Water

April 10th. What I learned about snow: It falls and settles in the crannies and undulations of the land. You never know just what depth you will encounter. Even on a flat field, you don’t know.

Its melting is unpredictable. Why here and not there. Why this sunny spot still thickly covered? And when the melt comes that ushers in the spring, you can push through all kinds—ice, “corn snow” (which is kerneled), “rotten snow” (which is all structure and no strength), slush and water—in a single brief expedition, as I did today.

I just came back from a walk back into one of my deep places of mind. I went outside after a murky day and roamed in the twilight the great flat flood caused by the roaring snow-melt river. The water has eliminated the steep river banks that carve into our valley floor. Now all is flat, the same level, so water spreads wide and wide. I stood alone in all the water in the expanse of fields under the sky. I took position, not where the river bank usually is, but pushed back by water to where the grass used to be and will be again, and absorbed the roar. The water included my feet in tall rubber boots. Just being there, keeping the river company and vice versa, and witnessing this time in the river’s life and season. When I was little we lived near a river and April was then, too, the time of dangerous fast water and then, too, I used to just stand there and that was enough.

On this walk I disturbed a beaver who flung itself into the water like a kid doing a cannonball, with great splash and no dignity. Out in the current it gave a scolding slap of its tail on the water, then disappeared in the current. Geese flew in, honking on the intake and outtake of breath like an old Model T’s horn, and making their own big splash on the shallow water of one of the new field-lakes. Ducks made their rude complaints as they flew by on their low horizontal trajectory. The water creatures—those adapted to dealing with floods—are out in force. This valley, after the glacier left it, was a gigantic lake called by geologists Lake Hitchcock. It was an arm of the lake that became the Connecticut River —and it was 750 feet deep. It filled the valley to almost to the tops of the hills. This afternoon Mark and I drove the length of it down to Bethel, an eight-mile wonderland of new, graceful shallow lakes and islands at the base of the steep hills. Imagine the watercolors of Turner and the pastorals of the Hudson River School and the English landscape artists, all of which celebrated the great willows leaning out over delicate rivers and lakes.

This river is high. The covered bridge in South Randolph had maybe a foot clearance at 6:30PM. We might get some rain tomorrow—what will happen? Surely they have made that bridge to last. At another point, in the area I call the water meadows though they are usually dry, the water covered the road. A temporary sign proclaimed, “HIGH WATER/one lane traffic” and we drove through on the shallow part, the water splashing over our windshield in a torrent. It was splendid.

Love, Josie

Negotiation With a Local

It’s early in the morning and early in April. At 7:20, the sun has just cleared Tunbridge Hill and flooded the house with long shafts of light. These mornings, the valley trees present tiny lines of light spilling in all directions: each twig is covered in rime and lit by the new sun. Though the fields are still socked in with snow, and the isolated living room I don’t heat is only 56 degrees, I nestle comfortably in here because of the sun’s strong warmth. Beauty is more than what the eye beholds.

We bought a farm trailer this past week, one to pull behind the tractor for manure and such. Here is how it happened:

Brookfield is the next town north, an idyllic dirt-road village with a floating bridge and a great restaurant. A mill pond and its waterfalls and streams flow right through the village. Funky old Vermonters’ crumbling houses sit across the road from new-comers’ revitalizations such as ours. Driving through a month ago, I spotted a rusty old trailer with “for sale” on it buried in the snowpack. Saw another one, too, still mostly submerged. So I approached the house, an enchanting cottage, picket-fence surround, sitting by a stream, little footbridges and all—and stepped onto a rotting porch with two grimy doors. I peered in one and saw jumbles of junk, and chickens milling. I boldly knocked on the other. An old woman shuffled across a wooden floor that had not seen a wash or polish in decades, and opened the door, vacant-faced. I asked about the trailer and she still stood there. “Leonard!” she called weakly, then stepped aside. I saw a brown, gray interior, a round old table heaped with newspapers. On dingy floral wallpaper hung a print of Old Dog Tray, and the obligatory picture of a country lane tilted on its nail. A tabby cat made for my ankles, purring importunately. A tall old man, somewhat toothless, appeared. “$400,” he told me, and “t’other is $600.” He said there’d been a man lookin’ at it t’other day, a rich guy, liked to throw his weight around, and—well I could see he didn’t want that guy to get it. I said we’d come back when the snow had melted off them some more.

Last week we drove up to Brookfield again. We were able to tromp right around the trailers. Mark bent down to peer under the better one and suddenly righted himself, saying, “I’m done.” He was excited—he saw hydraulics. It was a dump-trailer. You know, the little boy’s dream. Bbbbb---dump! And out falls the cargo. We seek out Leonard, who emerges from a horrific barn. Mark tried to talk him down from $600 and Leonard said, “That was Mom’s husband’s. Was the trash man, y’know, took people’s trash to the dump. It’s a good one. I offered the two trailers to t’other guy yesterday for $1500.” Then he looked at us silently. The math didn’t add up. It was drastically in our favor. I said I’d be back with a $100 deposit. We scuttled away feeling guilty. What would happen when I came back with the check? Would he have realized his error? Should I point it out?

When I returned, it was 8:00 at night. The old woman, long white hair falling, answered the door and stood silently. “I’m here for Leonard,” I said. Once again she stepped back and this time she smiled very sentiently. “Leonard’s got to get up for work now anyway, I’ll wake him up.” Leonard emerged in the clothes he’d slept in and coughed, a deep, alarming cough. He spluttered, “Yep. Gotta go to Castings [Vermont Castings wood stove factory]—night shift-- Mom here always gets to stay home.” He cast a little grin at the old woman and I was shocked. The poor man was son, not husband. But he looked so old! Anyway, he gave me a friendly smile and took my check with an air of contentment, saying he could deliver the thing in a week. I can only conclude that he never wanted that rich guy to get the trailer, and wonder what the rich guy did to lose such a good deal.

Note: It’s been a couple of weeks, and Leonard still hasn’t delivered the trailer. Are we really the elect who got the good deal? Stay tuned.

Love, Josie

The Mud and the Roaring Dandelions

Dear friends,

Did you ever notice the difference in crow caws from season to season? I may be imagining it, but right now they sound gayer, lighter-toned than before. Balmy breezes are blowing over the snow. Willows are glowing yellow against the white land. This is the season I’m calling Winter-spring, because it’s not pre-spring as I have known it. Hip-deep snow still covers the ground, so you have to be alert to subtler cues. Everyone else calls this Mud Season and I guess I’ll acquiesce to that: three-quarters of the roads here are dirt and let me tell you, this season is not subtle. I drove over Tunbridge Hill Monday in a car I ignorantly had just taken (at last) to the car wash. As I veered back and forth, slinging the car away from mud-pits, I felt like a trick driver. One false move and you’re stuck: keep it going, don’t lose momentum… I had the stern concentration necessary to a positive outcome. And there was still ice left, firming up the underneath—true Mud Season had not quite begun. That was the last time I was taking the direct route to Tunbridge for the next month, you can count on it. Too perilous. This season is so vivid around here, songs and jokes abound about it.

A couple of weeks ago we attended an event up in Cabot called the Compost Cabaret, the name striking us as funny. Music, poetry, even a group called Vermont Vaudeville that hashed up the traditional culture pretty hilariously, rewarded our drive up there. We laughed at a lot of good mud jokes in the songs and Mark’s still singing, “there’s a lot of good mud down my road”. It was a packed house amidst the drifts outside, a wooden hall upstairs above some little store in a small town in the Northeast Kingdom. Kids zoomed up and down the periphery, and a group of enterprising little girls dragged me up to the dance floor in front of the stage. It happens that I was willing to dance—I cannot resist African drummers—but I had just sprained my big toe and the only shoes I could get into were Mark’s size-13 boots. So I stood planted to the floor and swayed and wriggled, completely accepted by the group, in my strange get-up. People danced and drank homebrew and cider and cheered each act. Most of the acts were sparkling and perceptive and the crowd enthusiastic—the poet, David Budbill, received as much applause as the comedians (turns out Budbill is familiar to NPR listeners—we found his work enthralling). My biggest motivation to drive an hour for this show was to see what their publicity meant by, “And featuring the Roaring Dandelions!” When announced, the Dandelions ambled on stage and put out fantastic dancing blues.

There was a good cause at the base of it all: the evening was a benefit for the Highfields Compost Institute, which aims to create community food composting programs throughout the state, to return every bit of food waste back to the soil to sustain our agriculture for generations. With the Roaring Dandelions at the Compost Cabaret, we found ourselves in a place where sincere effort for social change is leavened by joie de vivre, because one without the other doesn’t make a good life.

Another time, I’ll tell you more about the agricultural scene up here. It is, as they say, vibrant.

With love, Josie

First of March

Dear friends,

First of March opened with a blaze of sun. March—the word just won’t conjure up the winter world I still treasure. It speaks to me of Change, even as I thrill to the new snowdrifts and the hilarious height of the snow outside the dining room windows. The sun insists to me that my world will change.

Why do I resist the coming of spring? Twofold: the glory of this winter’s consistent white, tree-decked purity and the endless bouts of cross-country skiing in unfolding fields more beautiful than any I knew before; and that I haven’t fulfilled my winter tasks that should be done before the ground opens up and sucks me into the world of growing things again.

We flung open the greenhouse doors at 8:35 this morning. That early, the heat trapped could warm the house today. It’s been 9:30 or 10:00, before. Today feels new. Ran upstairs to open the French the doors in the bedroom, too, for two storeys of heat at an outlandishly early hour. Change is in the air.

Suddenly a log skidder is blasting its way out of the woods across our field. They’re logging up on the ridge, as fast as they can before sugaring season begins when the guys—farmer Dave Silloway’s nephews-- go work on their real income stream. God it makes a huge racket, like a boy’s big toy—“and it can even drag real logs!...” They’re pulling out skinny red pines planted for telephone poles in the ‘50’s. There was a government program starting in the Depression incentivizing the farmers to plant red pines on the steeps all through the valley. Rural electrification was still a big thing and the market for the poles promised to stay robust. It didn’t always work out that way, and too many trees—non-native, shallow-rooted, vulnerable to windfall--still crest the ridges. They’re almost junk now. Mark chainsawed dozens of them fallen across a lovely old farm road that takes us up the side of the ridge on skis and walks. The owner of all that ridge land has got to maintain his forest to keep his Current Use tax-reduction status, and the logging can open the land for the best trees to grow unimpeded. Considerately, the forester and logger came to talk to us, the closest neighbors to the cutting site, about it before they began. We dream of owning a piece of that ridge and snowshoed up to inspect their work the other day: a decent environmental job.

This morning, we went to Annual Town Meeting: on a Tuesday morning! My lips fold in disapproval. Who can get there, the retired people only? Worse than that, we don’t even get to discuss as a group, intently hearing all sides, before taking a binding vote on the budget or on new land-use ordinances. We have to go to the polls instead, each in our own little cubicle, and no land-use plans are voted on. I am dismayed to find Randolph, Vermont, less democratic than Harvard.

Before we left, I saw Mark moving as usual among his seedlings in the greenhouse. Brandywine, Peace Vine—4” tall tomatoes already have That Smell. Mesclun running riot in its tray, pushing, crowding, already snippable. Basil and cilantro, both ready to season supper today, if modestly. Peppers, eggplant (even white eggplant—will I like it?) 2—3” high, though you can’t put them in the garden here until June! How that used to turn me off. Now I know that in this vale of fertility and sun they will thrive in a lushness I never had before. The lap of luxury, this valley.

Making this place work is a lot of work, believe me. Let the rigors of spring take their time in coming. I’ll gaze out the window and gloat over the two feet of snow still on the ground……………….With love, Josie