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.

in thirty minutes, in fall

All in thirty minutes, dodging rust and glass from

Last century’s middens,

The low-angled sun on the river backlights

The floating insect particles,

Still speckling the fall-

And the twig in my pocket that matches

The bobcat tracks, pad to toe,

One carefully inside the other,

Piercing my hip-

And the aging gray birch who

Seems a magnet,

Drawing a flock of goldfinches

Suddenly, like static,

    whose cheeky caps have dropped

so as to  disappear, becoming

The old birch’s golden leaves-

So I, coming in,

Gathering about me four heavy blankets who have

Seen who knows what all day,

 am so quickly laden.

a small dusk poem

I do not doubt that the old oaks speak.
Or that the biting dear wind
knows my cheek in particular.
Here in the dim gray dusk
the ground knows my knees,
and the white pine sentinels
are my unmetaphorical guard.

Merleau-Ponty writes
we know ourselves at the crossing of our worlds,
where one hand embraces the other.
outer meets inner-

But I know myself in the
body of the land, at the
edge of my skin. Or rather,
I forget myself
and am remembered.

sunrise in late october

Sun rise in late October is a gift – it happens now around seven am, giving the chance to wake up at a perfectly reasonable hour and still feel as though you’ve snuck upon something exquisite, unblemished. The world is already happening at four am in July – the robins seem as though they’re having mid-morning tea by that time. We feel we've already got to catch up a bit. But now, it’s just a solitary crow, or jay, who to me touch the small sharpness, the caution, the mystery, of an owl’s hoot. Crows fit into the veil-time, and though their call to some is grating, it doesn’t split the dawn. It coats it, if anything.

This morning, waking to the opening gray light, I felt myself padding slowly to the kitchen, without realizing why. I felt I was about to catch something. And I had the distinct feeling it was Christmas morning. That I was before the morning, and therefore knew something spectacular was about to happen. Come December, of course, there will be a deeper quiet and, I hope, blankets of still snow. That is what affords these fall mornings a special secret joy – there is still noticeable color and life. When the sun rises it glorifies still-gold maples, and makes the oaks and beeches glow amber. The geese are moving and some hardy ones persist in the garden. There is yet a pulsing in fall, cheerful activity, though you can feel the gentle slowing.

And perhaps that's it, that's the delight and ease that comes with these risings. Now, more than before, we are with the season. We come to life with the dawn and the world, and perhaps it is easier to feel attuned. I suppose there are more summery folks out there, who rise chirping and fluttering. It may be a constitution sort of thing, but I think it's more than that. There is a mystery to late fall mornings, a quieting, that feels like a storyteller has begun to whisper. There is a twinkle in her eye, and you have to still yourself -- lean in close... closer to hear the secret revealed. 

It is tantalizing, but also gentle and kind, that we don’t come to a halt, but get to turn around a bit and listen closely before settling down. And wake up to the careful dawn.

in fall

By the river the thrice-banded woolly one is a sparkling bristle, black so shiny it glows white, or luminous. I am too close and so it begins to curl, but I back off soon enough. It lifts its head apparent (it is perfectly symmetrical to my eyes), and rears, a tiny fuzzy sausage stallion.

And Hamlet arches to dip his stripes in the river, white flag tail rudder.

I pull one stiltgrass plant from the leersia.

Yesterday up the mountain we find molars and claws, tiny, in scat. Dried, white scat – just compact fur and bone. The pine needles are sharp on the bouldered sunlit summit, and the moss is lightening, letting go, now unhinged tiny carpet islands. At the vista, under sweet white pines, we watch two red-tails riding thermals. There are oaks at the top, too, and all seems thick and durable and dry and tannic. My lips begin to parch.

Under shade the boulders are soft enough with moss and needles, angled gently and we nap. There are whistles from a far-off playing field.

The descent follows stream-bed or game trails, no blazes, and we are in ferns and hemlocks, that “forest” green, and a toppled hop hornbeam taken by the grapes. It is tangled, and could be a dragon’s nest. One woodpecker. The last bridge is old and strong, with the numbers “548” in metal on one of the stringers – this great post lodged in earth and moss used to stand with hawks.

the end is the beginning

This is the new year, and the beginning starts with loss. A talk with a mediator who specializes in helping communities transition through loss and embrace new identities has me awestruck at seasonal coincidence.[1]

All around there is the subtle change in palette, now, a bronzing, the russet of an apple, but all over our woods. Here and there a young red maple has decided to dive deep and early, and is crimson from crown to trunk. The aspens are golden.

I was cold sitting outside today, feeling more distinctly the exact location of my furnace, decidedly not in my extremities. And a birthday poem by Mary Oliver spoke about the trees turning themselves to torches. The wind doesn’t set the trees to roaring, yet, like they will in October, when they will actually gesticulate by sending their own leaves falling. But they more than rustle, now – is there a word? It has sibilance to it, with an ‘x’ in there, too. It’s not raucous, yet.

But this is the beginning, this is my new year. Technically, too – seed is set, buds are born, and dormancy is merely growth, inside-out. We all know the wisdom of cycling, by now, but I’ve just begun to understand the importance of the order of it all. Now is when we plant our bulbs. Spring is resurgence: “re.”

The maple who decides to go for it, to burn up, to set its buds and immolate, has it right. It’s right there in the word: decide. Cidere, to cut. De, away from, out of, of, etc. To cut away. From the misty infinity of potential, choosing means loss. Beginning means loss. First the leaves let go, then comes the buds’ dormancy, then the leafing.

It is still taboo to grieve at the beginning, because, I think, grief gets mistaken for a lack of gratitude. Just like when we’re scolded for feeling angry – how ungrateful. But the loss is right there, and often it’s first, and when it’s holding us, begging to be seen, our energy can’t go into what’s been chosen.

Like how we prune our apple trees, cutting the water sprouts, those endless, perfectly vertical spikes you can see on a neglected old tree. And corn suckers, and calendula blossoms, like lilac sprays. Prune them, direct the energy, and multiply the fruit. Deciding to bear fruit, and bear it well, means choosing, and that means cutting. Which always, always needs to heal.

What if weddings, those ultimate cultural beginnings, recognized the necessary end and accompanying grief that comes with something new? When you choose your person, you cut away all other potential. What if this were acceptable to acknowledge, and made the choice wiser, sweeter?

My dear friend Cella described to me looking into the face of her newborn, and the depth and purity of the sadness, and the love, that welled up- it was magnificent and overwhelming. I wonder, and it’s just wondering, that even at the very beginning, that extraordinary, finite specificity of a new being brings the understanding of loss. I have no idea what this means. I just marvel at the maple trees.

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[1] See Ken Downes Consulting, www.kendownes.com