t occur to me to use the stuff on my clothes. Then my mother died, and, as years passed, the pristine linen tablecloths I’d lovingly brought back from my dismantled California home were dotted with stains and had begun to gray.
Looking at them made me sad. It was an affront to my mother. My childhood memories are replete with visions of those same tablecloths, snowy white on her well-laid tables.
“Bleach,” Dee said.
“I can’t,” I wailed in horror. “They’re old. They’ll rot and fall apart.”
“Nonsense,” Dee sniffed. “Nothing but bad press. I use bleach on nearly everything. Have for years. Never harmed a thing. You just have to use it right.”
So I’ve been learning how to use it right. And this holiday season, when I laid Mother’s good dishes on her once-again-snowy-white linen, I got to thinking.
I wonder how many other things I’ve needlessly feared.
Caution is a good thing. But so is the courage to change your perceptions, and common sense conquers a lot of foolishness.
It doesn’t take two cups of bleach to purify the well.
Thanks, Dee.
Thousands of miles from the Salt Lake City Olympics, I cry out “Oh, no!” when Evgeni Plushenko falls out of his quadruple toe loop.
A mogul skier drops from a jump into a hole, lands with his knee folded sideways, tumbles down the hill, and rises with his face contorted in pain. I groan.
American snowboarders—those radical, stoked, Gen-X renegades of sport—stand on the podium in a historic medals sweep. Not since 1956 have Americans taken gold, silver, and bronze in a single event. As our national anthem plays, the super-cool young men’s eyes fill with tears. Ross Powers, Danny Kass, and Jarret Thomas are unashamed of their emotions.
I watch sports I know little or nothing about and hold my breath. I root for athletes whose names I’ve never heard, sometimes from countries I’d be hard-pressed to find on a map.
Why? What is this Olympic compulsion?
For me, it’s about the stories, and every Olympian has one. Every story has common threads—passion, dedication, discipline. But every story is also unique.
Speed skater Casey FitzRandolph comes back from difficulties to win gold. In the stands, his legally blind grandfather savors his triumph, with the aid of special glasses. I don’t know who to be happier for, Casey or Granddad.
After a two-year, soul-searching break, Todd Eldredge decided to go to Salt Lake City. The former world figure-skating champion has held the U.S. title six times, but he has returned empty-handed from previous Olympic quests. “I wouldn’t feel right about myself if I didn’t try it one more time,” he said. He is thirty years old.
Former skater Scott Hamilton said that learning a quadruple toe loop at Eldredge’s age is like learning a new language. But Eldredge learns it, has the courage to go for it—and misses. His impressive career will not be capped with Olympic honors.
And yet, at the end of his routine, knowing his dream is forever lost, Todd’s face seems to reflect peace. I like to think that was the moment when he found fulfillment in his final effort.
As Eldredge waits for what will surely be painful scores, a young fan’s voice rings out.
“You’re a great champion, Todd.” A poignant moment of pure truth.
What awes me is not merely the winning of medals. What engages me isn’t the treasure of gold, silver, and bronze. It’s knowing that every athlete has a story, and every story is one of sacrifice, courage, passion, determination, commitment, and power.
I am aware that I watch a lifetime of effort condensed into minutes or seconds of make-or-break performance. That parents have woken up in the wee hours to drive their kids to the rink. That towns have held bake sales to help one of their own pursue the Olympic dream.
It is cliché to say every athlete is a winner, medals or not. To me, it’s more than that.
They embody something heroic in the human spirit, and standing witness uplifts me.
It was one of those steel-gray February days. Laboring in fields domestic, I picked up, swept up, cleared up, and cleaned up until I was fed up.
Tossing aside rags and rancor, I fled to the uninviting outdoors. Though dim and drear, it at least offered the charms of nothing to sort, straighten, or shine. Deadfall in the woods may rest where it drops.
The dogs were delighted with the unexpected boon of a midday romp. I very nearly couldn’t lace up my boots for their dancing joy at my feet.
I grab my walking stick—an inelegant, unvarnished staff stripped of bark by time and the elements. The hard-packed snow of midwinter is uneven and icy. More than a year after a trauma, I am still careful of my injured knee. The staff is not affectation but a necessity.
Outside, the dogs bound ahead and double back to me, as if demanding that I share their high spirits. I am not cheered. I am a refugee fleeing domestic oppression.
But as I walk, the cold, clean air calms me. Though the brook is mostly silent, it burbles beneath the ice. It murmurs under the frozen landscape, vibrant life gathering force for the explosion of spring.
A trick of the light illuminates the landscape in hues of a fine black-and-white photograph. I have seen this effect before, but no matter. It stops me in my tracks every time.
I have come nearly full circle in the woods, to the Grandmother Tree. An ancient maple, gnarled and wounded by lightning, she is majestic still. A magnificent living force of nature. Lay your hands on her weathered trunk and it is easy to believe she whispers secrets drawn deep from the dark of earth … if only I knew the language.
Standing there, chilled and thrilled in the strange light, I am quieted. One small human bundled against the cold, in a landscape grand and untamable by mop or broom.
The thought passes through my mind that this is how we were for longer than we have lived in houses. Nomads on the land, creatures like any other, subject to the whims of nature and fully aware of our small place in the wild.
I look back through the trees toward the house. It is small against the sweep of woods and hill and valley. The rooms within, with all their clutter and claptrap, are insignificant from my vantage point under the outspread arms of the Grandmother Tree.
We spend too much time indoors.
We forget who we are in piles of papers, ringing phones, and beguiling electronic wizardry. We begin to believe we are the pivot point on which the world turns, with our to-do lists, dates, and deadlines.
We begin to believe in our own importance.
Grandmother Tree knows better.
Some of us do not greet the day with perky enthusiasm. We come to consciousness in stages, and woe betide anyone who interferes with this process.
What I want in the morning is a cup of tea and lots of silence.
I might read. Sometimes I meander through shadowy corridors of reverie, chasing a piece of a dream or an elusive thought—renegade images I later tease into a column or poem.
As I get older, my hunger for this waking quiet time becomes more intense. Fifteen minutes used to be enough to give my day a good start. That became a half hour, then an hour. Now I like to have nearly two hours to get the engines up and running.
Some people would say I’m slowing down. I prefer to think of it as leisurely wisdom. In my younger days, I’d leap out of bed, into the shower, gulp down some tea, and be on the road to work before I was fully awake. My leaping days are gone.
Good riddance.
One morning, I was cocooned in quietude when the dogs suddenly went berserk.
Anyone who has dogs knows they “speak” in different tones, just like people. There’s the “Oh, goodie, Neil’s home,” announcement when his car pulls into the driveway. My dogs love company, so guests are greeted with the “Visitors!!” delight.
When other dogs wander into sight, the “Intruder, intruder!” alarm sounds. But most raucous is the big-animal frenzy. The sight of cows or horses sends them into snarling, snapping, growling, howling hysterics. Given where we live, this is not an uncommon occurrence.
Usually, we have some warning before this madness is unleashed. The clip-clop of horse hooves, a glimpse of someone walking a cow down the road.
When my quiet time was shattered on this day, the doggy cacophony exploded without any hint and exceeded the big-animal fury. To say I was startled would be a monumental understatement. My heart rate accelerated, adrenaline charged through my veins. Alarmed, I ran to the porch.
I looked out into the yard, and what a sight greeted me.
High in the crab apple tree, incongruous and ungainly among the small branches, were three wild turkeys pecking at the shriveled remains of crab apples. As they fed, they would lose their balance and fall out of the tree. In awkward turkey flight, they would rise again, sometimes crashing into one another on the way up, on the way down, or both.
It was an avian Three Stooges show.
There was no point in trying to settle the dogs down. We three watched those three, the snarling, screaming dogs setting a musical score to flailing wings and turkey-corpulent dance. Inside the enclosed front porch, dog noise bounced and reverberated, accompanied by my helpless laughter.
Those who sing the praises of the quiet country life rarely live in the country.
Before I moved to the North Country, “Town Meeting” was a quaint notion, something I had only read about or seen in old movies.
But since moving here, I’ve never missed the annual event. I was a teacher, and school was closed for the special day. It just didn’t seem kosher not to go.
It only took once. I was hooked.
I discovered there is nothing quaint about Town Meeting. Sometimes contentious, sometimes routine, but always entertaining, this gathering reveals the invisible threads that weave the tapestry of community.
What is said is often less important than who says it.
Unwritten rules govern Town Meeting. Rules as binding as the parliamentary procedure so deftly managed by town moderators. I was instructed in these critical rules by Pat Rhoads, a longtime resident of Newbury, where I saw my first eleven years of local democracy in action.
“Listen, learn, and don’t say a word,” she sternly admonished.
Townfolk take a dim view of newcomers taking the floor.
She explained that three years was a good minimum residency requirement to consider before going beyond joining the chorus of “aye” or “nay” at the appropriate time. And even after that, she instructed, if you must speak, do not speak more than once.
At Town Meeting, them that speaks the least is listened to the most.
Those who know me well will have no difficulty imagining what a challenge this posed. Pat nearly dislocated my shoulder yanking me down each time I was possessed by the impulse to rise and speak. Had she not done so, I would have made those newcomer mistakes that seal one’s doom for years to come.
I recently met someone who moved to Vermont ten years ago and did not have the benefit of a Pat to show him the way. He told me he’d stood up at Town Meeting from the first, taking on the town’s hottest issues.
“You didn’t,” I breathed in horror.
“I didn’t know any better,” he said mournfully. “And once I learned, it was too late. Branded a troublemaking, pushy flat-lander.
“I haven’t said a word at Town Meeting in five years,” he went on sadly. “But it doesn’t matter. If I’m going to get a fresh start, I’ll have to move to another town. Far away.”
This year after the meeting, I spoke with a man who’d made a motion I felt was really important. In the twelve years I’ve lived in Ryegate, I’ve heard him speak less than half a dozen times.
“Well,” he said with a worried grin, “later I really wanted to bring up this other point, but I was afraid that’d be too much.”
His family has lived in town for seven generations.
Whoever said small-town life is simple has never lived in one. Not in the North Country, anyway.
Each year at Town Meeting time, I’m struck anew by how many of my neighbors tend to our community’s business. Their unheralded efforts fill the pages of the Town Report.
Turn to the list of town officers. From the high-profile town moderator to the rarely glimpsed cemetery commissioners, folks quietly take care of business year-round. Their responsibilities involve tidal waves of paperwork, eons of meetings and thankless tasks that would give Job a significant challenge.
Most of what they do could only be truly appreciated if they ceased doing it.
If paid at all, their remuneration is a pittance given the hours, effort and aggravation involved. On the rare occasions when their work is acknowledged, it’s often on the firing line of complaint. Yet year after year, many positions are held by the same people, some of whom wear multiple hats in the parade of town government.
Were it not for them, ballots would languish uncounted, libraries would be bookless, weeds would obscure ancestors’ graves, and things would generally be in a nasty tangle.
But there’s more. Not listed on the town officials’ page are others who labor on our behalf. Consider volunteer firefighters and their inexplicable willingness to have their lives disrupted at all hours. Day or night, at twenty below or hotly humid, firefighters dash out the door to face very real dangers.
Despite their selflessness, odds are that the next day someone will gripe. No matter how quickly firefighters arrived at the scene, no matter how much (or whom) they managed to save, someone will say they shoulda been there quicker and done better.
Then there are unlisted people like Dale Wright of Ryegate. Every year for fifteen years, Mr. Wright has driven one hundred miles in two days, hand-delivering some three hundred Town Reports. It’s hard to believe Ryegate even has that many miles of road, but Mr. Wright should know, having driven them in ice and mud and snow.
Now seventy years old, Mr. Wright was seeing ahead to a time when he might not be able to continue his appointed rounds. He suggested that the town could use his pay in another way. But many Ryegate residents weren’t happy with the impersonal alternatives of mailing or leaving reports at key locations for pickup. “I don’t know,” my friend Holly said after Town Meeting, “those options just don’t seem … Well, they just aren’t Ryegate.”
Mr. Wright has left a legacy with his annual quick knock on the door and ten seconds of friendly chat. Now many of us don’t want to settle for less.
All these people who labor on our behalf define the character of our community. Their efforts shape who we are and what kind of town we live in.
From listers to delinquent-tax collectors, to all the folks who do those jobs, I say thank you.
spring Here in the North Country, nature clothes herself in weather excesses like a fashion fiend with no spending limit. If you prefer climatic moderation, this is not the place to live.
Fall is an explosion of glory. Winter is deep and cold. Spring is often a poignant sprint into summer. Summer compensates for its brevity with the drama of thunderstorms, heat waves, and dripping humidity.
I sometimes wonder about the relationship between weather and regional character. Are Southerners languid, right down to the drawl in their speech, because of their long, hot summers? Do Californians compensate for the lack of seasonal variety with personal flamboyance and eccentricities?
Is North Country reticence and understatement a no-frills-necessary response to a climate where nature always puts on a show?
I ponder such things on the first day of spring, gazing out at a countryside freshly frosted in white.
Prior to the latest snowfall, we were mired in mud season—the time that tries the soul. Mucky roads, days of dreary skies, stark landscapes awaiting spring’s greening touch. A friend of mine, a kindred spirit who suffers with mud season morbidity, described the view from his windows as a deathly specter.
“The trees,” he lamented, “look like skeletons scrabbling desperately toward the heavens in some vain hope of salvation.”
Though I had little cheer to share, I tried to lift his spirits with early observations of renewal. One sunny day, I told him, I’d driven to Hanover and seen crocuses blooming by a friend’s doorway. (I left out the part about three grown women crouching on the ground by the delicate buds, breathing in careful unison as if our very presence might fracture the fragile evidence of spring.)
But he could not be cheered.
“It’s worse than an Alfred Hitchcock movie set out there,” he said.
I know just how he feels. Which is why, despite my own desperate longing for leaves, I have not been unhappy with this new-fallen snow. It is a relief from the brown, brown, brown. A merciful mud season masquerade, covering dead grasses and outlining skeletal branches in fluffy finery.
The banks of the brook wear ruffles of ice. Rain and melting snow raised the water level. As it dropped again, freezing temperatures edged the banks in lacy adornment.
This touch of winter has a frivolous feeling. I know it won’t last long. It’s a playful fling of a mischievous spring, relieving the drag of mud season. I’m grateful.
I remember a year when leaves didn’t pop out until early June. I nearly lost my mind. It could be a long brown journey into green—I welcome a little white to lighten my way.
So I settle back in this North Country theater and watch the show. Trying to enjoy each act, not rushing ahead in anticipation of the seasonal shift I long for. Cultivating patience—these are the first seeds I plant for spring.
Awaiting the harvest of green.
It is the season of dirty snow, naked earth, and patches of sodden dead leaves, sucking mud-rutted roads, skeletal trees whipping piteously under lashes of wind-driven sleet.
It is the season of madness.
The grace of winter has fled, taking with it the cathedral hush of a snow-blanketed world. In its place, sand-littered roads grate under tires. Following other cars is often a dangerous skirmish with pebble-missiles fired into windshields.
A friend who lives farther south tells me the crocuses are in bloom, but I can’t relate to that. Like the possibility of water on the moon, it is a distant concept with no reality here in the world where I live.
February spoiled us with record-setting sunshine; now March extracts payback with leaden skies, icy rain, and occasional hints of spring that North Country folk know better than to believe in.
Frozen in silence for so long, our backyard brook rushes in rain-swollen tumult, making its own wild dash to spring. But midstream, the rocks are still sheeted with ice.
The cats are crazed. Nature on the edge of spring confounds them. Lulled by warm sunshine occasionally beaming through windows, they expect welcoming warmth outdoors. But brief forays on paw-numbing packed snow leave them disgruntled, and in they want to come.
They return, flicking quick tongues over muddy paws and cold-nipped ear tips, growling their displeasure at me as if I am responsible for this nonsense.
“It’s not my fault,” I grumble back.
“Yeah, right,” their disgusted looks reply.
Five minutes later, they want out again, as if the season might have changed from one moment to the next.
Is it spring yet?
Had I earned a nickel for each time I let out or let in one or both cats on a particularly maddening March day, I would have a small fortune. Instead, reviewing my accomplishments at day’s end, I can recall nothing but serving the door-tending demands of my imperious felines.
The sap of spring rises in furry breasts. Denied outdoor play, our cats and dogs transform the house into an arena for games of tag. They lie in wait, pounce, dash upstairs, careen around corners, thunder downstairs, leap and roll, and perform every feat short of bouncing off the walls.
There is little joy in their games. Their cavorting is edged with desperation.
I am empathetic.
As snowmelt seeps into my basement laundry room, I tiptoe past puddles to the washing machine. Solid ground is but a dream in my dooryard. The house feels colder than in the heart of winter. Lucky souls take flight for destinations where warmth is more than an illusion, while I gaze at distant snowcapped mountains illuminated in frigid sunlight.
And, like my cats, I sit by the door waiting for spring.
When this column appears, I bet the snow will still be up to our windowsills.
A few weeks ago, we asked Jeremy to come over with his backhoe. If we didn’t clear away the snow banked against the house, we’d need a rowboat for our basement laundry room when those mountains melted.
The nice thing about metal roofs is that the snow slides off rather than staying put. Loaded snow on shingled roofs cyclically melts and freezes, causing ice dams and interior water damage. The not-so-nice thing about metal roofs is that avalanches of snow cuddle up to the house.
Thanks to the last two storms that blew through, you’d never know Jeremy had already hauled and shoved away a season’s worth of snow. I console myself with the thought that if he hadn’t, we couldn’t glimpse even a patch of sky out our windows.
While clutched in winter’s stubborn snow-blown grip, I’ve amused myself by observing that the most die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool, native North Country residents have reached the end of their winter tolerance.
Complaining about winter to these folks usually gets you a laconic rebuke, delivered in a rapidly disappearing regional drawl. “Way-uhl, it’s wintah and this is Verrr-mont.” Ringing through this statement are tones that clearly say, “What did you expect, you down-country fool?”
So forgive me if, after decades of being put in my place, I take delight in hearing these folks mutter their own grumble or two.
I’m strangely strengthened by these cracks in the granite of native North Country temperament. My own endless-winter doldrums seem validated. I feel less like a winter-wimp when even the crustiest old-timers aren’t dismissing this season with a “Way-uhl, it’s nothin’ like the wintah of …” Instead, they are saying, “Reminds me of those wintahs when I was a kid.”
This may seem like a subtle concession. But live long enough in the North Country and you come to appreciate such finer points. If this winter lives up to winters past, baby, it’s baaad.
Although everyone I’ve talked to is hungry for green by now, their hankering is tempered by the prospect of mud season and spring cleanup. When all this snow melts, it’s going to be a mess. Broken branches and other winter wreckage lurk under the drifts.
It’ll be some long while before we get to laze in warm sunshine.
I look out at the dog yard that runs along the side of our barn. The fence has been assaulted and is partially collapsed from loads of snow careening off the roof. That’ll be one of our first jobs when we can reach it. Out another window, I look on a mangled lilac that will need a chain-saw rescue.
Wherever I look, work waits for snowmelt. Still, I’m ready to make that trade for the green of spring.
At night, before sleep, I like to read for a while. But at this time of year, that’s nearly impossible.
The flies won’t let me.
I crawl into bed with my book, turn on the light, and they come. Drawn by the warmth of the lamp, they sneak out of devilish hiding places to converge on the ceiling and walls above. Buzzing and beating their foul bodies against the ceiling in mad ecstasy, the flies destroy the quiet I treasure before folding into sleep.
I keep a clean house. There is no rotting matter on which they can feast. But still they come, the first and ugliest precursors of spring. Big flies, little flies. Fat, furry flies. One by one they come, until at least a dozen of the nasty things are feeding on the light, dotting the ceiling above my head.
In frustration, I put the book down and turn off the lamp.
I feel them there, in the darkness. Humming with spastic movement, the flies take time to settle. Even then, I feel their presence. And there is always one, the fattest, that continues to bounce against the ceiling with frenetic insistence long after the others have given up.
After this most persistent beast has come to rest, I am still uneasy. I lay quiet, senses alert. Worrying that they might fall dead in the night on my bed, on my head … perhaps even into my mouth, gone slack with sleep.
It is an Alfred Hitchcock moment. They are there. The ordinary turned malevolent. The Birds in miniature. Determined to reclaim the night, one evening I took the vacuum upstairs and did battle before bed. I stalked and hunted down every fly, feeling grim satisfaction as each one was sucked into the bowels of the machine. It was not an easy task.
Have you ever chased a dancing fly with the small opening of a vacuum hose?
But when the duel was done, when even the window casements were clear, the room was fly-free. I closed the door, so the rear guard could not advance.
Silence.
With a sigh, I crawled into bed with my book. I turned on the bedside lamp. Savored the quiet and began to read.
You know what happened next. One by one …
Old houses have many secrets but nighttime readers are persistent people. I borrowed a trick from childhood, nearly forgotten until need arose …
These nights, you’ll find me under the covers, reading by flashlight.
Walter Wilcox has been picking up our trash ever since we moved to Ryegate Corner more than ten years ago. In rain, sleet, hail, snow, or heat, Walter pulls up in his truck every Wednesday, gets out of the cab, bends over, picks up the heavy bags, and hurls them high on top of the pile already heaped in the back.
Once a month, Walter walks to the porch and sets the bill inside. If there’s a car in the driveway, he takes a shortcut and lays the handwritten bill on the driver’s seat.
There are few things in life as reliable as Walter. The sun rises and sets each day, and on Wednesday Walter picks up our garbage. So this past week, when his appointed time came and went and the bags still sat at the end of the driveway, we worried about Walter.
It’s true that it had been snowing for two days and was bitter cold. The excellent Ryegate road crews were doing their usual best to keep on top of things, but high winds and blowing snow conspired against them. That Wednesday morning, I took one look at the white ribbon of road and decided to work at home instead of risking a wretched slide down into town. But still, I worried about Walter. Snow had never stopped him before.
That evening, Neil brought the bags back in, and I called Walter. I left a message on his machine, even more concerned by the long tone indicating that others had been calling him, too.
A few hours later, Walter called back. In his North Country drawl, as always peppered with an assortment of mild swear words, he admitted to setting out that morning and turning back.
“The wind was blowin’ so much snow I couldn’t see a ***damn thing,” he said with disgust. “An’ I had a wake to get to later on. I was afraid I’d get up in them Ryegate hills and get myself stuck somewheres. So I said to hell with it and came on home.”
I tendered my sympathies on the death in his family and assured him it wasn’t our trash I’d worried about—it was him.
“Naw,” he said, “I’m all right. ’Course I’ve had this damn noo-moan-ya,” he added angrily. “An’ there’s this broken collarbone they found when they did them X-rays. Don’ know where that come from. Don’ remember ever breakin’ it.
“I dunno,” he went on. “Ever since my last birthday it just seems like it’s been one ***damn thing after another. I’m gettin’ along, you know. I’m thinkin’ maybe it’s time for me to quit. Gettin’ to be an ole man.”
Walter is eighty-four. I laughed and said he’d been an old man when he first started picking up for us.
“Naw,” he scoffed, “I was only sev’nty-five.”
There’s something to be learned from people like Walter, but I’ll be ***damned if it can be put into words.
My favorite Walter-wisdom comes from running into him one day in town. I asked how life was treating him.
“Life always treats me just fine,” he replied that day. “It’s the people in it that’ll make you crazy.”
Now, there’s a distinction worth chewin’ on.
Under steel-gray skies—a specialty of dreary mud season—we take to the woods. The trees are bare. Not even a hint of buds. Spring fades to a faint hope in the heart.
The skeletal maples have become so familiar in their stripped-down hibernation, it’s difficult to believe they will ever be dressed again in deciduous glory.
Patches of snow hide in forest shadows. The dogs find them with glee, tracking their frosty surfaces with muddy paws—blissfully rolling in squirming, leg-flailing delight.
I think sometimes that this is the dogs’ favorite time of year. They run across open ground, no undergrowth tugging at their fur, the spongy forest floor soft under their paws, scents of woods creatures strong on exposed earth. Yet there is still snow to play in.
The dogs snuffle along in an olfactory orgy, darting from one invisible trail to another, pawing at small burrows. They thrust their muzzles into little openings in minor acts of destruction … undoing the efforts of some night critter that had dug itself into the pine-needled forest floor.
Moving deeper into the woods, we come across green and flattened ferns, startlingly verdant against the brown, decomposing humus under the trees. They are perfectly formed and vibrant, emerald enchantments on the ground. No other new growth pierces the still-sleeping earth, yet here are these fully grown ferns.
Had they slept, cryogenically preserved under winter snows, now revived? Or, if newly grown, why are they flattened against the ground?
Someone with more woods knowledge than I may have the answers. I prefer the mystery. We caress the fresh fronds with wondering fingertips. In weeks to come, there will be a riot of green, and each fern will not seem so precious.
The woods’ history is revealed in the starkness of pre-spring. In some century past, these acres were orchards and fields. Where rock walls once stood, scattered stones gather, half sunk into the ground in ragged rows. Naked of underbrush, they are testaments to some farmer’s labors, stone by stone evoking the sweat of his brow.
What would he think, I wonder, of this land that abides but is not worked? Would he think it a waste? Or be grateful that at least there is no paving here?
Ferns and stones and snow traces captivate us, but it is the brook that fascinates. While the others just hint at spring, the stream carries the message with boisterous vigor. Snowmelt and rain have transformed quiet waters into a rushing furor, swift and strong, white-watering over rocks like little Niagaras.
Under leaden skies, I gaze into the water where it eddies in pools below the falls. No reflections dance on its surface. I see dark waters bright and clear.
Dark waters bright and clear, with spring still a breath away.
It’s that time of year. Time to throw open the closets, to refresh and renew dark places where clutter has hibernated through winter.
The onset of warm sunshine and balmy breezes inspires a hunger to clean house. Perhaps we want our homes to be as fresh as the air we gulp like heady champagne when we dash around triumphantly opening windows.
But even with such inspired motivation, thinning out my wardrobe always slows me down. Why are old clothes so difficult to let go? They might be tattered at the edges, woefully outdated or too snug for comfort, but year after year I re-file some clothes like old love letters that cannot be thrown away.
I once read a New York Times column on this subject. The author pointed out that certain items of clothing become symbols of stages in our lives, or reflect elements of our personalities we do not want to lose.
Right on, I thought, considering the dashiki-print caftan hanging next to my sensible North Country turtleneck tops. Newly graduated from high school, I wore that caftan in the heady days of first freedom from the parental abode.
It was 1969. The place was San Francisco. I hung out in coffeehouses, dreaming of being a poet.
No matter that the hem unraveled long ago, or that it’s too tight across my back. Having it in my closet reminds me of idealistic days and the pristine belief in a writer’s dreams.
The tee shirt from my high school boys’ gymnastics team takes up scarce drawer space. In those pre–Title 9 days, girls’ teams didn’t rate their own uniforms. Boys got a new tee each season. Our challenge was to convince one of the guys to give up his. Not an easy task. Many a short-lived gymnast-romance came under suspicion of tee-shirt intent.
I won mine not through romance, but through the kindness of a graduating senior. Rick was a ring man, built like a V. He was quiet and gentle and had the same girlfriend all through high school. She was as quiet as he. Rick gave me his tee shirt because he knew how much it meant. It was his comment on the injustice of girls not having their own.
It is as thin and soft as fine fabric now. But the coveted SKYLINE GYMNASTICS is still bright red. I’ve hand-stitched disintegrating seams innumerable times. I wear it rarely to preserve its life, but I know that even if it were reduced to shreds, I could not let it go.
It is a reminder of an era of heart-thumping competitive excitement, and of a time when the sting of inequality was softened by a boy who understood.
So though I clean and clear, my closets and drawers will always be more cluttered than they could be.
This is a price I’m willing to pay … for reminders that enrich my life, for memories that make me smile.
We’re on the brink of spring. Stuck in the mud, surrounded by brown—but I spied buds on our lilac tree yesterday. In my garden, daylilies have sent green shoots scouting above the ground.
The brook is hale and hearty, rushing over rocks as if delirious with freedom. While I was changing the sheets in the upstairs bedroom, two Canada geese flew by the window. Fat and sassy they were, and close enough that I could marvel at their detailed markings as they winged gracefully northward.
We have had days when the morning sun was strong enough to heat our enclosed front porch. Strong enough that we could open the kitchen door and let the balmy solar-warmed air into the house.
Yet, I find, it isn’t easy to let go of the winter state of mind.
We cocoon in winter. Like hibernating animals, we take sanctuary in our caves. We seek home and hearth against the furies of raw wind and snow. The quietude of the sleeping, white-blanketed world outside seeps into our spirits. We shift into low gear, conserving energy.
As winter loosens its icy grip, I emerge gradually from my cave. Slowly, like the inch-by-inch emergence of new green in my garden. As if caution is called for. Not quite trusting that another storm won’t swoop down and lay its icy mantle on my head.
Snow scrapers and brushes are still on the floor of my car. Headed outside, I grab my winter coat, hat, and gloves as a matter of course. On some days, thus bundled, I sit sweating behind the wheel and realize a lighter coat would have sufficed.
The unconscious anticipation of dangerous, unpredictable road conditions is still keen. I make appointments and plans with icy roads in mind. These days, however, the worst I’m likely to encounter is rain.
Some afternoons, when the sun shines, I’m taken by surprise—discovering that it’s nice enough to sit on the open back porch. The heat is captured under the roof, and if the wind doesn’t blow down from the north, I can turn my face to the sun, close my eyes, and feel warmth stealing into my bones.
But when the wind picks up, it is a strange sun-warm, air-cold experience. This time of year presents such contrasts. The crocuses may be blooming, but there is snow in our woods, pockets where the chill still reigns.
We dance these days between winter and spring. What will it be today? The slow waltz of winter subsiding, or a sprightly spring fox-trot?
Do I need the heavy coat, or will a jacket do? Is it warm enough to open the doors, or is the wind raw-edged with winter’s trailing touch?
These questions mark the way out of winter state of mind, as I unfurl from the cocoon where I have cuddled against the cold.
What’s in a name? Possibly, reduced repair bills. Give a machine a name and it reacts with gratitude, delivering a better performance in return. Or so we hope.
Laugh if you will. But consider this. In World War II, pilots named the planes that carried them into battle. The choice was a significant, symbolic business.
It’s not enough for us that a collection of mechanical parts merely does its job. There is a human impulse to create identity for the inanimate equipment we rely on. The impulse to create a relationship.
If you snicker at the notion of naming your automobile, I ask you this … Do you get into your car on a cold winter morning and, before turning the ignition key, mutter “C’mon, baby,” or some such encouragement?
And once the car has obligingly started, do you pat the dashboard gratefully with a silent or spoken, “That’s a good girl”?
If you’re going to talk to it, you might as well give it a name. The principle remains the same.
Many people might not confess to conversing with their cars. I am not among them. As a result, I had an interesting exchange with a local mechanic. I shall not reveal his identity. The man has a business to run, and the general public may not consider his attitude as enlightened as I do.
Dropping my car off for a tune-up, I gave the hood a gentle slap and said, “Don’t worry, girl, they’ll take good care of you.” I’m accustomed to talking to my car in private but had forgotten the mechanic was standing there.
Caught in the act, I blushed. I considered making a joke out of my car conversation, but the words never made it to my lips. There he stood, the rugged North Country mechanic, smiling at me. Shrugging, I grinned. “Yep, I talk to my car.”
“Good thing,” he replied calmly.
“Excuse me?” I said, surprised.
“A-yuh. A good thing,” he said.
“Why’s that,” I asked.
Wiping his hardy hands on a rag, he said, “Cars that get talked to run better.”
“Really?” said I, shocked not by his statement, but by his willingness to utter it.
“Yup. Don’t understand it. Just know it’s true.”
I got to thinking about this the other day. If it works for cars, why not for other essential machines?
Let me introduce you to our furnace. Her name is Gertrude.
It wasn’t until years after this column appeared that I learned protecting the identity of my car mechanic was unnecessary. Tim Spooner, owner of Groton Garage, stands behind his experience.
“I think it’s funny,” he laughed.
Is there some special part of the brain devoted to storing song lyrics?
Amid all the knowledge in our gray matter, isn’t it amazing that tucked away somewhere are all the words to “Harper Valley PTA”?
And why?
I genuinely love learning and have a high regard for history. Then why do all the lyrics of “Monster Mash” spring forth at the opening chords, but I can’t recite more than the first few lines of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”?
What is it about music that so imprints words in our memories that we remember commercial jingles from childhood, but our parents’ anniversaries always take us by surprise?
As if lyrical memory itself were not enough, few songs come back to us without a wealth of associated sensory details from long ago. The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” brings back sights and scents from my first dances and first love.
The smooth–rough texture of his corduroy jacket, the blue crepe paper hanging in the gym, that cologne I would recognize even if I were standing in a field freshly spread with manure. The feel of his slightly sweaty hand in mine. My nervousness, wondering if he would kiss me right there in front of God, everybody, and the chaperones.
That’s a lot of baggage for a few notes to carry.
Each generation has its own music, its own memories. Sinatra’s “Me and My Gal” takes me back to a California kitchen where my parents danced, singing along to “their song.” My mother, a tall woman, bent over with her head on Dad’s shoulder. An awkward height combination, but no less graceful for the discrepancy. They danced, caught in their own memories of early love, creating memories for me. They are dead now, but many songs bring them back—my mother’s trilling laugh, my father’s crooked grin.
It was Dad who introduced me to the blues, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the console stereo he called “the Victrola.” As the wailing tones of music came through the speakers, he told me the sad tale of Billie Holli-day’s life, the trials of Miles Davis, stories of racism that drove so many black musicians to Europe. And when Dad died, the most precious gift I brought home was his record collection.
Every groove is an unbroken line of my history.
And though the twenty-something clerk looked at me oddly when I insisted my first CD stereo system be equipped with an antiquated turntable, I was not embarrassed. Those revolving platters carve my paths into the past, where the long-dead still dance and tell the stories, which have now become mine.
Where the magic of musical memory enchants me still, and always will.
The gloomy month of April has made this year’s passage from winter to spring a journey of mythic proportions. Day after day, week after week, dreary overcast skies have tried the souls of the most hardy North Countryites.
Even taciturn and stolid old-timers have been heard to mumble edgy, disconsolate commentaries in this dark time. Faced with slowly emerging shoots of green in my garden, I have barely restrained myself from speeding their growth with desperate tugs.
Now there is one, one, sprightly bunch of daffodils finally blossoming in my yard—in a spot protected from the north wind and advantageously exposed to meager measures of sunshine. On several occasions, I have knelt near-worship-fully in front of this modest cluster of brightness. Drinking in deep draughts of flower power from this lone nourishing hope under gray skies.
Meadows have greened to velvet, a startling sight against the stark background. This landscape is a study in contrasts, verdant carpet ringed by snowcapped mountains and skeletal sentinels of maple and birch.
I should be more grateful for meadows’ majesty, but I am deeply dispirited by the view from my kitchen windows. They overlook the woods, and the forest floor is still blanketed with dead leaves. Brown, brown, awaiting true spring’s renewal.
As April surrendered to May, a few sunny days dawned bright. But winds blew raw with winter’s edge, and the sun was winter-weak. It has been too long. I am greedy. Sun-bright is nice, but not enough. I want warmth.
A new edge of desperation came in with May—the sure knowledge that warmth and blackflies will arrive at the same time. Canceling each other out and driving me back indoors.
It’s just not fair.
Walking through the woods, it appears that this endless wait for spring has been as hard on the trees as it has on me. Whole trees have fallen … as if they could hold out no longer and fell in defeat. Our usual pathways are blocked by their massive corpses. It is not some illness peculiar to our forest. Down the highway and on back roads, we see more toppled trees than in previous years.
My imagination’s fancy sees these downed trees as nature’s winter-weary soldiers surrendering in exhaustion, having lost all hope that balmy breezes would e’er blow again.
This personalization of the trees’ demise is somehow comforting. If even the trees have fallen to the rigors of this lingering winter, my own malaise feels less absurd.
And so I watch the slow progress of barely budding trees with steely intent. “Leaf out, leaf out,” I growl in part prayer, part curse.
For comfort, I stand in awe before a small cluster of miniature daffodils, and get down on my knees to gently touch their soft, golden petals.
I am not a frilly, frou-frou woman. But when the sun shines and I am basking in a warm spot on the back porch, I long for cotton dresses.
This whim breezed through today, with the realization that I am deadly weary of bundling up against the cold. It’s darn difficult to feel feminine through a North Country winter.
I’ve tried, heaven knows. I’ve scoured shops for winter wear in bright, light colors. I have even scored a few. My penultimate triumph was a winter coat in a yummy raspberry shade. It brightens glowering days.
Cheery colors help. But as long as I’m layered in bulk, encased in pants and clomping around in boots, femininity eludes me.
Back when I was teaching, I could indulge in lighter wear. Functional outer layers could be shed after the frigid, messy trek from car to class. But now that I work at home, I don’t have the cocoon of a classroom to go to.
Here in my venerable, drafty Vermont farmhouse, practicality reigns. Trudging down to the basement wood furnace, popping out to the woodshed, keeping the front porch shoveled clean—these routines do not lend themselves to frivolous dress.
The enduring tomboy in me really doesn’t mind the rigors of rural living. There’s a deep satisfaction in carting armloads of wood from shed to basement. Without doubt, I carry less each trip than in years past and move more slowly, but I chalk that up to good sense.
Stepping outside into the snappy, post-storm air and shoveling snow can be strangely exhilarating. Holding one’s own against the elements is a North Country thrill difficult to translate to citizens beyond these borders. But around this time of the year, my feminine spirit awakens with the siren song of spring. I dream of long, light dresses brushing bare legs. I yearn to tote nothing heavier than a handbag.
It doesn’t matter that, in reality, donning a dress will not be my initial spring celebration. Nope, I’ll be mucking about in the garden. Or pruning the raspberry patch. Or dodging blackflies to find the first green growth in the woods. Still, if I wanted to stroll down the street in feminine finery, I could.
As the seasons cycle, North Country life demands that we move from one set of chores to the next. High fashion isn’t high on our lists …
Perhaps my frou-frou turn of mind can be blamed on the Academy Awards show. All those women, hair coiffed, draped in elegant jewels and gowns, trailing clouds of silk down the red carpet, prodded some womanly instinct deep in North Country hibernation.
Wouldn’t it be fun, just for one night? Maybe we need a Spring Fling here in the hinterlands. A fluffy, frivolous evening … a grown-up prom, perhaps.
Something fun, before spring chores demand their due.
It is May 15 and it is snowing. I’d say something obscene, but my editor would delete it.
Anyway, this is the North Country and I’m not supposed to be surprised by any bizarre weather nature throws our way. I wouldn’t want the old-timers to laugh at me.
But it’s May 15, and it’s snowing.
A few days ago, I spoke with someone from down country—where it’s almost summer—and she jokingly asked if it was snowing here. “Bite your tongue,” I replied.
I hold her personally responsible for today’s snow.
I bet if I drove down the hill into Wells River, it wouldn’t be snowing there. Doesn’t matter. Up here in Ryegate Corner, the frozen north of the North, I will have to scrape my windshield before I go anywhere.
I know this stuff won’t amount to much. The snow shovel can, most probably, stay in the barn. Doesn’t matter. There’s white drifting down, frosting the lilac buds. It’s May 15, it’s snowing—it’s the principle of the thing.
All told, the universe has put my life on the fritz. I am dangerous. I burn whatever I cook. This morning, I walked on the cat. The other day, I couldn’t even open a door and go through it properly. I opened and moved simultaneously, smashing my toes, jamming my wrist, and jerking my head back in shock and alarm.
Now I need to visit the chiropractor, my toe cries “hairline fracture,” and my wrist aches where it sits on the keyboard.
Yesterday my computer turned on me. It hiccuped strangely and burped rudely through some essential functions. I spent several frustrating hours on automated help lines—“Please listen carefully to the options: They have recently changed to make it even more impossible to comprehend this process or to get any kind of meaningful help whatsoever.”
Here’s the only part that made sense, delivered in dulcet tones of hearty humanoid cheer: “Our best guess is that you’ve picked up a nasty virus. Our live customer service representative will help you on a fee-paid basis of a zillion dollars an hour, or you can visit our website.”
I visited their website and was transported to the land of TechnoSpeak where English isn’t even a second language. I lack the congenital geek gene, so the instructions served only to alarm me further—“your computer will curl up and die if you don’t get rid of this bug.”
Thoroughly panicked, I called Paige Computer Systems in Woodsville. Dale said Ely could doctor my computer if I got down there straightaway. Luckily, it wasn’t snowing yesterday, so I could fly down the hill.
Ely did his technical thing. No virus. But since I had to pay for the office visit anyway, he gave my ’puter a general checkup, did some geeky magic, and sent me home with a happy laptop. Total cost: twenty-five dollars. Blessings be bestowed on local businesses.
I hope your week is going better than mine and that, wherever you are, it isn’t snowing.
Golly gee, there are leaves on the trees!
I know this sounds simpleminded. I know that my friends who live Elsewhere will question the state of my mental health, but I shall staunchly defend my delight to all comers.
This is a thrill reserved for denizens of the North Country and similar climes. It isn’t that we cold-climate country folk are easily entertained. We’re just more attuned to natural wonders. Deprivation does that.
We’ve had nearly seven months of naked-tree gazing. In our context, the reappearance of leaves constitutes a minor miracle.
I drove down to Hanover last week, in what might be regarded as a reverse-direction foliage drive. From atop our hill, directly in the path of Ryegate Corner’s north wind, to the heart of the Dartmouth College campus, I savored the progression of leaf development.
Happily transfixed by the passage from fragile, translucent baby birch leaves to the unfolding fronds of maples, I meandered down Route 5, crossed over to New Hampshire at Thetford, and continued down Route 10. It’s a good thing I was out at midmorning when traffic was light. I drove slowly, mimicking flatlander leaf-peepers whose fall rubbernecking drives us crazy.
As if the leaves are as happy as I am in their debut, they come forth shouting in colors that are nearly unnatural. The first leaves of spring are a shining yellow-green neon that glows against the backdrop of dark pines.
Day by day, the distant hillsides gradually fill in, like a child coloring inside the lines with deliberate concentration. I have a friend who insists she likes the starkness of winter—when leafless woods reveal views later curtained by foliage. And it is true. With leaves, the landscape changes.
Roads seem to shrink, narrowed by overarching branches ribboned with green. The woods move in more closely around our homes, shielding forest secrets from sight.
Winter clearings become verdant glades. Rivers and streams, once exposed swaths glistening in the sun, are reduced to glimpses you only catch through wind-parted screens of green.
Backwoods homes retreat once again, no longer visible through the trees. I’ll soon forget they are there, and will be surprised again next winter when they reappear.
The harsh lines of winter’s countryside have given way to leaf-softened shapes. The monotones of frigid months and mud season are relieved by spring’s emerging hues. Even on gray days, the scattered yellow of dandelions punctuates green meadows, rainbow tulips’ upturned bells ring cheery notes, and wild violets dance purple through the grass.
In days past, black-and-white photographs were tinted by hand. A blush on the cheek here, a reddened lip there. Our North Country shifts into spring the same way—feature by feature, shade by shade, the countryside comes alive again.
So allow me, please, my simpleminded pleasures. It has been a long winter. I have earned my glee.
Once upon a time not so long ago, music was not just a spectator sport. Some of my most treasured memories of North Country life feature a few friends, a guitar or two, and good times with tunes.
I remember a porch overlooking the lush summer countryside. Bucky with his guitar, Vinnie and me with our harmonicas, a jug of hard cider, chairs tipped back, song rising on a gentle wind. From the trees, woodpecker percussion accented the beat. I still feel the warmth—the sun on my face, the camaraderie of creation.
I remember a cold winter’s night. A group gathered around the woodstove, the smoky tang of maple logs crackling. Outside, the wind howled. Inside, the dog chimed in on occasional chords. Riffs of laughter accompanied fingers dancing on frets.
No one would mistake the music we made for professional fare. So what? The magic was in the making. None of us had dreams of stardom. We were teachers and truck drivers, construction workers and waiters. We just loved to make music.
I can’t remember the last time I shared that delight. A friend and I were talking about this the other day, and it left me wondering … Where has all the music gone?
“Everybody’s plugged in and passive,” Gino grumbled. “Watching music on television, listening through headphones.” Plugged in and passive. Consumers, not creators.
Child of the ’60s, I grew up in the era of garage bands and folk guitar. Everyone, it seemed, either wanted to learn or already played. And in my Girl Scout days, the star at the campfire was the one with the guitar, leading us in song as sparks rose into the dark night.
Even if you knew only four chords, you never hesitated to take your guitar to the party. You’d play your four and learn a few more.
Have we become too busy for the magic of making music? Have we taught our children that music is only for a select few headed for superstardom?
Taxpayers slash music programs from school budgets as non-essential fluff—even though research shows that making music literally enhances brain development. Scientists have all sorts of neurological explanations for that, cells and synapses and brain chemistry.
I look at it more simply. Brain cells dance to the sheer joy of music. Happy brains are healthy brains.
The weaving of notes is an alchemy beyond our ken. Food for the mind, solace for our souls. A mini-vacation. A prescription for what ails you.
Bucky and Vinnie have long since moved away. Somewhere out there, nestled in the North Country hills, I bet there are other people who hanker to play for pleasure. If you’re reading this, contact me. Please.
Have harmonica, will travel.
Oh, spring! Dressed in new vibrant, lush foliage, some trees bring to mind grand ladies in opulent ball gowns on their way to an elegant party.
And no town around throws a spring fling quite like Newbury.
From the northern point of the old Placey (now Huntington) Farm, south to the old Page (now Johnson) Farm, flowering crab apple trees line the road. Given the right conditions, these unassuming trees turn Newbury into a pink fairyland of delicate enchantment.
There has never been a Flowering Crab Festival, and there never will be. So brief is this glory that one must be poised to appreciate it. One rain shower, one strong wind can destroy the ethereal magic before it reaches full splendor.
Last year, I drove through Newbury just after the party was over. I cursed myself for the busy-ness that had driven from my mind the approaching time of beauty. I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again. I vowed to stay attuned to the signs, to remember that an exquisite experience awaited.
On Mother’s Day, Neil and I drove slowly into Newbury, ooh-ing and aah-ing at the preview on the outskirts of town. Then we parked at the school and walked through fairyland, giddy with the sights and scents.
I wouldn’t trade that walk for a byline in The New York Times.
This flowered exuberance is a bit of small-town sorcery—ordinary people creating an extraordinary vision. In the spring of 1969, the Jolly Workers 4-H Club of Newbury, under the direction of Marjorie Deming and beautification project leaders Mr. and Mrs. Leland Wooding, set out 270 flowering crabs.
The 4-H kids sold the trees to individuals and town organizations and helped plant for people who couldn’t manage by themselves. Not all the trees survived, but the legacy is undeniably magnificent. A few of those kids are grown and still live in Newbury; eleven families of those dozen Jolly Workers are still represented in town.
How proud they must be, along with everyone who bought a tree. What deep pleasure they must feel to have had a hand in creating this heritage of nature’s resplendence.
They certainly have my profound gratitude. The quixotic jubilee is no less glorious for its fleeting nature. Indeed, the flowering crabs of Newbury remind me to make space for beauty in my life … and that is a magic all its own.
Many thanks to Pat Rhoads and Ginny Swenson for helping me get the history straight.
Dreams are strange things. Like messages in a bottle tossed into the seas of our somnolent minds, they sometimes bob to the surface in great detail. I woke one morning, thinking of my mother’s aprons.
In my dream, I was giving a dinner party. I wanted a nice apron to wear for the evening and thought one of Mom’s would be perfect. But as I mentally ran through all the places the aprons might be—tucked in the cedar chest, folded among the sheets—I realized I hadn’t seen them for a very long time.
Then I realized I no longer had them.
I felt a piercing sense of loss so acute its sharpness wakened me. The distress accompanied me into consciousness.
I am a keeper of things, a collector of memories. My grandfather’s gold retirement watch rests in my mother’s cedar chest, alongside his Shriner’s ring. When Dad died, I kept several of his shirts—I wear them with bittersweet affection when I garden. Mother’s fancy evening purses accompany me on special occasions.
I never roll dough, yet her rolling pin has a prized place in my kitchen. Her wedding crystal serves wine to my guests. But I do not know what happened to those aprons. Did I give them away as some useless artifact of a lifestyle long gone, I wondered in the dream’s aftermath.
My mother was a woman of a generation that wore aprons … and now, families struggle to even sit down to dinner. And when they do, how often is it a dinner cooked from scratch, with all the mess that entails? Microwaved food isn’t very messy. Macaroni from a box cooks up cleanly.
Recently, I saw an item on the news about a town that decided the rush of life had become too much. Collectively, they decided to cancel all after-school activities and evening social events once a month. On that evening, the town would sit down to dinner together. Parents and children, families together.
This town wanted to reclaim the “family dinner” tradition that was an unquestioned daily routine of my upbringing. When I saw this, I first thought, “How wonderful,” then “How sad” that it should take a community movement to wrest from life an hour to break bread together.
I see my mother’s aprons in memory. Everyday colorful cotton aprons with indistinct stains even Clorox couldn’t quite erase. Fancy aprons she wore for dinner parties, barely functional, with deep ruffled netting like a bridal veil.
I dreamed of Mother’s aprons, icons of another time. A hungry dream for slower days, rich with gravy.
A dream in memoriam for a generation of women whose homemaking arts were misunderstood, devalued in the storm of “liberation” that followed … whose daughters now have a new appreciation for the complex grace of a family meal.
summer Our yard has been ugly. The artesian well installed late last fall left us with the granddaddy of bald spots stretching across the north end of the house, near the perennial gardens where we usually sit in nice weather.
Then, as winter’s snow piles threatened spring floods in the basement, we hired Jeremy to move the mounds away from the foundation. As good as he is with his big rig, it left deep gashes, as if an angry clawed monster had used the front lawn for a scratching post.
When the grass started coming up, the yard looked pathetic. Unsightly ruts ran every which way, and spring flowers bloomed next to naked ground.
Do we need a layer of clean fill? Who would haul and spread it? How much would that cost?
I added such items to my domestic to-do list, where they languished amid urgent or ordinary day-to-day tasks. Mostly, I just looked the other way when I walked from the car to the house, feeling that our yard was a blight on the countryside. A measure of our failure as country folk.
We eventually made it to a local garden store, thinking we’d at least buy some grass seed. There we learned that grass is complicated stuff.
There was a dizzying array of seed to choose from. Apparently, we were supposed to “match” what we already had. What kind did we have? If we planted a different kind, would the lawn look strange?
Then there were fertilizers. Some grass seed had it mixed in, but other products claimed that was insufficient for verdant growth … And there were spreading gadgets, for seed, for fertilizer …
Neil and I left the store, baffled and feeling stupid, overwhelmed by the science of grass.
About that time, a Vermont farmer friend came over and I confessed our yard care anxiety. I was ready for anything: dry humor at our incompetence or a detailed laundry list of utterly intimidating procedures.
Well, said she, you could go to all that trouble with fill and recontouring the ground. Or you could just wait and see how much grass comes back. Then you could toss a few handfuls of grass seed in the worst places. If not this year, then next year, she figured, it’d all probably take care of itself.
“That’s the Vermont way,” she said.
I was relieved—I had been given dispensation. It was okay for things to look awful. It was okay to let nature take its time.
Things look better now. The claw scars healed themselves. The ruts have mostly leveled out. Neil just finished raking and tossing some seed (by hand) around the shrinking wasteland.
Maybe this will do the trick. Maybe it won’t.
We’ll just wait and see.
When Neil and I bought our house on the hill in Ryegate Corner eight years ago, we moved from cable country to television Never-Neverland. Two stations, folks. Count ’em. Two.
We could probably get more with an outside antenna, but high winds are common up our way and the maintenance shock of owning our first home was bad enough without worrying about that, too. Besides, a few spectacular thunderstorms convinced us we didn’t want an antenna competing with the lightning rods.
So we learned to live with Channel 8 out of Maine and Vermont ETV. The TV upstairs occasionally pulls in Channel 3 out of Burlington, but only if the wind is blowing just right, if you jiggle the rabbit ears to perfection, and if skies are clear. We found TV-alternative ways to entertain ourselves and have adapted pretty gracefully to the limitations, except for weather reports.
The Maine station acknowledges New Hampshire weather, but Vermont gets only an a-yuh sort of mention. Over time, we’ve learned that if the Maine-predicted weather front is moving north, we’re likely to be in the midst of whatever they’re anticipating. If the front is moving south, it generally takes a day and a half to get here. East–west patterns are too ornery to figure out.
On ETV, they don’t do weather, except documentaries on hurricanes and historically significant snowstorms.
This year we decided to buy one of those small satellite dishes and looked forward to expanded entertainment and improved weather reports courtesy of modern technology.
What we got was 175 stations, give or take a few … and no local weather.
I don’t understand the Weather Channel. What they call “local weather” covers someplace in the Midwest, and just about every time I tune in, I catch “Pacific Weather Update.” It’s nice to see what my California friends are experiencing, but I live here. When the actual weather people do the national weather, they seem to think the East Coast stops somewhere around New York. Vermont doesn’t even rate little symbols to give me a hint of what’s to come.
I’ve been startled by dire weather warnings flashing across the bottom of my television screen, preceded by an attention-getting tone resembling an electronic alarm clock, guaranteed to jump-start a resting heartbeat. I catch my breath, poised for action in the face of impending natural disaster … until the affected areas are listed. The threatening tornado is headed for Atlanta (CBS out of Georgia) or the heavy storm is a distant southern fury (NBC from Carolina), and I feel like a damn fool.
ABC comes out of New York, but heaven knows their weather patterns are not our own, or even as distantly related as fourth cousins once removed. We can tell you the three-day forecast for Neil’s folks in New Jersey, but don’t know if we should close our windows before going to work.
It’s an odd thing, being members of the global community. We can watch the nightly news from Japan, but I’m left wondering whether to water my garden or if this dry spell will break. I’m trying to build the radio habit and look for weather in local papers, but I miss the visuals.
On TV, I can be anywhere but here.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone of modern technology.
As if nature could read the calendar, the first day of summer brought hotter temperatures. Though the days had previously been warm, nights were so cool I still had flannel sheets on the beds.
Summer arrives later in Ryegate than it does less than ten minutes down the hill in Wells River or Woodsville. Perhaps you’ve long since switched to cotton sheets, broken out the fans or put in air conditioners.
Such tasks can be perceived as irritating chores, or they can be seen as rituals of the season—the rhythms of our lives. I find quiet comfort in the cyclic tasks of seasonal shifts.
I go out to the barn where the fans are stored. A bird has built a nest on a beam. As I enter the barn, the bird and I startle each other. It alights on the painted wooden figure of a sorcerer. The sorcerer’s pointed, glitter-glimmering hat is now crowned with our feathered tenant. Very Harry Potter. My laughter alarms the bird into fluttering retreat out the barn door.
The nest is an architectural wonder. Stuck on the face of a beam, the wad of fuzzy mud gives no hint of an opening. This bird is not a neat builder—bits of nest have been falling for days. Neil has moved the tractor from beneath it so the mess lands on the floor instead of fouling the machine.
As I carry a standing fan back through sunny heat to the house, I notice that, despite the rain we’ve had, the grass is dry and crunchy.
Since we store the fans in the barn, I don’t clean them before I put them away. Maybe that’s a rationalization. We cover them with plastic, but it just feels right to start summer with freshly cleaned fans. With two dogs and a cat, animal hair gets pulled into the safety grids and collects dirt. Being allergic to dust, the last thing I want is to fire up a fan and blow dust all over the house.
I enjoy small mechanical tasks. Disassembling the fans, I am pleasantly meditative. Hands busy, mind empty. It is satisfying to see the white plastic blades emerge pristine from their layer of grime.
Madness and mayhem may be afoot in the world, but my fans are clean.
Tomorrow, I’ll open the cedar chest I inherited from my mother and take out the cotton sheets. I remember, with a smile, how she gave me the chest when I first moved away from home. She hated that chest, a “proper” girl’s present when she turned fourteen.
She had wanted a new shotgun.
Chores, yes … but they sing the songs of our lives.
One of my earliest memories is of my mother on her knees in the gardens of my childhood Virginia home.
It was the ’50s, she was a Southern lady, so she wore pink flowered gardening gloves and a housedress with an apron as she trimmed the rosebushes. Her long, dark hair pulled back in a bun and crowned with a braid, she’d hum and dig in the decorative borders of our backyard.
Even I knew these moments were snatched from brownie baking, women’s service clubs, choir practice, and carting children hither and yon—the full life of full-time moms in the days before “working” motherhood.
She never grew vegetables, but we had crab apple trees. By some sorcery, she transformed their bitter fruit into delicate jelly in steaming, pungent pots. And so it was that even in a post–World War II suburban neighborhood, I grew up with an awareness of the land’s bounty in roses, irises, and jams.
I planted my first pansies in Pennsylvania when I was in third grade. Pansies, because I needed their happy faces. My family was miserable in our new, unwelcoming town.
In my floral ignorance, I hoped they would draw hummingbirds as in my grandmother’s West Virginia garden where hollyhocks grew taller than me. There, jeweled birds darted diamond-bright in the summer sunshine among the yellow tomatoes my grandmother taught me to love.
My grandparents’ home was a row house with a narrow corridor backyard in coal country. There, my grandfather bestowed gentryhood on his family because he was not a miner. He sold insurance in a land where the whistling, lumbering passage of coal-filled trains sang my summer lullabies.
I have my own gardens now, carved out of Vermont tropical-lush forests clamoring up the hillside to reclaim every small bit of land I’ve tamed. The wild has its way. Columbine and lupine mingle with carefully cultivated perennials, native sisters moved in at the land’s will, not mine.
Flourishing flowers have been a wonder to me. The first year, I watched winter kill and despaired. But in the spring, the garden proliferated. After another season of bounty, I thinned the growth and expanded the flower beds without having to purchase a single plant.
In jeans and sneakers I fight the ferns that would engulf my flowers, humming in Skin So Soft–scented shirts culled from my father’s closet after he died. Blackflies and myrtle don’t give much ground. The only roses I have are gifts from a gardener long since gone, who perhaps like myself was surprised by their appearance—pink, wild, and lower to the ground than their stately, well-bred sisters.
I have no hollyhocks here, but bee balm grows tall and calls hummingbirds. They grace our garden like small, sleek angels. Their presence creates a connection with the gardens of my childhood … humming memories of the women before me who also kneeled on dirty knees and smiled.
Life gives us magic moments. In the North Country, these moments often involve nature.
The visiting falcon perching on the porch roof. Two pairs of black dragonflies dancing in tandem down by the brook. The rosy glaze of alpenglow on distant mountains.
Living here has taught me to drop everything and grab these quixotic gifts. The falcon takes sudden flight. Darting dragon-flies vanish in the next breath. Alpenglow is a transient trick of light easily erased by a passing cloud.
“Come see!” is our urgent code for fleeting natural phenomena. No time to explain what or why—whatever it is could be whatever it was in a heartbeat.
I’m fascinated that this immediacy exists in counterpoint to the underlying slow rhythm of North Country life. The seasons turn, and turn again. If you haven’t managed to pack away your winter clothes by now, it isn’t worth the effort. Soon, the late-summer evening chill will have us reaching for those sweaters. Let it go.
But when a snowy owl perched in the tree smack-dab in front of my kitchen window, I was there instantaneously.
Some things simply cannot (and will not) wait.
Take rainbows and the shifting light of sunrise and sunset. The full arc of a double rainbow fades faster than the time it takes to put away that last dish. A whimsical lavender sunset cloud turns common pink while you hang up a shirt.
And so it was that we recently surprised Rod and Gail who were driving by our house at sunset … They spotted Neil and me romping atop the rock wall bordering our front yard.
The sky, you see, was bizarre. Abruptly abandoning the movie we were watching, we dashed outside and clamored up on the flat-topped wall for a better view.
We beheld an eerie sky. Just above the western tree line was a bright strip of gleaming, greenish gold. Above that was a bank of huge clouds illuminated by the strange light. The clouds had jagged edges, needle-sharp and glittering. In contrast, the northern sky was utterly dark with foreboding thunderclouds.
The wind blew weird, expanding greenish gold clouds right at us. If the hairs on the back of my neck didn’t stand on end, they certainly wanted to.
Suddenly the line of trees to the west was brought into sharp focus in the uncanny light—as if seen through finely adjusted binoculars—and the leaves of one maple glowed phosphorescent.
Then radiating beams fanned out like spotlights, pointing to the highest heavens, and the peculiar greenish tint was gone. The trees returned to their normal appearance.
“Oh, wow,” was our immediate, if inarticulate, response.
A year from now (well, heck, maybe next week), I won’t remember what movie we were watching. But those moments on top of the wall, watching the peculiar sky, will forever be an Oscar-equivalent memory.
When we bought our place, we inherited a raspberry patch. It’s probably as old as the house. I suspect more than a century of berries has come out of this unruly thicket of nature’s glory. Even old-timers can’t name one of the cultivated varieties here.
This plant produces berries the shape and size of a thimble. Nearly an inch long, perfectly conical and sweet, they are almost seedless. Really. This is not just a proud momma bragging. I have witnesses.
Picked warm in the afternoon sun, the berries melt in your mouth like raspberry cotton candy newly spun … so delicious it nearly breaks your heart.
Like much else in the North Country, the patch has a mind of its own. Disdaining orderly ranks, it marches to the beat of an untamed drum. The cane grows like small tree branches—tough and sturdy, rising nearly six feet if unpruned, bending and weaving together in leafy embrace.
Untended for many years, the patch was a tangled nightmare of dead cane and new growth. “Mow it down,” many advised. “There’s nothing else you can do.”
But I love raspberries. As snarled as the poor patch was, its twisted jumble offered a veritable embarrassment of berries. Red riches glowing in golden sunlight. To sacrifice such bounty seemed a sacrilege.
I knew nothing of raspberries. I had never tended a crop nor cultivated any plot of land. So, for the first three seasons, I simply observed.
Gradually, the patch revealed its secrets. Cane that looks dead in the early spring is dormant and will bear summer’s berries. It is easiest to distinguish dead cane in late spring by the absence of leafy shoots. Emerging growth is inconveniently underfoot but cannot be cut. Those plants will bear next year’s berries.
In those first years, I picked by wriggling through the thicket on my belly like a combat soldier moving under barbed wire. Flipping onto my back on the damp ground, reaching up through twisted branches to grasp one berry at a time.
Finally, I began cautiously to care for the plants. I was terrified I’d violate one of nature’s raspberry rules and ruin the gift given to me.
But the patch tolerated my down-country fumbling and flourished. My crops now come in gallons, not pints.
Every summer, day after day, my kitchen counters are covered with cookie sheets and platters of red gold. Filled with wonder, camera in hand like a tourist on my own land, I take pictures of the harvest.
I can no longer imagine a winter without raspberries. The rattiest raspberry in August is a miracle in March.
There is magic in the land.
During a recent late-night drive back from Burlington, on the stretch of road outside Barre, I saw tiny streaks of yellow light in the tree line.
I had just returned from the wilds of Manhattan, where lights twinkle near and in the distance. I was momentarily bewildered. I knew there was no little city back in the trees.
Then my country self kicked in, and I remembered. Fireflies. Against the dark foliage, their luminescence threaded ribbons of yellow as the car sped by.
Fireflies, faeries of the summer woods.
Firefly magic always makes me smile. Certainly the Creator and Mother Nature collaborated with Humor, fabricating a glowing creature whose urge to mate advertises itself with such illuminated glee.
Anyone who grew up in lightning bug territory has childhood memories rich with golden-green glow. How long could you bear to keep their blinking bodies imprisoned before you set them free to dance their light in the dark again?
Where were you when you caught them in jars with hole-punched lids? Who were you with?
Forgotten friends flicker back to mind in firefly reflections. Summer’s temporary playmates, united by vacation, as fleeting yet entrancing as the fireflies themselves.
Grandmother’s back porch. It was probably a small garden, but it was large to me then—towering hollyhocks and profusions of plants both edible and decorative. I first went face-to-face with a hummingbird there, frozen in place by his intent inspection before he determined I was not sweet enough and darted off.
But the soft nights are what I most remember. Three generations gathered by firefly light. The comforting creak of wood-on-wood as rockers rocked and the grown-ups watched us dance after lightning bugs with determined delight. We could not understand why they did not join our dance.
As I watched the golden tracks from the car, I pondered. What power these little bugs have to retrieve the past from memory’s shadow, illuminating each detail, glowing with warmth. For a moment or two in firefly spotlight, they all live again: Grandmother Ru, Granddaddy Russell, Mom, Dad, and my companions of childhood’s lost time. Their laughter echoes in my ears, dear faces are wreathed in smiles and soft summer winds blow sweet.
For a moment or two in firefly light, I dance again in the dark.
I’m in training for raspberry season. The rigors of preparation are as daunting as any faced by an athlete getting ready for the big game.
Go ahead and laugh. But last year’s bumper crop nearly did me in. It’s foolish to expect to shift from a sedentary routine hunched over the computer to hard labor picking berries, and I was a fool.
You can only get away with that when the blush of youth still gilds your rose. My roses stopped blushing years ago—but the mind is slow to catch on. I blithely expect to go from relative inactivity to daily, unremitting physical exertion with nary a muscle twinge.
Last summer’s harvest disabused me of that illusion. If not for the grace of berry-picking friends, gallons of red treasures would have rotted on the canes, while I mourned in achy, enforced rest. I swore this year would be different.
I know better than to think I would dedicate myself to an exercise regimen. I’ve always hated exercise. In my athletic days, “exercise” was something you did briefly to warm up for the real fun—the sport itself.
A sit-up is a sit-up. It isn’t an activity. I walk to get from one place to another, or to pass some contemplative time in the woods. I watch people “power walking” with purposeful determination and am filled with admiration. But exercise as its own reward is a concept my psyche refuses to embrace.
What better way to get in shape for raspberries than by working in the patch. So for the past several weeks, I’ve been in raspberry training. Not only cleaning out the dead cane—an annual chore—but also attacking the invading witchgrass, putting in new metal posts, stringing more supports, creating new rows. Cutting, digging, pulling, straining, reaching.
The first day of this endeavor, I was able to keep at it for only an hour. This aging body’s early warning system then notified me of potential significant damage if I did not cease and desist. At once.
I listened. Strategic retreat is the action of a wise warrior.
Feeling like a wimp, I waited several days before going back to work. My inner coach gave me the go-ahead when I could reach for a dish on an upper shelf without wincing.
My next session lasted two hours, with a shorter recovery time. The session after that, I marked four hours, with a rest period between two-hour stints … and it just keeps getting better.
The patch is looking pretty good. The raspberries are ripening, and so am I. Go slowly, I keep reminding myself. Getting older doesn’t mean I can’t do the things I want to do. I just need to do them differently.
As a memorable tee shirt advises, aging is not for wimps … and only the young can indulge in impatience.
On I go, row by row.
The day dawns clear, with piercingly blue skies and a fiercely blazing sun. On waking, I close all the windows to capture the cool night air. The promise of a hot, humid afternoon is heralded with birdsong.
In the harsh sunlight, the trees and grass shout with verdant vitality. The flowers in my garden radiate with intensity. Yellow blooms are small suns fallen to earth. Wild roses sing deep pink unfolding. Daylilies smile orange starlight.
A perfect day for laundry, I think. Energized and ambitious, I imagine clothes strung on the line, saving electric dollars.
By the time I’ve hung two loads, the sky is darkening. A wind has blown up, tossing the leaves to reveal their silvery undersides. The threatening storm is oppressive, like a deep sadness lurking in the heart that cannot be relieved.
It feels as if there is no air, as if it has been sucked into the descending darkness, into the gathering force of the storm. Flowers take on an eerie glow in the gloom, faint spots of color, like multi-hued candle flames fading before guttering out.
The clothes whip in the wind, headless bodies twisting and turning, arms flailing, empty legs kicking. Stephen King would love it.
The darkness deepens. Day turns to night. I switch on the kitchen lights.
When the rains come, they come with a vengeance, surging with punishing force. Thunder growls, then crashes as I rescue the clothes. I give them safe haven on the shower rod, where they rest quietly after their tortuous dance.
Lightning flashes and cracks with savage abandon. Strobe lights in the heavens. An unseen force wielding a bullwhip of celestial proportions. I am glad for our lightning rods and wonder if some of the explosions I hear are trees being hit in the woods.
It is a Shakespearean storm. Picture King Lear on the moors, mad with disillusioned grief, shaking his fist at the heavens.
The metal roof resonates with rain rhythms. I am no longer ambitious. Time to curl up with a good book. The dogs lie by my side, the cat crawls into my lap. The pack has gathered. Against the wildness outside, there is safety in numbers.
Three chapters later, I raise my head to see sunlight streaming through the windows.
The storm has passed.
My creature companions follow me downstairs, outside onto the back porch. Glittering diamond-bright raindrops wink from leaves in a forest of waterborne jewels. In the air is the freshness that comes with a world washed clean.
Down by the brook, black dragonflies come out to play. Darting through shimmering grasses, meeting and circling, separating and meeting again—a square dance on the wing.
I pull up a chair, and sit in the shaft of sunshine beaming through the trees.
There are shower people, and there are tub people—or so I’ve heard tell.
I’m both. Showers are for getting clean. Baths are for luxuriating.
When you’re house hunting, real estate agents tell you to beware of falling in love with any single feature of a home. Makes sense, I know—but the antique, claw-footed tub in the upstairs bathroom featured prominently in my enthusiasm for our house.
Me and that tub. It was love at first sight.
Long, wide, and deep, that old bathtub sang its siren song. It’s a good thing I liked it; it probably weighs an immovable ton. None of this contemporary fiberglass nonsense. This is a serious porcelain-over-steel job. In the winter, it takes a good deal of hot water to warm that baby up, but once filled it holds the heat for a long while.
I call it my therapy pool. I figure it has saved me thousands of dollars in therapist’s fees. Bad day? Fill ’er up, add a few drops of rose oil, light some candles, set a glass of wine on the tub-side table, play some gentle classical music, and an hour later it’s a whole new world.
I’m an expert bath connoisseur. I can read in the tub without getting books wet, and I have a method for plugging up drain holes to give myself an extra inch and a half of water without sloshing over the sides.
There isn’t anything much you can tell me about the art of bathing.
Or so I thought. Then a new friend came to visit. She oohed and aahed over my tub—they have an efficient, modern house, featuring only a shower. Out in the garden, she admired my wild roses. We love roses. We have neither knowledge nor patience for cultivating them, but wild roses come back every year with no care at all.
They’re smaller than their hothouse sisters but just as sweet. As we bent to drink in their scent, she noticed the piles of petals in the grass, fallen pink gems against the green.
“Those are great to put in your bath,” she commented.
I was stunned. Roses and tub for some twelve years, and never the twain had met—despite my preference for rose-scented water. Isn’t it odd that we keep garden and bathroom so categorically separate?
Petals on water. A delightfully incongruous sight, pink fairies come to play. Raise an arm, and they beach themselves on skin—soft, light kisses that swirl away on small tides of gentle waters. Skim cupped hands along the surface and gather handfuls, breathe deep the essence of roses, still sparkling with sunlight.
Child’s play is filled with wonder. Everything is new. Petals on water, and I’m a child again. Weaving an enchantment of simplicity, the union of bath and beyond, ordinary things creating something fresh.
The roses have gone by now. But as I walk my garden, I consider other possibilities …
Once upon a time, there was a rock wall. Hollyhocks grew along the wall, tall spires swaying in the wind.
I remember climbing the wall, securing toeholds between protruding rocks. It was a daring climb then. We’d sit on the top, my friends and I. There we would make hollyhock dancers.
Pluck one blossom. Insert a toothpick through the center. The flower becomes a skirt, and we’d twirl our dancers in the summer sunshine. Sometimes holding a dancer in each hand, we’d create whole ballrooms of flaring skirts, telling stories of ladies in pink and purple skimming across the floor.
There was a man who owned the wall. He lived in the house not far from where we sat, spinning our dancers, our stories, our dreams. He was a nice man, but he scared us because his hands shook and he always looked sad. My mother told me his hands shook because he had a disease called Parkinson’s. There was no reason to be afraid.
She told me he was sad because, years back, his whole family had died. His wife and children were in a car that stalled on railroad tracks. A train came.
He was lonely, my mother said. He liked children. She would take us into his big house to visit. He always had something sweet to drink and cookies for us that he would lay carefully on the table with those trembling hands. I remember the picture on the mantel. A soft-smiling woman sitting between a boy and girl about my age, each one tucked in the protective curve of her arms.
That scared me, too. That they had died.
Sometimes when we were on his wall dancing our dancers, we would look up to see him standing at a window. He would raise his hand in a shaky wave. We knew if we waved back he would invite us in for cookies.
But we were afraid. Even cookies could not entice us into his sad and silent home. We visited him only when Mother took us by the hand.
Several years ago, Neil and I had a rock wall built along the edge of our yard. From the day it was finished, I was haunted by a desire to see hollyhocks rising against its stony face. But more pressing projects took precedence, and seasons passed.
Two years later, I visited my friend Holly’s house, where hollyhocks grew tall and strong in pinks and one purple so deep it was nearly black. Memories rushed in. I asked. She gave.
They wouldn’t bloom the first year, Holly said, and she couldn’t promise I’d get a purple one. Hollyhocks change colors, she told me.
I watched them last summer, broad leaves barely above the ground. This summer, they blossomed. There is a purple, almost black. I think of the grieving man with the shaking hands. There are pink ones, too. I think of the joy his wall gave us.
I smile when each new bud opens. I smile at the green stalks swaying in the wind against the stony wall. It is a memorial. My apology for childhood fear …
My thanks for hollyhock dancers.
I’m back in the bushes again.
The raspberries ripen languidly in this awkward summer. Too little sun, too little rain, too much rain all at once.
I’m back in farmer mode. Checking my crop daily. Watching the skies. Snatching berries from the threatening jaws of mold and insects. Soothing aching muscles as best I can.
It is good, this annual shift to crop and land. All else becomes secondary. The fruit of the earth will not be put on hold. Cannot be scheduled into agendas.
I am out in the patch. Now I live closest to the land. The computer is silent, email unanswered, ringing phones ignored.
I do not “play” at farming. The red treasures are too great a gift to take lightly. My winter stamina depends on these frozen riches, reminding me that brighter seasons will come ’round again.
It may sound absurd that from my plot of raspberries I feel connected to those who farmed before and to those who farm still. But there it is. I will not apologize for this, nor for my awe of folks who carry the burden of farming full-time … who always watch the skies, their labors in Nature’s capricious hands.
In the patch, the elements become elemental … and I ponder the North Country’s heritage.
Settlers came here to till the soil. They cleared land without chain saws, much of it now reclaimed by forest. They heaved stones from new fields by hand. Through wicked winters and short growing seasons, they carved out a life in the wilderness, amid isolation we can only imagine.
They say that most Americans don’t have to count back more than three generations to find farmers in the family. (It might be four or more now, so far have we come from the land.) As I gather the harvest, I feel a link with my paternal great-grandparents who farmed fields in Russia and Poland. Carrying berries into the kitchen for freezing and boiling, I feel connected to my maternal great-grandparents who farmed first in Scotland and then in America.
This is good. To remember that roughened hands, not corporations, once fed families. Remembering what a miracle food is—wrested from the grip of Nature, which cares not if bellies are full or empty. Cares not if the labor breaks backs or spirits.
So each berry is a triumph. Wrought by earthy forces beyond technology, a tangible trophy of the sweat of the brow, patient determination, and Nature’s rare grace. Each berry spinning a thread between past and present, touching the spirit of those who brought their own food to the table.
Everything I eat, the milk I drink, takes on a special quality now. I wonder by whose hands food comes to my table and what it cost them to feed me. How many nights did they pray for rain, beg for sun, hope for the best?
I am happy to be back in the bushes again.
Talking with a dairy farmer friend one wet summer, I bemoaned my disrupted harvesting schedule and my untended raspberry patch. She listened impassively … and it dawned on me how much greater a burden the sodden weather placed on her.
What with all the rain, she hadn’t been able to get out into the fields. The rhythm of chores was on hold, corn uncultivated while they waited for the land to dry. North Country farmers have a short season as is, and the loss of a few days poses problems, never mind losing a couple of weeks. They’ll be playing catch-up till winter, when the weather drives them inside.
Considering the challenges she faces in the fields, I felt pretty idiotic and downright small for worrying about my raspberry crop. But then she smiled.
“Well,” she said with the calm characteristic of her kind, “you’ll just have to be behind like the rest of us farmers.”
I was so flattered to be numbered among the stewards of the land that I forgot my frustrations, shrugged off my complaints, straightened my shoulders, and stood taller.
“A-yuh,” I said. “I guess I will.”
Nature moves to the beat of her own drum. We who would take something from her can only dance to her rhythms.
This strange summer has played havoc with my raspberry routine. The fruit began to ripen a good two weeks ahead of schedule—long before I was prepared for the labor-intensive days of harvest.
Nature cares nothing for the scheduled plans of puny humans. She offers her abundance as she will.
And ripe berries wait for no man … or woman. Ready or not, here they come.
Harvesting this year has been a race between the mold, the insects, and me. Given the heat, humidity, and rain, no sooner would a berry ripen …
And they’re-rr-rrre off!
Comin’ down the stretch, it’s Furry Mold in the lead. Scurrying Ant is close behind, running nose-to-nose with Persistent Wasp, but coming up hard on the outside rail is Harried Woman …
When one rare temperate day finally dawned, I had an unbreakable appointment that kept me from the patch until late afternoon. I dashed home, stripped, basted myself with Avon Skin-So-Soft, donned appropriate berry-picking attire, secured my hair out of tempting reach of creepy-crawlies, slapped on the patch-hat, grabbed the cut-down plastic gallon jug-buckets, and headed out.
Several hundred berries later, as dusk darkened the thicket, I refused to give ground. An entire section remained unpicked. Given this summer’s past performance, who knew when another such day would come?
As the shadows deepened, it became impossible to tell which berries had reached the perfect deep red state of ripeness. Frustrated, I considered grabbing a flashlight. But that seemed too absurd for even the most fanatic berry lover.
In a final gesture of surrender, I stuck my hand blindly into the foliage … and felt three perfect berries plop softly into my palm. Ripe fruit will do that. Fall into your hand if you gently cup a cluster just so.
I had to smile.
It isn’t always necessary to see the fruit. Sometimes, just reaching into the darkness is enough. But your hand has to be open.
When life gets too complicated, my mind takes refuge in contemplating the minor mysteries of life.
Why do people turn away from the price of steak, but spend two bucks on a handful of potato chips without hesitation?
Why do my dogs want to lick my clothes only when I’m dressed in my best?
Is there a plastic wrap gene? Some people handle the stuff with ease, while others can’t touch it without creating a tangled mess.
What is the secret of a perfectly ripened peach?
I love peaches, but they are a cantankerous fruit. Unripened, the peach is hard. Eating it is not unlike chewing a bar of soap. Properly aged, a peach provides an exquisitely flavored, melt-in-your-mouth delight.
Choosing the potentially perfect peach is an art. My mother had the gift. In some arcane manner, she would select the most promising peaches, bring them home, and nurture them to their peak.
I haven’t had a properly ripened peach since Mom passed on.
My peaches tend to rot before they’re ripe. I’ve tried the ripen-in-a-brown-bag-with-a-banana trick. I have set them in the sun, in shade, in warm spots and in cool. I’ve talked to them nicely and serenaded them with classical music.
At best, I have managed a half-ripe, half-hard peach. Nibbling the juicy delight with surgical precision to avoid nicking into the bitter portion.
On very special occasions, my mother would prepare an elegant Southern treat. She’d fill her wedding crystal champagne glasses with a good California dry champagne and float several perfect peach slices in each glass. Then we waited with anticipation while the peach marinated and flavored the cold bubbly.
I have my mother’s wedding crystal now. And champagne is easy to come by. But those perfect peaches remain a mystery.
One of the nice things about getting older is acquiring a knack for acceptance. I accept unknowables with more grace than I could have even imagined two decades ago.
When people claim they want to hear the truth but cannot themselves muster the courage to tell it, I can smile instead of frothing at the mouth in frustration.
When the guy on the bar stool next to me bitterly complains about a fraction-of-a-penny increase in school taxes but moments later laughs about dropping forty bucks at the bar on Friday night, I can shake my head in wonder instead of screaming.
When what can go wrong invariably does, at the most inopportune time, I mutter “Murphy’s Law” with only minimal truculence.
But the mystery of peaches haunts me with irritating persistence. Every time I toss out another unripened, fuzzy-with-mold failure, I feel a temper tantrum coming on.
And please, don’t even get me started on cantaloupes …
This is a small-town tale.
Nearly two years ago, I wrote a column titled “Perfect Peaches and Other Mysteries.” In it, I recounted my woes with this most delicious fruit—particularly my inability to master the art of ripening peaches before they rot.
I recalled with mouthwatering detail the exquisite peaches my mother had provided, noting that I hadn’t eaten a perfect peach since she passed away.
Several weeks ago, I stopped by Pierson’s farm stand in Bradford to buy strawberries. As I shopped, I chatted with the folks there. The woman laying out produce asked, “You’re Nessa Flax, aren’t you? You write that column for the paper?”
I admitted I was, and did.
“Remember that column you wrote about peaches?”
I really had to think about that—there had been a lot of columns since then. Finally, I nodded.
“I meant to call you back then but didn’t know how to reach you … We get beautiful peaches from Pennsylvania. You won’t have any problem getting them to ripen perfectly. We’ll be getting them in soon,” she said.
Amazed and flattered that my column would stick in her mind for so long, I hastened to assure her that I would love to know when they came in.
“You can always reach me through the JO,” I said. “If you call and leave a message with Connie, she’ll email me and I’ll make sure to get right down here.”
I happily trundled my strawberries to the car, thinking I should let Connie know about the impending peach alert. But I was busy with summer and it slipped my mind.
Sure enough, a week or so later an email arrived from Connie. “Sara Pierson called to say the peaches are in,” she wrote, clearly baffled as to the newsworthiness of this bulletin. “She said you’d understand.”
I fired off a reply, filling in the blanks and thanking Connie for acting as messenger. The timing was perfect. I was headed down off our hill in Ryegate Corner for an appointment that very day. I could stop at Pierson’s on my way home.
There they were. Crates of peaches. Peaches unlike any I had encountered in grocery stores. Peach-colored peaches. Peaches emanating a blissful aroma. Peaches that were not rock-hard, but were ever-so-slightly soft to the touch.
Sara Pierson was right.
I had no trouble ripening these peaches. I even succeeded in picking out some that were already ripe and others that would ripen over the next several days.
Peaches so juicy they had to be peeled over a bowl. Peaches that melted in my mouth. Peaches that made my taste buds stand up and do a little song and dance of glee.
Perfect peaches.
And a perfect small-town tale.
Once again, the Civil War comes to town.
The afternoon before Ryegate Heritage Day, white tents of a time long past sprout in green meadows behind the Meeting House. From my windows, I watch them rise, stark against the clear blue sky.
It is impossible to continue my ordinary chores. I walk down the road to witness the transition from today into yesterday.
It is a strange and wonderful sight. Uniformed soldiers mill about with newly arrived blue-jeaned travelers. Artifacts are unloaded from pickup trucks as the living tableau of another era takes shape.
I meet Amanda Page of the Springfield Art and Historical Society. Already garbed in the long, hoopless work dress of the Comtu Falls U.S. Sanitary Commission, she sets up camp. With her is Emily Stringham, a self-possessed teenage intern who has been in the program since eighth grade. In a puddle of ground-sweeping skirts, Emily coaxes wood splinters into flame with the fan of a proper young lady.
From Amanda, I learn that the commission was a forerunner of the Red Cross, tending to Confederate and Union soldiers with equal dedication. From Emily, I learn that living history beats the heck out of hanging out at the mall.
Below the rise, men string pickets along the tree line behind the Grange. We talk horses. Since I know little, I ask a lot. Is that horse with spots on his rump an Appaloosa? No, his owner tells me with a straight face, it’s just a white horse.
I feel foolish.
He later explains, with a grin, that since there were no Appa-loosas in the Civil War, “I just call ’im a white horse.”
That night from my living room, I watch the campfires burning. Soft laughter floats on the cool evening air. I feel cozy with my new neighbors. The next day, I awake to cannon fire. They have brought their world to mine.
Saturday night, Neil and I walk in the twilight down to the dance. Elegant ball gowns, swaying hoops, and handsome dress uniforms transform the Meeting House into an intersection of now and then. Scattered among proud soldiers and their ladies in the grand march are my neighbors in blue jeans and Bermuda shorts.
We learn to waltz. With much laughter, visitors living the past teach locals stuck in the present the steps of the Virginia Reel. Scenes from Gone with the Wind unfold—whirling skirts and gentlemen bowing—only better, because I am here.
Oh, the high spirits! Stomping to music, participants turn wooden floorboards into a communal drum. Costumed and uncostumed revelers share a raucous celebration of dancing joy. Rebel yells mingle with Yankee shouts. Everyone sings, “Oh! Susanna, don’t you cry for me …”
Rare and wonderful hours slip by in merriment—a gift from reenactors who bring such passion for what they do. A gift from Barbara Watts of South Ryegate who works so hard to make it happen. A gift from volunteers who feed armies of participants. A gift from every sponsor who contributed.
I thank them all.
What I find most irritating about death is that it is so stubbornly permanent.
Few things in life are absolute. Mostly, life is an ebb and flow in shades of gray. You can be a little late, days can be a little hectic, but you can’t be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.
For some inexplicable reason, I miss Mom a lot lately. She died five years ago, and I find myself increasingly nettled by the fact that she is still dead.
I keep wanting to ask her questions. Like how she made her biscuits so fluffy, or if she was scared when she first moved to New York from a small West Virginia town. I want to know, in intimate detail, her feelings the first time she laid eyes on Dad, and whether she sometimes felt like her house had tentacles that wound themselves around her, threatening to suck the very breath from her body.
I long to ask if she doubted her sanity when the hormonal craziness of midlife struck, and how she got that tart tang in her pound cake.
Did she truly enjoy dyeing Easter eggs and decorating Christmas cookies all those years, or was she graciously providing fodder for our fond memories?
I wonder if she was angry at having to carry so much of the domestic burden during those years when Dad’s job kept him on the road. Or did her era bestow upon her some grace of acceptance beyond my generation’s capacity to fathom?
I want to ask her how she coped with the burden of love. Did she break into a cold sweat when Dad was late, picturing him plastered on the pavement? Was she ever calm as she watched her children walk out into a world filled with danger?
I keep wanting to tell her things, too. Like how I now understand why, as she got older, she refused to watch shows about distressing realities of life. Murder, genocide, domestic abuse—she turned them off.
“But Mom,” I protested with the fervor of youth, “these things happen!”
“Indeed they do,” she replied, “but they are not the foundation for entertainment.”
I judged her an emotional escapist. I know better now.
Mostly, though, it’s the questions that haunt me. Did she still feel like a girl inside though her mirror presented an aging image?
How did she feel in the tumultuous ’60s when the values she held dear were challenged and ridiculed? Did she ever forgive the early women’s movement for making motherhood seem trivial, second-class?
Decades after her own parents’ deaths, I remember Mom saying she never stopped being lonesome for them, so I know she missed her mother, too.
Did she have questions tinged with regret? And what would they have been? I have no answers.
Even if we take care and ask what we can while we can, the truth is that some questions do not arise until we reach later stages of our lives, years after someone has passed on.
There is no remedy for this.
I guess that’s why they call them the blues.
A few years after we moved here, we had a grand old maple tree taken down. We hated to, but it loomed over our house. A logger friend told us he suspected the tree had been dying for years and was dangerously top-heavy, so down she came.
Our friend was right. The trunk was hollow from the ground up, through three-quarters of its height … Saved by a savvy woodsman.
At the same time, we asked him to look at another majestic maple a little farther from the house.
“Yup,” said he, “she’s dying, too.”
We were new to land- and homeownership then. With the unseasoned perfectionism typical of rookies, we asked if we should have it removed as well. He regarded us stoically, then spoke in the tones one would use to educate very young children.
“No, when she falls, she won’t hurt nothin’.” Pointing, he said, “When she falls, she’ll land in the brook, right about there.”
He tilted his head, regarding the tree. “A bad storm might take ’er, or she could live on for ten years, maybe more. No call to take ’er down before her time.”
In the decade or so since he made that pronouncement, storms stripped the tree of branches. The ailing trunk splintered and broke and began to rot. Finally, all that remained was one glorious branch, parallel to the brook and our back porch, a horizontal line across the kitchen windows above the sink.
Flocks of mourning doves, twenty or more, lined up along that branch for several years—until the falcon came. Nuthatches mined the bark, and for a while two varieties of woodpeckers lunched there regularly.
No matter how ragged the trunk became, every fall, the leaves on that branch would turn with the same joyous gaiety of younger trees.
One clear and windless Saturday a few weeks back, I bustled into the kitchen, intent on a series of room-to-room chores. What I caught out of the corner of my eye stopped me cold. In utter silence, nearly in slow motion, that branch was falling. The span of kitchen windows was like a movie screen on which the familiar horizontal line simply slipped out of sight.
In those split seconds, I was baffled and oddly frightened. It was as if the sky itself was falling. Then came a mighty splintering sound—wood tearing away from wood—and a thundering thump as the branch hit the ground.
I rushed to the back porch, to see Neil standing not twenty feet from where the branch had landed. He had taken the dogs out to walk their usual path along the brook.
“Did you see that?” I cried out stupidly, before it dawned on me precisely where he was standing.
“Wasn’t it something!” he called back.
Then it registered. Where he stood. The branch lay in one of the dogs’ favorite wading pools.
“Yeah,” I whispered, “that was something …”
For the fourteen years we have lived here, a majestic maple tree has graced our home. Rising from the steep bank leading down to the brook, she shaded the back of our house. Her leafy veil protected us from the heat of the afternoon sun.
Even after age and decay had reduced her to one reaching branch, the rooms in her shadow were a naturally air-conditioned refuge at the height of summer. We’d put fans in front of those windows, drawing the tree-cooled air into the house.
She’s gone now. And from the moment she fell, our world changed.
A span of sky has been unveiled. Stark in its emptiness, expansive in its reach. From the sitting room where I spend quiet time with good books and journal writing, my view is newly crowned with blue by day and stars by night. Across the brook and into the woods beyond, I see aspects of trees I’ve never seen.
Standing at my kitchen sink, I observe the altered flight paths of birds approaching the feeder that dangles from the back porch beam. Nuthatches who used to take their seeds up to that outstretched branch now fly to trees farther away. Mourning doves, who preened on that sunny perch, now fly in from some way station out of sight.
The air is filled with wings.
In the late afternoon, light streaming into the bathroom radiates so brightly, spilling into the next room, that I keep going in to turn off lights I must’ve left on. It will take time to curb this impulse.
It is hotter now on the back porch, throughout the afternoon and into evening. The laundry I hang on the lines dries faster, and sections that used to be shaded late in the day are now prime territory. But our cool evening retreat to the porch chairs must wait until well after sunset.
I think of winter. The snow usually piled up on the porch steps leading to the garden, dumped in avalanches from the intersection of house and porch roofs. I wonder if the unveiled sunshine will change winter’s snowy landscape. I wonder if I will be warmer at the kitchen sink, where the old uninsulated wall offers weak protection from frigid winds.
The sun sets as never before. I am startled by large squares of sunlight stretching across the kitchen floor. Crystal prisms on windowsills above the sink send rainbows dancing in new patterns on walls and ceiling …
I am bemused by the awareness that, in her absence, the majestic maple is more present than ever.
With each transformation, every new shaft of light, I remember her with affection.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine had a poster hanging in his office.
“Sometimes I sits and thinks,” the ungrammatical prose read, “and sometimes I just sits.”
More than three decades later, I remember the smile that surprised my face when I first read those lines. It struck me as particularly amusing since my friend was a professor at an Ivy League college.
I remember feeling oddly reassured … as if I had been given permission to not think. In the ensuing years, I’ve discovered that not thinking is an art. Just try it. It is not easy.
Not doing isn’t easy, either. Especially this summer. North Country summers are fleeting under the best of circumstances. This season has been merely a flicker in our wistful imaginations.
What makes our summers so short is more than the number of days. There’s so much to do in the fair-weather months; weeks fly by on the wings of one set of chores after another.
And thus it came to pass that I was tending to long-overdue weeding one rare lovely day. As I attacked the encroaching offenders, lists of other tasks revolved through my mind … and I sat down to catch my breath.
It was late afternoon. The sun glittered gold through the leaves, danced off the stream below in silver reflections. Puffy clouds lazed across a sky-blue canvas. Deep magenta bee balm waved in the breeze.
I felt myself slow down, sinking more heavily into the chair. I noticed how startling the pink phlox looked against the background of deep green leaves.
Stillness settled over me.
I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had simply sat in my garden. Just sat. Not noting what needed to be done. Not planning what flowers to plant next.
And so, I sat.
Flashing iridescent green, a hummingbird came to the bee balm. Its thrumming vibrated through my stillness. I watched the darting, hovering creature as it fed, watched as it was joined by its mate. To my utter shock, I heard for the first time hummingbirds chirping.
I watched as one came to rest on the branches of the small tree behind the flowers. Hummingbirds don’t sit for long, but years in my garden have taught me that to see one stop at all is a rare gift. I breathed softly.
The first hummingbird took flight and its partner alighted on the same branch while the other fed. Then they traded places again. I watched this dance for several moments, utterly delighted. If I had not sat quietly, the performance would not have happened.
Native Americans believe that hummingbird’s medicine is joy. They believe hummingbird feathers can open the heart. Without an open heart, they say, you cannot taste the nectar, the pure bliss of life.
Those hummingbirds surely brought me joy, reminding me that, to taste bliss, sometimes we have to just sit.
The rumble comes from far away, indistinct. It could be the echo of a large truck, a high-flying military jet, or our big dog Devin resettling himself upstairs.
“Was that thunder?” we wonder.
The night silence settles into an eerie stillness—that strange calm before the storm. Then the wind comes. Trees first sway in waltz time and move rapidly to a rumba, leaves rustling like swirling taffeta skirts.
The thunder rolls in. No mistaking it now. Imagine a celestial wooden floor with mammoth boulders moving toward us and away in waves. We hear and feel forces gathering.
Finally, the first flash of lightning. As if, from somewhere beyond the sky, a flashbulb of mythic proportions fired. In milliseconds of illumination, the countryside is cast in blue-white light.
This is the theater call. We turn off the television, grab some treats, and settle into our front-row seats on the enclosed porch. The large, long windows are open—we are almost outside, but safe. When the rain comes, we are misted with wind-blown spray.
High on our hill in Ryegate, we have open views over the meadow to the mountains—a vast expanse of sky on which the lightning plays. Nothing matches an evening’s storm entertainment.
Every show is different. Like birders who record each sighting, we collect variations of lightning witnessed during more than a decade here.
We have seen truly frightening balls of lightning. Forks flashing pink, thick clouds backlit with flares of electric white. We’ve seen bolts shoot toward earth, heard the splintering crack of a tree being struck, then crashing as it falls in nearby woods.
Twice, our lightning rods have captured a bolt and given us the bizarre experience of feeling the walls shiver as the energy ran to ground.
Even if there’s nothing new, the show’s still grand. But tonight, there are new thrills.
Sheet lightning in rosy hues. We ooh and aah in reverent whispers. At center stage, horizontal lightning, snaking and branching in a race across the sky. But strangest of all on this evening are the lightning bugs.
Between the cracks and flashes high above, lightning bugs flicker in the meadow. They flit about, undaunted by the rain. As if they are conversing in code with their light-cousins in the heavens.
We don’t remember ever seeing this back-and-forth of tiny lights with the broad and blinding strokes above. It is a sweet sight—a dance of the minuscule and the majestic.
My imagination dances with the bugs and the bolts.
Do the bugs envision the lightning as a grand rival for their ladies’ attentions? Have they become so flickeringly active in a valiant effort to prove their worth against the big boys up there?
What a lovely evening’s entertainment.
For nearly fifteen years, I’ve been entranced by nature’s sorcery in my patch. I’ve been told that raspberry plants last about seven years, then they’re done. Not mine. They keep coming back and starting new mini-forests beyond the confines of the main plot.
Faithful readers have received many a summer’s tale of my adventures in what I’ve called “the grandmother of all patches.” It is not a civilized place. I do not have neat rows to walk and pick. It could, more accurately, be called a raspberry forest.
My forest is still not civilized, but it’s worlds better than it once was.
Hard labor is involved in maintaining the patch. Dead cane must be removed in the spring. Pruning keeps the plants at a height I can pick without standing on my tiptoes. Stakes and string must be tended to keep paths open. Encroaching witch-grass must be pulled.
Yet each year when the fruit ripens, I feel that the bounty of ruby gems far exceeds the time and energy I’ve invested. It’s still magic. I watch the flowers become small, hard white kernels … then watch them grow larger. They first turn orange-red, then finally transform into deep red, juicy fruit.
Hundreds, thousands of them—every one a miracle. I move through the patch in wonder. Berries high and berries low. Shining in the sun, hiding under leaves. At peak harvest, it takes four hours to pick the whole patch if I am alone, another two to put up the day’s treasure for winter.
In recent years, I have become less inclined to do this day after day, week after week.
Thank heavens for Phyllis, who is as much of a raspberry fanatic as I am—and picks faster than I ever will, though she has nearly twenty years on me. She keeps what she picks. In exchange, Phyllis gives me jars of her incomparable jam. She makes special seedless batches for me. I ration the glorious jars carefully, through winter and the dreary mud season that holds spring hostage.
If your jam-eating life has been restricted to store-bought varieties, you cannot imagine the intense delight of Phyllis’ ruby spread. Sight, smell, touch, taste: The senses celebrate.
And between her farm chores, Holly picks whenever she can. She rewards me with heavenly raspberry pies, delivered in deep winter months. Her piecrust is a marvel. Flavorful, thin and crisp, never soggy as fruit pies often are. I don’t know how she does it. I am happy to simply savor the delectable mystery.
Grab your buckets, ladies. It’s that time again.
(… And time for me to take a break from the column while the harvest is bountiful. See you after all the picking’s done.)
In the midst of the boil and bubble of North Country life, there are moments that stop the heart with awe … and we know with utter contentment why we live here.
We know why we suffer a spring as brief as an eyeblink, an insect population bent on inflicting torture; why we slog through the sanity-challenging despair of mud season, the icy complications of winter; why we endure the frenetic pressures of summer.
We understand why we accept the “you can’t get there from here” bedevilment of rural life and the complexities of nothing-to-do but too-much-to-do with too-far-to-drive-to-do-it.
One night before the full moon, I experienced such a reminder of bliss.
It was late. I couldn’t sleep. The air had cooled, so I went to close a window. As I reached up to lower it, I saw the stars. A zillion pinpoints of light against a perfectly black sky. I ducked under the curtains to expand my heavenly line of sight, but it was not enough.
Beguiled, I was drawn outside. On the way, I flicked the porch switch. No artificial light should disturb the scene.
The Milky Way arches over our driveway. I stood beneath it, entranced by the sparkling diamonds spilled in concentrated profusion against the velvet dark. As I marveled, the mournful lowing of cows from Bill and Jenny’s farm echoed across the meadows.
Though I could see no moon, a cold, blue-white moonlit quality illuminated the landscape. The distant tree line was cast in silhouette, spiky treetops etching a ragged edge against the sky.
As I walked up the driveway, away from fans rattling in the windows, the chorus of crickets intensified as if someone had turned up the volume. The Big Dipper dangled hugely above Ted Clark’s house as if to empty its contents over his roof.
Mesmerized by the still, dark-bright of the night, I wandered up the road. No bugs bothered me. The air was sweet, spiced with a green-growing fragrance released by nightfall’s alchemy. I passed through shadows cast by starlight, more subtle than sun-shadows, but as distinct.
I looked back toward our house, comfortable on its rise, guarded by sentinels of birch, pine, and maple. Circling slowly, I surveyed the scene from humped mountains sensuously rolling in the east to the tree-lined ridge in the west. And above it all, that impossible, improbable, better-than-Disney, star-studded sky.
This spectacle is ours. We live nestled in what has, elsewhere, been cut down, plowed under, paved over … places where lights wash away the stars and quell the song of night.
We live nestled in nature’s embrace. It’s just outside our doors.
I hate to say this out loud (or in print), but summer wanes.
There it is.
Have you tossed another blanket on the bed? Closed windows against the cold night air? Seen the first tree blush orange?
The season begins its waltz into fall. It is a gentle time. As I write this, I’m basking in the second of two classically beautiful North Country days. The sun and air are crystalline, a perfect breeze tosses the leaves, the midday temperature is summery.
With winter looming on the other side of fall, such days feel magical, oddly ephemeral and glorious all at once. I sense a vague wistfulness as summer slips away, a touch of nostalgia for June and July.
I’ve had a good summer and am loath to let it go.
Perhaps we never lose the childhood joy we felt when school was over and September was unimaginably far away. I have not forgotten the sense of foreboding as the specter of school opening laid its cold hands on my unstructured days. This is the only explanation I find for my inner shift from playful ease to getting down to business … as if my mother had just told me we were going school shopping.
Oh, those dreaded words.
How strange. These many decades later, I can still feel my stomach sink with that pronouncement. Can remember how a lightness left me. Recall the feeling that something had been taken from me, a spell shattered.
No matter how warm the sun, the last days of August simply did not have the enchantment of June. I remember wanting, trying to recapture summer’s sorcery, to no avail.
And so it is today.
But, older now, I sway more softly in this seasonal waltz. Gently, I begin to let summer go. I let the season be. There is no potion to transform August into June, no fairy dust to sprinkle on my psyche. In this acceptance, I can hear August’s symphony, appreciate her song.
Nor am I, as in years past, leaping into that edgy “before the snow flies” mentality. I caress these crystalline days.
I wash windows.
I am clearing the way for every bright moment to shine through. I want a sparkling view of the sun illuminating green trees and meadows. When raindrops dance diamonds in the last of day’s light, I want no dirt to dull the sight.
If I could put my arms around the crisp light and blue skies of these days, I would.
I cannot, so I wash windows.