Month: April 2018

Scrolling through the last few months of posts, I see the same themes repeated again and again: Snow. Driving. Cows. Writing, either the act of, or the teaching of (as if). And so I’m leery of mentioning the snow in the night, or how I awoke to the sound of it sliding off the metal roof (Vermont roofs. Two words: Metal. Steep.) and thumping to the ground. Or how yesterday I drove back roads (again) past rotting snow banks, churning through mud and potholes, balancing on the spines of deep ruts. Or how today is the last class of the semester, and how much I’m going to miss my students. In a strange way I don’t yet understand, I’ve come to rely on them for something.

It’s nearly full daylight now. A beautiful morning, the air lit from the ground by the new snow, the closed-up sky barely any help at all.

Here’s a quote from Edward Abbey to start your day:

“If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it…” 

Early morning turkey scouting

Barely more than a week ago it snowed, and not just a dusting but an honest-to-goodness four-inches, a dispiriting accumulation for the end of April. But then the sun came ’round and the temps were in the 60’s, and then a steady rain, and now the snow is almost gone, even the piles and banks formed by the snowplow are much diminished. Spring is here for sure. It feels hard-earned, and very welcome.

In the rain the other day I followed a school bus through the outskirts of a nearby town, idling at intermittent intervals as it stopped to disgorge students, most bound for the trailer homes that lined the roadway. Trucks with rusted rocker panels, snowmachines perched at the apex of those receding snowbanks. Dogs rushing to greet the children, almost all of whom were dressed inadequately for the weather. No rain jackets. Short sleeves. I turned the heat up in the car, as if it would somehow warm these intrepid kids. I watched through the edges of the windshield, the wipers swaying back-and-forth, back-and-forth.

Later that same day I did chores in our friend’s barn. So light now at chore time. The light filters through the gaps in the barn siding, the cobwebbed windows, past the used round bale wrappers plugging some (but not all) of the broken panes. I roll the bale down the aisle, a wet one, I lean into it, it’s heavy but getting lighter by the minute as I distribute the hay to the long line of hungry cows, straining at their chains for evening ration. One is bleeding mysteriously from the nose, but seems otherwise fine. Blood has pooled on the floor. I cover it with hay. The gutter cleaner clacks and clanks, moving shit around the perimeter of the barn and then up and out the conveyor to drop into the spreader parked beneath. To be spread tomorrow. Shit, that forever link between beast and land. It’s part of the unspoken deal one makes. It’s what one gives after one has taken.

My students bring Kendrick Lamar lyrics to class. They read them like poems, then we listen to the songs, turned low so not to disturb the class in room above us, but still the bass is heavy and we bob to the beat. Outside the gray sky looks to be easing, but so little I could be wrong.

The song ends, we talk awhile, then Dante reads his essay on communism. It’s really quite good.

Music: A nice one from Tyler. 

It snowed again in the night, and was still snowing when I awoke, three inches on the ground already and mounting. At chore time I loaded square bales into a utility sled and pulled them through the orchard to the cows, who marked my progress from under the outstretched boughs of the big spruce trees lining the pasture’s crest. I watched them watch me, their heads slowly swiveling to track my journey. The snow was dense and the sled heavy, and I was glad I’d worn my new boots, the ones with the deep tread and the soles that don’t leak. I like them very much.

Yesterday, driving a back road not far from here, but far enough that I don’t drive it often, I passed a sap bucket hanging from a telephone pole and then another, affixed to a spruce. I remembered the roadside pumpkins I saw last December, and was grateful all over again for those, and now for the whimsy of these sap buckets. I imagined the delight of the person hanging them, how in some form or another they must have envisioned a moment just like this one. And then I thought (the buckets now far behind me, a sleety substance pelting my windshield, the sky heavy, low, insistent) of how they’d been delighted to imagine my delight, and how I was delighted to imagine theirs.

Ah. It was a very nice thought to think.

Later in the day, snow still falling, I drive a mile down the road to borrow a wheelbarrow, then another two miles to buy a beer. The roads are slick; the ruts beneath the snow are frozen, pulling at the truck. I drive slowly, in part for safety, and in part because I feel no urgency. The snow and cold have sapped my energy like a low-grade fever.

Near the Bend, idling down a steep grade, I come upon two boys on bicycles, riding uphill through the unplowed snow. The older one is in the lead, he’s 13, maybe 14 years old, standing on the pedals, weaving against the pitch, leaving deep set tracks. The younger one is 100-feet behind him, and as I watch, he dismounts his bicycle and begins to push. I roll down my window and yell “looks like fun!” which I immediately regret because it sounds just like something a 46-year old man would yell at a couple of kids riding their bikes in the snow, but they’re polite enough to flash smiles, and I watch them in my rear view mirror after I pass.

A few minutes later, heading home,  I pass them again, now at the bottom of the hill, and I realize they’d been riding up for the sole purpose of riding down, for the sheer novelty of it, and for the remainder of my short drive, I imagine how good it must felt to fly down that hill, snow in the face, wheels slipping and catching, slipping and catching, the risk of falling always close at hand. The way the risk of falling always is.

The temperature has dropped again, and gusty winds have delivered snow, it’s falling now, steady and slanting on what remains of the wind. I watch the chickens retreating to the shelter of their coop, walking in their forward-falling way. I watch what ground had been bared by cold rain and warm sun turning white again. The wood box is empty; the boy whose turn it is to fill it is away, and I know I’ll be stepping outside in a matter of minutes to fetch an armload or two. I think that filling the wood box is a good chore for a child or even (in this case) an almost-adult, so I will bring in only enough to last until his return.

The cat sleeps beside me, folded into himself, rear paws tucked between the fronts. Tail, too. I taught class this morning and we all had a fine time of it, reading and writing and talking and laughing, and I’m realizing that soon the semester will be over and how much I will miss my students. The quiet ones, the bawdy ones, the funny ones, the serious ones, the one who’s progressively losing both his vision and his hearing, the one whose father was murdered and who tells me that even now, when he returns home, he can’t be certain there’ll be enough food on the table, the one who can write so pretty you’d hardly believe it but doesn’t want to share it much. I don’t push her. She’s young yet, not even out of her teens. There’s time yet. Lots of time. Indeed, I can barely fathom how much time she has.

First, Penny’s hosting a black ash pack basket workshop at our place the last weekend in April. You should probably  absofreakinglutely come. You’ll leave with a beautiful basket made with your own two hands, though of course folks with any number of hands are encouraged to attend. 

Second, Penny’s now offering a limited supply of her birch bark handcraft through her Etsy shop, which you can access here. Leather straps, antler buttons, buckskin closures: These will NOT be available at a WalMart near you anytime soon, if you get my drift.