Essays about Vermont

This Enormous Blue Morning A Borrowed Line Poem

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At the Boothbay Literacy Retreat I was introduced to a new (to me) technique for writers called a borrowed line poem. You read the poem of another author to find a line that especially resonates for you. That line then becomes the foundation of a poem of your own. In the new context the line may take on an entirely new meaning from the poem of its origin. It’s a wonderful writing exercise.

From Mary Oliver’s poem, Notebook, I borrowed this line: “the enormous blue morning”.

It inspired this reflection on summer mornings of my early childhood. We lived in a house on a hill with concrete stairs tucked between tire paths up the steep drive.

The Enormous Blue Morning

By Julie Burchstead (with a nod to Mary Oliver).

The enormous blue morning opened wide

as the slap of my sandals

counted the cement steps

down the drive.

Slap! slap! Like staccato code

to my sleeping friends,

“Wake up! Come Out!”

Enormously blue,

a bit dewy around its grassy edges yet,

the sun’s warmth still a promise only

this day so new, so enormous.

I sit on the bottom step

feeling grit through my thin cotton shorts

hugging my goosebumped legs

waiting.

Waiting on the bottom step

for the clap of screen doors

as sleepy children come tumbling out

of morning houses.

“Hey! Shake off those cobweb dreams.

Come out, come out!”

This day,

this blue enormous day

It’s ours,

but it won’t keep.

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Shopping Retail

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Retail shopping is a little like ingesting large amounts of sugar. Meandering aisles stocked floor to ceiling with shiny new somethings of every color and purpose, all screaming “You need me! You want me! Take me home!” does something strange to the brains of persons who have been away from such experiences for so long, defenses have become a bit shaky, and you find yourself with the mad urge to throw a tantrum like the unseen toddler in the aisle just over. Yes, my cart overfloweth, but I want that too!

But here, in my neck of the Vermont woods, such shopping experiences are difficult to come by. Vermont is very beautiful. It’s villages tout main streets from Norman Rockwell posters. I shop local as much as I can. As our town  is larger than some, it sports a lovely local artist’s collective, a Rite Aid, an Ace Hardware store, a car dealership, a Shaw’s grocery store, and the ubiquitous Dollar Store (where one can find unnecessary plastic items of every purpose known to mankind)…but there are times, (and the beginnings of school years are such), that only a big, warehouse style, multi-department, retail establishment, aproned by acres of neat, white-painted stalls for parking your car, will do. For my Oregonian friends, I was in need of a Fred Meyer’s. The closest thing here is Target. The nearest Target is an hour across the Connecticut River. So with a rainy day in the forecast, Herb and I clambored into the CMax, and headed to Keene, a New Hampshire city, offering the closest experience in true retail saturation one can find in SE Vermont.

The scenic highway along the river gave way to two lane roads. Stop lights and arrowed direction signs, then (gasp)..MERGING lanes appeared. Finally, one trip around a roundabout and a few false turns later, it loomed before us, the iconic Target red dot!  After only circling the lot a few times, we selected our very own place to park. A short walk later, the big metal and glass doors yawned open to welcome us in. And just inside…. to my fancy-coffee-deprived-soul’s delight, was a Starbucks! With a caramel macchiato and my shopping list in hand, we wandered up each and every aisle in Target. Found the elusive cloth shower curtain we needed, but not the percale sheets. Found the on-sale markers, but not the hanger thingie that attaches to the metal braces of classroom dropped ceilings. We laughed out loud at silly office supplies and pondered the need for kitchen gadgetry of all sorts, settling on a splatter screen and a lidded-reheatable mug perfect for taking leftovers to school for lunch. One Target, one Michael’s, a Home Depot, and J&J’s Discount (for that impossible to find classroom plant hanger)…oh and the New Hampshire Liquor Commission…(they have the most West Coast wines)…we found my list exhausted, our brains on traffic and plastic object overload…and the CMax so bursting to the gills it had a momentary eco-challenged burp, and was not able to show us even a single growing leaf on its screen.

Late in the afternoon, we stopped at Five Guys for lunch (Great burgers, but next time we will share a small fry…the large is…well gargantuan). As we steered the car towards home another round of gentle rain began to fall. The wipers slapped a comforting rhythm that soothed our weary souls. What-a-day. There is a satisfaction like no other that comes with being in possession of a shopping list that is almost completely crossed off. But I have to say, after all the noise and color and people and traffic…those misty green mountains welcoming us at the end of the long bridge back into Vermont were very easy on our eyes.

Painting Shutters

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Screen Shot 2014-07-08 at 10.22.40 AMMy husband and I are painting the exterior of our house in Vermont. It’s not a hard job, just tedious and slow. In the scope of things, painting isn’t a half-bad way to spend a late summer day, outdoors, with someone you love. And its a job that provides an immediate reward.

Herb is mostly doing the sides where long narrow planks run from trim board to trim board. I am painting the shutters. We will hire some younger person, with better balance, and less fear of falling, for the high gables on the steeply angled roof.

Our house is old. Its bones were first nailed in place in 1760. It has seen many additions along the way. Like these shutters. They do not appear in a picture we have from the turn of the century, when what is now our kitchen was still an attached barn, when the black iron crane inside the dining room fireplace had a purpose more than decorative. But they have been part of the house long enough to have experienced three changes in color.

First I have to scrape. I balance each shutter on the top of two red buckets and kneel in the grass, working with my tool to loosen flakes where the paint and the wood are parting company. In the process, the work of painters who have come before is revealed. Bare wood was followed by blue, covered over with green, then light gray, which we are painting over with black. When all is smooth, I can addshutters the first layer of new paint, that begins to transform what was, into new. It is mindless sort of work. It leaves me with time to wander in my thoughts.

I am thinking how this work, scraping and repainting shutters, is like revision in my writing. Rereading comes first, for an overall impression of how it’s weathering. I read to see what holds, and where intent and word choice are parting company. I scrape some parts completely away, discarding words like paint flakes that no longer fit. I carefully compose and repair, adding fresh color where it is needed. Where my writing once was rough, it now reads smooth, And when the revised section is restored where it belongs, just like newly painted shutters, it makes the whole construction better, beautiful, as if it was always meant to be that way.

Woodpile (A Tuesday “Slice Of Life” story)

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Photo Credit: world4photos Flickr Commons

Photo Credit: world4photos @ Flickr Commons

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Growing up in Portland, Oregon,  I experienced a relatively limited palette of seasons. Basically, there were three.  There was the season of wet and cold, followed by wet and warmer, with a brief interlude of hot and dry. You knew that summer had arrived when the sun so baked the concrete, you danced your bare feet across the gritty pavement as fast as you could to the respite cool of the nearest lawn strip, and when sweat from the tanned length of legs unprotected by your shorts made you stick, instantly, to the vinyl backseat of the car. Winter announced its arrival when the chill of the same blue vinyl seats would take your breath away even through the thickness of your coat. You could hear the change of seasons in the sound of the traffic : a hushed hiss and splash or thrumming, spiced occasionally by the fleeting sounds of radios through open windows, and the thwack of rubber tires hitting the cracks.

In contrast, rural Vermont boasts a traditional, calendar-worthy full quartet of seasons, with a bonus fifth thrown in. Mud season: The brief weeks between the end of full-on winter, and budding spring, when the knee-deep, sloppy slurry of unpaved back roads can swallow small cars. Too early for leaves, and dressed in a grey weariness left behind by melted snow, mud season is the only Vermont season without much to love.  And yet, it is during mud-season is when maple sap runs and drips, and is boiled down for its own sweet reward.

The Slice

Vermont winter is LONG. It pummels, powders, and freezes until even snow lovers like me despair of the cold and shoveling the drive one. more. time. But relent it does, giving way to mud season, followed by chartreuse springs,  firefly summers, and crisp, sweater day falls,  times that make it hard to conjure up the slightest memory of winter’s bite…until the wood arrives, like today.

Dan dumped the load in the middle of the drive on the hottest day of the year so far. A day smelling of just- baled hay and the last of the peonies. Herb and I had awoken this morning thinking this was the day we had been waiting for. “We’ll tackle the big yard project”. You see, we inhabit an ancient house. Upkeep of the grounds, until our arrival has been an affair never high on previous absentee owner’s agendas. Each year we spend several days reclaiming the bank and forested hillside from the tangle of wild roses, escaped barberry, impossible vines, and too crowded saplings. But the early morning email announced our change of plans. Wood.

Dan arrived on schedule, and after the obligatory Vermont chat in the road about our kids, the neighbor’s kids, the weather, town doings (or not doings), waving the few cars to come on and drive around, Dan dropped the first load. Two cords. Split. Mixed hardwoods.

A freshly dumped wood pile is overwhelming. It looms nearly shoulder-high and its jumbled outline covers significant real estate.  “Gloves?”, Herb asked. “Yep”, I replied. I learned the hard way our first stacking season.  Even garden calloused hands are no match for wood stacking without some sort of protection.

It’s hard getting started. My older muscles complain. My older hands tattle my age. It’s more difficult to palm the ends of pieces of a certain size. But soon we find our rhythm. Herb and I pass companionably with each armful, lift, tote, stack. Each piece settled down into a just right spot.  The biggest pieces build the end  tower. We toss the smallest with the kindling. Smooth birch, rough barked maple.  Lift, tote, stack. Early laughter settles into comfortable silence, broken only when one of us pinches a finger, drops a log on our toe.  We break for a drink, then soldier on. The sun moves, but it seems the wood pile barely shrinks.

Wiping more sweat off my brow, I think,  “A fire? Are you kidding? Who was the idiot who said Wood heats twice. Like it needs to be hotter today!” Lift, tote, stack.

In the rhythm of this work my mind begins to wander. Twenty -two times we have completed this task.  I smile at the thought. Herb’s eyes  smile back. Memories settle into their just right place, each season, our life…. until our task is finished. Lift, tote, stack….rest.

We eat supper late. I take one last look at the tidy rows of wood lining the breezeway. The thermometer reads 80 degrees,   I watch a firefly carry its tiny lantern across the night, and head inside. Herb and I share a bottle of wine and watch a movie, before turning in, to the whir and tick of the fan, a failed attempt to find cool. The house settles and slumbers too, tucked into its hillside of ledge. Winter’s chill will come, but for now remains a distant dream.

 

 

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