along the reservoir in winter

Sometimes you can only walk alone.

Even when, at the point of the path that in the winter meets the frozen water, the ravens croak, as if to you. And the way is so clear, and the sun is obliging, making the whole set sparkle (the dry goldenrod are of course encased in ice), and when you stop there is no sound. Not even your breath.

Even then, you cannot turn to anyone else to say ‘look, look at this! Look at this place I have come, look how the world has swelled around me.’ No one can stand behind your eyes. (Please do not take a picture; where is your heartbeat? The groaning ice? The stillness?)

And because, also, this would not happen. Footsteps in the crusty snow are so loud, they are a wild racket, and when you stop the other who has come with you generally won’t stop exactly then, the ravens' croaks will be off, muffled by another’s crunching walk. (Someone with four paws can come, perhaps, who senses before even you when you will stop, who in fact lives in sense and so cannot interrupt it).

And there is a world between people, especially the ones you love the most, and it cannot be set aside. Ribbons of life infused with care and history and hope circle between you, color the space surrounding you, divide your loving attention (this is nothing terrible, but lovely and its own Thing). A living, breathing inter-life comes with you, and in the still strung winter it is as raucous as an orchestra. Here you can marvel, only differently.

Sometimes you can only walk alone, and you must sharply, sweetly understand that no one else can stand behind your eyes. 

fall is a verb

The height of a season has passed, and there was no stand still. The fall, the season that is also a verb, like spring, seems to have more constant movement than summer or winter. The year’s made of fullness and stillness, respectively, with movement in between. At the end of August things seem to be holding at crescendo, a great earthly fermata.

Fall then, is a glissade, the most joyful and active letting go I know. You can watch it happening, watch a tree go bare, in the right wind, in an hour. The daylight changes palpably – it’s getting dark at four and the stars are twinkling by six.

I try not to play favorites, but it seems fall suits my constitution best. For that reason, my first instinct is to put my hands up, for everything to stand still, for just a moment. It’s all gone so quickly. Now we have snow and frost. But then, it’s a relief. It is a beautiful thing indeed that it is all out of our hands. It’s not my timeline. The green that turns gold and then mahogany on a beech has nothing to do with me. The squirrels get fatter on their own accord, I do not have to tell the geese to fly south (or to stay, for that matter), and the crows and jays know their own cues.

I am not unlike the leaf of a streamside alder, who lets go, or is let go, depending on how you anthropomorphize things, and tumbles down and floats along the river’s back. The river, too, millions of droplets, who flow according to their friends, and gravity, who yield to obstacles. Who seek their final outlet without effort. 

early september

The world is speaking loudly now, raucous and sibilant and joyful. It isn’t shouting and roaring, like it will in October, when exclamations bring showers of red and gold, but it is somewhere above a stage whisper. When I walk past the drying grasses their rustling makes me look twice – I imagine only a clumsy, scuffling woodchuck could make such a racket. But there’s no waddling round body, just the shushing grasses declaring fall.

The trees, too, are speaking – the maples are becoming stiff and dry, while the willows are lightening with age, almost silver in the sun. Corn husks are beginning to whisper in the fields, and even the sumacs have a voice.

This is the special time of year, too, when late summer layers on early fall, and all things happen at once. The grasses whisper while the cartbirds mew and the waxwings squeak in the tree tops. The crickets are noisy, and the bumblebees hum about the goldenrod. The jays are squawking with the crows, and the river continues to babble. Now leaves, too, are crunching underfoot.

It’s more than the sounds, too. The greatest variety of texture and color, I think, happens now. Because of all the rain we are still lush, the soft grass underfoot and the beeches and apples and birch keep their deep green. But the Virginia creeper has started to burn red, with the sumac, and the maples are beginning to become sere and gold and orange. The still-green apples have yellow and pink baubles on their branches. The goldenrod is still is powdery yellow, while the very first of it has begun to petrify in crispy browns. The sun is warm where it hits, but the breeze is chilly and bare fingers search for pockets on a walk.

There is abundance everywhere, and warmth, which brings a slow relaxation. But there is also the morning and evening chill that suggests a happy urgency, and a coziness. September is the most luxurious month of the year, here in Vermont, anyway.

summer morning in the cemetery

At twenty after eight the sun is already strong. Walking up the gravel path, eighteen twenty through eighteen eighty-nine, eighteen seventy-three through nineteen oh-one, the shadows are still long enough and forgiving. Junipers stand straight, whose roots do not up-end the stones. The light old flat ones are cool, the new dark shiny ones are already taking on the day’s heat. Summer comes, too, to the cemetery.

     (Q: Can I forgive these narrow thoughts?

            A: Does the world forgive the sunset?)

The crow scolds. I want to be him, inky feathers folded, head cocked, at home on a tombstone. Here in the heat autumn auditions, at once I see the corner oak turning copper, the maples scarlet and blowing. Without invitation snow settles and the sun arcs low. Something in me stays, with the crow, while the seasons swiftly ebb. Thank goodness for the prism, the sight that sees two sides. Small things fall away.  And we are (gladly) left like living stones.

spring, suddenly

I don’t know how it happened. I must have been thinking too much, navel-gazing as it were, or maybe just eating a delicious snack, but somehow, suddenly, everything is green and we are halfway to summer. It happens every year – every year! The quiet wonder and reverence of winter fades come February, and I start wondering what leaves look like, and who the heck warblers are, and why do I have to wear so many coats, anyway? And then I’m walking at night, and look up to the miraculous sight of a moon shining through, get this, leaves. And the firsts come streaming, with hardly any time to gape: the first phoebe insistent by the river; the grape in leaf, with all its tiny fruits already in miniature, pinky-red; the first breeze which is turned sibilant by new leaves, instead of its wintry, creaking whistle; the dandelions, turning pastures sun-fuzzy; the roadside coltsfoot already gone to fluffy seed.

I consider myself average-to-slightly-above in my level of awareness of the seasons, and yet I’m humbled every year. Spring is in process in February, and well on its way in March, but with snow and sleet and harsh winds I always grapple with my faith. Its an invisible turning, for a while there, and the long-lasting chill numbs my senses a bit. The upside, though, is an awakening so fast and opulent that it nearly blows me away. Walking on one of the first warm days quite literally raises my pulse, quickens my step, and I’m sure increases all kinds of good brain juice. I feel dual urges to thank the world and apologize for my doubt.

But here we are, whether we doubted or not, and there is new ease around us. I forget the way we brace in the cold, and the loveliness of letting go, letting out, breathing easy. Life comes quickly now, it seems to rush in streams of red admirals and oven birds and Johnny-jump-ups. I must remember not to forget.

tapestry

Now we have a fourth dimension, with the onset of spring. The birds and their songs have grown from the singular, the pointed, the individual crow or jay or chickadee to a thing so consistent it becomes a layer. A quality of our surroundings that provides information, perspective, orientation. What has it been called? A choir of song – it is also a blanket, a ceiling, a shower. The other cliché is a tapestry, but we’d have to parce it out to see how it fits.

At first thought, it doesn’t seem quite right, a tapestry of birdsong. A tapestry is a still thing, a decorative thing, which the springing of birds is not. But it has the weaving right. Yesterday morning two cardinals perfectly timed their whoit-whoiting to make me imagine them carrying threads in their beaks, flitting over, under, over, under to the end of the loom. What would a tapestry of cardinal song look like? Some great, crimson, textured herringbone, perhaps. But like an illustrative tapestry, individual pictures arise amidst patterns, colors. Chickadees interrupt the tea-kettling song sparrows, and hairy woodpeckers drum underneath phoebes. It is a many-textured but constant endeavor, to weave the morning.

I think to gain the full effect of song-tapestry, we have to go beyond the ordinary. Birdsong in spring becomes a geographical story, an audible map, an unrolling scroll as you stroll through microclimates. We start in the upland, with chickadees and nuthatch (yes, usually just one of them), and move to the rolling lawn twenty yards away, with briar thickets that hold the song sparrows. Then to river’s edge, and dogwood and big decaying cottonwoods, to hear the woodpeckers. Further along, come floodplain, the phoebes, the same every morning with their raspy two-note song. I know I’m moving again to the small hardwood stand in the park when I hear cardinals, and chickadees again. The robins scatter, shouting their woodpeckerish chatter as they fly from the baseball field, and I know I’ve made it to the juniper stand by the old cemetery when it’s grackles and starlings, all squawking and hollering. 

The only tapestry I can think of that displays this kind of color, texture, story, and knowledge is the great one in Bayeux, holding history and conquest.  As you walk its length a world unfolds. But even that is faded, which today’s songs are not. There are no metaphors, really, not for spring.

cabin fever, remembering summer

It has been gray and windy for a week straight, right into March, the only color cardinals and finches. At times I seem to resent the chickadees' choice of clothing. At this point in the year leaves seem like a dream, a time when you cannot read the architecture of the land through the forest impossible. But it IS the case, I have to remind myself, that this land goes from bare to bursting with surprising speed. No place, for me, has been as dripping with life as the Champlain Valley in summer.

Sultry and low, the northern tip of the northernmost island in Lake Champlain, North Hero State Park sits in a floodplain forest, rife and brimming and laden. The cabin's easy backporch, a raw log bench, supports dirty shovels and tent poles. Next the swamp white oak, thick and bunched, with three leaves left as lace, excavated by caterpillars. A juniper by the door where the little gray bird we never identified sings each morning, rose bushes where the yellow warblers built their nest. Jewelweed everywhere, soaking its toes in deep damp soil, sucking it into translucent stems and mottled flowers. Wet, wet, wet – the water rises high enough to snag fish in the forks of trees, during the spring floods. This is the mosquitoes’ kingdom, and the pileated. I see them big as ravens and close, honking and pecking and drumming, their red crests cartoonish and delightful.

And driving outward through empty campsites meet the beach, sand and willows and basswood easing into clinking shale. A rainstorm in your palm, those chattering smooth stones. We wade into high tide, it’s bathtub warm and the milfoil wraps our legs, zebra mussels slice our toes.

There is a closed loop, by the old leach fields, wherein dwells the great shagbark, the hickory five feet at breast height, ripped and ragged and grand. Its discarded shells litter the floor. Here live the great birds of prey, the hawk and owl.

And the breakneck patchwork garden, a haphazard fence but parsley and lettuce overwhelming. We watched the sun go down over the sumac. The line of spruce, the meadow, and the fox kit learning to hunt. The tree swallows glinting teal in the sun, aligned all on a wire. A garage full of discarded signs and unused furniture, a great diesel pump tank and the sharp sting of deet. 

The locust trees that swarmed, birds' nests in the grass, millions of frogs. Poetry. 

the transplant

Spring is coming. Temperatures hover near zero, and the ice whines on the reservoir, but days lengthen and footsteps thump like sap in a bucket. Well after five, here in Vermont, the day lingers and fades to a pinky gray. Six-thirty sees a pale glow. The evenings bite, but March doesn’t feel that far off.

Here in Vermont.

We transplanted ourselves according to wisdom, in the hard dormant freeze of winter. Our stores should have been full, all energy pulled into our efficient, hearty cores.  Growing and fruiting require stability, resources, to support the vulnerable blossoming. We left Western Massachusetts in a deep freeze, with two feet of snow on the ground. We couldn’t see the grass we were leaving, and some old planting pots stuck to their ground and refused to come with us. It made sense – less ground to stir and muck up, a heartier surface for travel.

            (It’s a pity our lives can’t ebb and flow with the seasons – as I think in every 

              season. The world around us cycles, in New England, but our energy

              requirements stay the same, with our schedules. The whole business of 

              dormancy remains lively in its figurative sense, but I think waiting for winter

              to transplant oneself has more to do with the land).

It was kinder to our destination, too, to steal away in the night of the year. As newcomers in winter, our boots and boxes don’t yet leave an imprint. It’s a gentler approach, to this sleeping land. I suppose we can spy a bit, too, before our surroundings notice. Stark and sere we can see all the crooked limbs of trees, their bare forms. Even the leaf scars, the bundle scars, the velvet naked buds of witch hazel.  Bud before leaf.  Form, structure, then flesh. Maybe when the maples wake up, they’ll have thought we’ve been here all along. They’ll yawn into fullness, and our own toes can thaw with the ground, sneaking our subtle roots into icy mud.

At least, for now, we have our houseplants, who have only dropped a couple of nervous leaves in the process. And we have the great Green Mountains, as always, pink and grand and constant at first light, even in winter.