HOPE

Expecting to be settled as I aged and relaxed into retirement, I have been, instead, shuttling from one place to another, boxing up my belongings, depositing them in a storage unit, and moving three times in the past two years. I am temporarily occupying a 150-year-old farmhouse, that, in an odd twist, was once inhabited by a distant ancestor of whom I knew nothing until moving here and delving into the house’s history. The house is furnished so my personal bits remain in storage until I can find a more permanent home. It is a place where I can rest and recoup. I have fallen in love with the solitude, though I am not altogether alone.  

A mourning dove, sleek and slender with a long, narrow tail and feathers that appear painted on has built a rather tall, messy nest just under the roof line of the side porch. Untidy bits of twig, twine, and feathers droop over the edge of the capital that tops a supporting pillar. The bird squashes herself into the nest, her tail protruding from one side while her head ducks at an uncomfortable angle opposite. She watches me with one dark liquid eye as I climb the steps, broom in hand, to sweep the porch floor. Occasionally she flies to the rooftop of the small shed at the edge of the property or sits on a branch of the apple tree in the front yard. Most often I see her perched on the telephone wire that runs past the front of the house where she converses with friends who also cling to the wires and speak in low, plaintive tones. 

 There are other birds in the yard—robins, catbirds, cardinals, wrens, and a variety of finches—some of which will soon fly south as the days shorten and cool down. Blue jays and crows make most of the noise in the mornings now, the dove adding her mournful coo to the sunrise salute. They scatter when I open the door to the front porch to see and feel what the day is like. Mornings are cooler than they were a month ago, though on sunny days the daytime hours between ten a.m. and three in the afternoon are pleasantly warm. Crickets still chirp in the grass and the rabbits, so shy in the bright sunshine, hop out from the underbrush as I take my evening walk. 

There are numerous shade trees about the house, but I need walk just down the road to find open meadows that roll their green carpets to the edge of the woods. Deer feed there, and I know there are raccoons and most likely foxes about. There are bears, too, though I haven’t seen one, just a large pile of scat under an apple tree in a nearby orchard. I have no garden space of my own, so I’ve purchased a share in a local farm. Every week I choose from bins piled high with beets and carrots, spinach and chard and kale, sweet corn and tomatoes, filling a basket with produce and a canning jar with flowers I cut myself from their vast gardens. I am content to live in this quiet poem of a life for a while, teaching myself anew about patience, perseverance, and hope.

Ponderings

 

I came into this world naked and helpless, bearing the genetic structure composed of elements that stretch back to the origin of our species. I'm a chaotically organized crapshoot of characteristics from my ancestors that got molded and modified by nature and nurture. Depending on the capacity of my brain and my physical structure (which, by the way, I did not choose any more than I chose the geographical location of my birth), I learned how to identify and navigate my surroundings. I am no more nor less important than any living thing around me. I am naturally different as well as simultaneously the same. And my purpose is simply to perpetuate life itself. I make up the rest as I go along. Life on this planet may be just one way in an unending number of ways to exist. Thinking these things helps to keep me sane in a seemingly insane world.

 Dinner Disasters

 

Dinnertime is usually pretty tame at our house. One of us cooks, all of us eat, and we take turns cleaning up. Occasionally a magnificent effort will produce ooohs of appreciation but on the whole, mealtime is pleasant and uneventful. There are times, however, when things get out of hand and dinner gets (literally) turned upside down. Take Saturday night, for example. My sister, Jeanne, came for supper. She brought a roasted chicken and some fresh fruit for a compote. While I scrubbed and wedged some potatoes, she spread a rich crumble over the fruit and the two dishes went into the oven to bake.

 

Daughter Cassie was setting the table on the porch and I was in the yard when, from the kitchen, we heard a screech followed by a great crash and clattering, and then dead silence. Then came the moan. Uh oh.

 

Cassie and I stood in the kitchen doorway surveying the wreckage. Jeanne was toe deep in fruit slices and potato wedges. Purple juice splattered the floor, the cupboards, the refrigerator, the walls. The three of us looked at each other, horrified.  “I was pulling the oven rack out,” explained Jeanne, “when whoosh! Both pans came flying out of the oven like greased pigs. It was as if they planned it. You know, one dish said to the other, ‘When she opens that door, make a break for it.’ ”

 

This was greeted with more silence. Then one of us giggled. Giggles led to guffaws and finally we were all hooting as we tried to salvage what we could of the food. “You scoop,” said Jeanne, handing me a spatula “and I’ll spoon.” 

 

As an afterthought she said, “I hope your floor is clean.” 

 

“It will be when we’re done,” I told her.

 

This was not the first time I had to scrape dinner off the floor. We spent the next hour picking grit off the potatoes and telling tales of other dinner disasters. “Remember the porch-chops?” Cassie asked, recalling the time I turned a whole pan of pork chops upside down on the porch floor. “The dogs sure loved that dinner.”

 

That reminded me of another pork chop peccadillo. There were ten hungry guests gathered around the table, sniffing appreciatively at the spicy aroma of pork chop pizziole. We heard the oven door open. There was a scraping sound, a grunt, and a tremendous, squishy thud. Investigation showed us what had become of dinner. Pork chops, tomato sauce and cheese lay in a puddle on the floor. Sauce slid down the walls and some of the cheese hung from a doorknob. “Ah,” remarked one of the guests, sizing up the situation. “Pork Chops Linoleum!”

 

 

Reflections

 

Looking out.

Looking in.

There is a window in my bedroom wall that faces west through which, when I am inside looking out, I can see the rise of a mountain, its flanks like bits of blue paint splashed between the trees that grow close to the house. At this time of year, late autumn, the ground is papered brown with fallen leaves and every branch and twig is gilded by the early morning sunlight. Through bare branches I can even glimpse the pond across the road where geese are gathering by the hundreds to plan their journey south. A gray squirrel scampers in the leaves, a cardinal flaunts its jeweled feathers, a chickadee pipes a morning tune. All that I see is natural – birds, water, trees, mountain, sky. I’ve made none of these, own none of them. They frame my day, I move among them. They are what’s outside that window. They don’t come in.

 Ah, but I can go out. I can gaze into my house from the other side of that window and see what the trees, the squirrel, the birds might see if they cared to look in. Should it be a surprise that the first thing I notice in that window is me, looking back at me? There I stand, reflected, surrounded by sunlit trunks, gazing into my own eyes. Only when I change my focus can I see the room I’ve left, the walls beyond reflection, the window in the east wall, my computer where I’ll record all this, the wall of book crowded shelves, the ceramic turkey I’ve forgotten to replace with something more Christmasy. I notice that from the outside my window looks dark, the result of all that’s reflected in the glass while from the inside, the window looks quite clear and bright. I can see out far better than I can see in, but when I step close to the window and shade my eyes with my hands there is my room, my things, what I’ve made and what I own, what I am, really, reflected in those things.

Gathering Memories

Old homestead

                                                     Berry patch (L) and brook (R) behind me

Yesterday I stood in the driveway of my brother's house that sits where a small apple orchard and fruit patch thrived when I was a child. The brook is to one side, West's hill the other and, if I glanced next door I could see the old homestead itself, now looking like someone else's house altogether. My mind's eye and my memory filled in remembered details - the bent old apple trees that looked like horses to my sisters and me to which we attached rope stirrups and reins; the thorny patch of blackberry and raspberry bushes and the stout blueberry bushes; the brook that ran along the edge of our property line before dashing through what we called the tunnel to the other side of the road where it widened into a satisfactory small pond; the giant pine across the street where we kids would crouch for hours building miniature moss and stick houses and roads lined with pine needles where imaginary pioneers lived and traveled through the bear-infested, never-ending pine woods themselves. 

When I was very small, I would pretend I was mere inches tall. Rocks became mountains, moss an impenetrable forest, a runnel of rainwater in a roadside ditch grew into a roaring river. If I sat still long enough and was quiet, the imagined scene became real and I entered the parallel dimension with ease. It would take a sudden loud noise or a tap on the shoulder to bring me back and I always returned reluctantly. By the edges of the brook, beneath the trees of nearby woods or among the cornstalks in the meadow near the house, I would lose myself in play, bothering to go home only when my stomach rumbled loud enough to rouse me or the ringing of the ship's bell on our porch calling us kids home penetrated my awareness. I always kept the house in view, though when I was hunkered down I believed no one from home could see me. For an introverted child, this state of affairs was ideal. 

I am too stiff now to hunker down and too tall to go unnoticed as I walk along the brook's edge. And I am far too big to fit through the culvert and splash into the pond. On all sides the reeds and marsh grasses and bushes have encroached until there's hardly a pond at all. In my memory, my mother is beside me, helping me find a few good-sized stones to toss into the water. "Rocks help clean the water," she'd say, and we'd throw our finds as far as we could, watching the ripples make their way to shore. 

Turning from the brook, I am assailed by another memory. Coming back from a visit to a friend's house one late winter afternoon, I stopped at the brook to listen to the water talk to itself as it splashed through the tunnel. When I looked toward my house, the kitchen light came on. I knew my mother was there, making supper, and I was flooded with such a feeling of contentment and safety that I was near tears. Just the way I am now as I recall that feeling of utter happiness. 

The brook summer 2023.

Returning Home

 

I look out the window at the familiar trees of my childhood, the great pines, the lone oak still holding its leathery brown leaves on this mid-November morning. I watch the light appear in the eastern sky over the brook, watch the fingers of sunlight touch first the top of the mountain – Mama’s mountain – and trace their way slowly down to color meadow and farmhouse, and finally the familiar road I now walk along every day. All my selves, my small self, my grammar school self, my teen self and the one I was in young adulthood, my middle-aged self, home for as many visits as I could fit in my busy schedule, my now elderly self who holds them all in memory, walk the road that leads from my childhood home to what we kids called “the Corner” a mile away, a gently hilled road winding its way past fields and woods and a few houses. 

 

I am more at home and at peace here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, having formed an intense attachment to the place in early childhood. As a small girl, my perimeters extended to the farm on the hill, known to us as West’s Hill because a family of that name lived there, down the hill to encompass the nearest neighbor’s farm where lived an elderly couple we called Grandma and Grandpa though they were no relation at all, across the street to the Big Pine at the edge of another meadow, and past the brook to Mary’s house with whom I chose to play on occasion. She was younger than I, falling between my own age and that of my sisters, three years younger. My older brother, though busy with other pursuits, often consented to play games with his younger sisters. We played, too, with the West kids whose farm had a delightful hill for winter sledding and whose woods were filled with wild flowers and mushrooms in the spring, and a great barn filled with cows and a grain bin filled with corn, oats, and barley mixed with molasses. 

 

 To be nearly home again (my childhood home lies next door to the house where I am living now) is an unexpected gift. I wake each morning with a feeling of expectancy. I walk past Grandma and Grandpa Gordon’s house now renovated to suit its new owners, up West’s hill where a newer ranch house occupies the spot where the old two-story farmhouse once sat before it burned to the ground one cold December night, along the level spot that leads to the Macchi farm where we once boarded our cow, Cecile, and did farm chores in exchange, past the Name Rocks where people in the 1800s, and later we neighborhood children, carved our names and the date, along the edge of the long hay meadow that marked the beginning of the wooded area near the Corner, to the Corner itself where stands a favorite tree I’ve become attached to over the years. Here, too, are massive rocks that hold honeysuckle in the spring, and enormous trees that I recognize from 70 plus years ago. And as I turn for the walk home, I feel the same lift of spirits I felt as a small girl, as a young woman, as a middle-aged visitor. It is possible, in a wide sense, to go home again.

 

Sunday morning writing prompt - what that you love most about life would you give as a gift to someone? Here's my gift to you:

I would give you dawn in vivid colors and in rainy gray. I would wrap sunsets in shades of scarlet and orange, and darkening evening skies in glimmering starlight. I would give you cold November rains, colored lights gleaming against the snow in December, the warmth that grows in April and blooms in May, the chill that signals autumn, and brilliant scarlet leaves that tumble in the sweeping winds of change.

I would give you meadows full of daisies, the sweet scent of new mown grass, the contentedness of pastured cows. I would give you the red fox that leaps for ripening grapes, the possum that chortles to itself on its nightly ventures, the bear that sharpens its claws on a dead tree. And I would give you trees in every height and variety, those giants that sink their roots deep and hold their heads high.

I would give you the smallest stream that rushes downhill from a mountain spring, a river that tumbles over a dam, the ocean teeming with life that never ceases its restless, shoreward roll. I would give you pearly shells and starfish, harsh-voiced seagulls, ducks and cormorants and slouch-billed pelicans. I’d give you the scarlet cardinal whose voice drops liquid notes into the springtime air, and a small chickadee that dares to feed from the palm of your hand.

I would give you stones that sing about the earth in deep tones, and craggy mountains that offer visions of timelessness. I would give you distant blue hills and an adventuresome spirit that would, even if you never left your homeplace, help you to learn about faraway places and people and landscapes.

I would give you the fragrance of a spring wood violet, the delicate perfume of a rose, the piney scent of a forest path, the metallic taste of a snowflake melting on your tongue. I would give you the silence of a winter snow, a dawn symphony of summer birds, the song of the wind in the high treetops, the sound of wings.

But, these are not mine to give, so come, sit here with me, and let me picture for you with words all the wonders that I know.

 

Then life Intervened

 

I was contemplating the way the sunshine gleamed

on the polished chrome of the kitchen faucet –

creating a star of cosmic proportions for a small sink –

when the telephone’s strident voice

broke the silence.

My book, the story forgotten on my lap while I

thought of stars and moons and planets

loose in my kitchen, fell to the floor and closed

its covers so the occupants could not escape.

Donning hat and coat, boots and gloves against the cold,

I ventured out to collect the “ready for pickup now” prescription 

of pills designed to keep the pain of old-age rheumatism at bay,

at least for a while, and returned home with a quart of milk

and a box of Bandaids, the former to add to my tea,

the latter to pamper the small cuts life provides daily.

 

Ensconced in my chair once more, a quilt draped across my lap

to still the shivers, my book once again in my hands,

a mug of milky tea at my elbow, I searched for the page

I’d been reading before the advent of the star. 

Three lines later, I glanced out the window to see a crow, 

followed by three more, slice the blue with their black wings.

Four crows now flew in my head, their raucous voices echoing – 

did they call directions to one another? Gossip? 

Shout for the pure joy of hearing their own voices in the void?

I noticed the faucet star had turned to a rainbow that danced on the floor 

at my feet. And as I watched, it slowly crept toward the quilt on my knees, 

climbed my leg, and spread itself across the pages of my book. 

 

Rainbow words, redorangeyellowgreenblueindigoviolet, shimmered.

I tilted the book, splashing the colors on the floor once more where they

lay quietly, singing themselves out of existence as the sun inched westward.

I got lost in the story, conversed and ate and slept, worked and wept with the

people who lived forever between cardboard covers. When it grew too dark

to see the words, I set the fictional world aside and made my way to the 

kitchen, remembering it agleam with reflected starlight, itself a fiction. Which world

did I inhabit, I wondered – the fictional one I’d just left or the one I made up

for myself? 

 

As I prepared supper, life intervened. I fetched a Bandaid for the cut.

Searching the Present for the Past

 

Two Small Winter Poems

 

Waking In a Snow Globe

The wild wind tipped the world

upside down while I was sleeping.

Now, snow catches in tree-caught gusts of air

that blow small birds off course

and set the wind chimes swinging.

High above the spinning white,

the sun is prying the clouds apart,

loosing snowy feathers from the downy puffs,

until the air itself is made of silver and gold.

Winter Day

Snow is falling all around,

it swirls and eddies to the ground,

it makes a kind of whispery sound,

as it comes tumbling down.

Mystery

With all the Bernie mitten memes circulating the internet, I found myself thinking about mittens and remembered this poem from my years in the classroom teaching poetry. It was winter term and one second grader said, "It's cold out. Make up a poem about mittens." So I did.

Mystery

I found a mitten in the snow,

just one, just thumb and hand,

and stripes of red and green and white

around the mitten band.

I don't know how it came to be

alone and in the snow,

or where the other one might be

and how was I to know?

perhaps it from a pocket fell,

perhaps a child lost it,

perhaps it kept a snowman's hand

from getting cold and frosted.

I hung it from a bushy branch

that grew there on the lawn,

and next day when I went to look

the mitten? It was gone.

 

Forever Winter

 

 

Perspective

In early 2000, I returned to school to earn a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT. My roommate was a sturdy woman from Michigan. Both of us were used to the cold and often during that first winter semester we rose at 6 a.m. and booted, hatted, and mittened, we walked for 45 minutes before breakfast.

One chilly day we decided to walk into the town to fetch a couple of gallons of drinking water. We bundled up as usual and walked the half mile down the hill to the store. There were very few cars on the road and still fewer people. In fact, we hadn’t seen a single soul until we entered the store. At the clang of the bell over the door, the young clerk looked up in surprise. We grabbed two gallon jugs of water each and approached her, smiling. She rang us up and then asked, “Are you guys from the college?” We said we were and she shook her head. “Did you drive down?” she asked. We said, no, we’d walked. Why?

“I’ve heard there’s some strange folks up there,” she told us. “Who else would walk down the hill for water when it’s 40 below zero?”

Roomie and I looked at each other. 40 below? Really? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The hike back uphill seemed much colder than the walk down and by the time we reached our dormitory, half the water in each jug was frozen.

My outdoor thermometer this morning read 3° and the wind chill is bringing the temperature down to a balmy -13°. But, I’m running low on milk – anyone up for a walk today?

Summer

These are the long nights

The middle of July nights

The pink and blue and cream nights

The best time of the year

They’re firefly and moth nights

Fiddle cricket tune nights

Stay out late to play nights

Until the moon appears

These are the hot nights

The no pajama, sheet nights

The window open, fan nights

The nights of frog and loon

The bicycle and stroll nights

The freezy ice cream treat nights

The skinny-dipping pond nights

That always end too soon

It's NOT Boring!

I don't know why some people claim that country living is quiet and boring. Take, for example, the other night. My friend and neighbor, J, and I were taking our regular evening walk that passes the dam at the north end of the pond. Water crashes over and pools in the rocks below before hurrying on its way downstream. We often stop to lean on the bridge railing to watch the great blue heron fish for its evening meal. It's noisy there so we stop on the edge of the one way bridge and check both ways for oncoming traffic before crossing, which is why we saw a large van approach the bridge and stop. The driver leaned out and pointed to the neighbor's lawn across the street where a large black mama bear was galloping, a wobbly black cub doing its best to keep up. They weren't more than 50 or so feet from where we stood.

"You know, they were right behind you," said the driver, "until I sort of nudged them off the road onto the lawn there."

Insert bug-eyed emoji here. J and I waited until the bears had disappeared into the woods before continuing on. Home again, we sat at my patio table to discuss the day when J looked out across the lawn and remarked, "Brian (her son) must have put his chickens in early."

"No," I corrected her. "He never let them out this morning. The door to the outside pen is gone."

"Gone?" she said. "Where is it?"

"I don't know," I remarked carelessly. "It's not my door."

She gave me a funny look, wondering why I was not as curious as she about where the door actually was, and when she left for home, went out past the chicken pen to see what had become of it. I heard her hoot. She came back a moment later, almost doubled over, gasping out that the door was not gone, as I had assumed, but merely pushed back against the wire fencing. The fact that I had not seen it nor been curious as to its whereabouts was the cause of great hilarity. I had to laugh with her, wondering out loud what else in my life I missed when it was right there in front of me had I bothered to be curious.

Not ten minutes later, while I was weeding the beets in the waning light, I heard my name being called across the yard. I looked about but could not see J anywhere. Finally she shouted, "I'm locked in the hen house! I need rescuing!"

It was my turn for hysterics. I chuckled and chortled as I hot-stepped it across her backyard to the hen house. Sure enough, the door with its simple hook and loop mechanism, was firmly latched.

"How did you do that?" I queried, as I lifted the latch and set her free. She looked chagrined.

"Well," she admitted, "I forgot to turn the hook aside as I usually do and when the door slammed behind me, I heard it fall." She was looking at the ground as she said this. She looked up and confessed, "It happened a couple of weeks ago, too, but I managed to get out the door at the other end of the house. But I've since locked that one."

"From the outside," she added.

On our way back to her house we wondered aloud how long she might have had to stay in the hen house had I not been outside and heard her hollering. We agreed it would be a good idea to check on each other daily. "And now," she said, "I'm going to bed before anything else can happen."

I haven't heard form her yet this morning. Excuse me while I go check.

Winter hues are so unlike their bright summer counterparts you’d hardly think they originated from the same colors. A winter sky looks cold. It’s ice blue in the early morning, cobalt in the afternoon. Even on sunny days there’s a hint of frostiness. And there is no color quite like New England grey—a sullen shade that portends snow, or worse, a dreary fall of freezing rain.

Winter woods are hauntingly beautiful. Trees whose shapes and patterns go unnoticed under a canopy of summer leaves stand revealed, every lofty limb, every bend of branch and configuration of twigs inked in relief on a canvas sky. Bark—rough and craggy or smooth as skin—is every shade of brown there is. When a pale January sun reaches out and touches bark and branch, the trees look as if they are lit from within. And snow, far from pure white, flaunts rainbow colors when struck by direct sunlight. Late in the day it harbors deep purple shadows; on moonlit evenings it turns to pure silver. Snow brings a discernible depth to other winter colors.

We tend to think of winter as a bleak and desolate season, a time when color recedes and fades into nothingness. A painter would tell us differently. No winter landscape is rendered in pure white. Always there is an underlying wash of blue or brown or yellowy-orange. Our eyes, blinded by fall’s fiery display, seek brilliance and in so doing, overlook the perfection of subtlety, of austerity, of less.

 If you look closely, you can see hints of spring shades to come. They are visible in the pale green-gold of the tightly folded lilac bud, in the wine-red withes of the swamp osier, or in the grape-colored stalks of blackberry canes. Winter is not a season of death so much as one of rest, a time to withdraw and be quiet, to renew ones' self in anticipation of summer's vibrancy.