Drawing on Grief

My hands are sore.  My back aches.  I am sweating and bugs are buzzing in my face, tangling up in my hair.  I take a break to pull my sweaty mop back into a ponytail, look out over the field, and a white tail is staring back at me.  Remember, she says.  Don’t work too hard.

I am digging a rectangle inside a frame to grow vegetables.  It’s full of dirt, soft on top, hard on the bottom.  I want to dig a foot below the ground surface so my babies will have lots of room to reach their delicate roots down deep.

I will dig that foot down one row at a time, but I can’t get the spade to go deep enough.  I get hardly eight inches before I hit something so hard the metal scrapes against it like a rock.  I tell myself it’s enough.  I can’t dig through rock.  Maybe there’s a boulder down there.  There’s a boulder I can see not ten feet from here.  It takes me an hour to do one row.

I let it go a few days.  I can feel it pulling at me, begging me to get it done.  My babies stare at me, crying to be put into their new beds.  It’s windy one day.  It’s cold another.  Finally, the weekend comes and I say, I am getting this done, no matter what.

A friend tells me about some aged manure that’s sitting up on the Borland Road, free for the taking.  I load two garbage cans and two five-gallon buckets of the beautiful shit into the back of the Subaru.  It looks and feels like sand.  My back cries the rest of the day.

I get Dave to help me dump the garbage cans into the bed, even though I haven’t finished digging into the hard dirt underneath.  I figure the fertilizer will get worked into the soil as I dig, which is an okay idea but it means I have to move a lot more dirt around.

There are three or four kinds in my rectangle.  Some is black and hard as cement.  There is brown stuff that feels like decomposed redwood, soft and fragrant.  Chunks of it break apart in my hands like sand.  There is airy hummus, brown and rich and then there is light gray stuff, comes in rocks that I have to punch hard to break up.  When it does, tiny little pebbles fall through my fingers.

I get a rhythm going.  I shove that spade hard.  I work it back and forth until the earth gives.  Then I sit on the edge of the frame, reach in and grab the rocks of dirt and break them up.  I feel like I’m dancing with it, giving and taking, feeling it close.  I’m out there for an hour and a half and I tell myself I’m almost done.

I go back out in the afternoon.  In an hour I can finish this thing.  I pull out a rock the size of a football.  This is hard work but I’m doing it.  Like stacking wood, it’s painful and satisfying together.  I can’t stop until it’s finished.  I pull out another mini boulder, and another, and scores of smaller stones.

Frances comes out to help.  She likes picking out the rocks and pitching them.  Me too.  She calls the dirt clumps that look like rocks, “fakes.”  She collects big stones in the wheelbarrow.

A pair of chickadees sings to us from the big spruce that towers over the garden.  I hear the little hummer buzz by but I don’t see him.  He’s busy showing off to his girl.

Frances leaves, bored by the endless task.  My stomach aches.  What did I eat?  It’s my body trying to get my attention.  Stop!  It says.  You’ve done enough.  Just a little more.  I have to get this right.  I have to get the whole thing dug down.  I can’t stop until I’m sure its all soft.  The sun is setting and I ignore it and my daily chore of cooking dinner.

I reach the last corner.  I dig in the spade, making sure it goes in easy a full foot below the ground.  I try again, and again and again until I know I’m finished.

I’m done.

My garden, having been neglected for some time is pretty over grown.  I have a feeling I am going to spend the entire spring and summer weeding and never really feel like I am winning the battle.  This Wendell Berry Poem makes me feel better about that.  Enjoy.

May Song

By Wendell Berry

For whatever is let go
there’s a taker.
The living discovers itself

where no preparation
was made for it,
where its only privilege

is to live if it can.
The window flies from the dark
of the subway mouth

into the sunlight
stained with the green
of the spring weeds

that crowd the improbable
black earth
of the embankment,

their stout leaves
like the tongues and bodies
of a herd, feeding

on the new heat,
drinking at the seepage
of the stones:

the freehold of life,
triumphant
even in the waste

of those who possess it.
But it is itself the possessor,
we know at last,
seeing it send out weeds
to take back
whatever is left.

Proprietor, pasturing foliage
on the rubble,
making use

of the useless—a beauty
we have less than not
deserved.

Gardening was never my forte.  I used to think I was just bad at it.  I used to buy a houseplant every so often and it would usually die within a few months.  My mother was not into plants.  We hardly had any around the house that I remember and at the summerhouse on Long Island she kept things pretty simple.  I don’t remember flowerbeds or vegetable gardens except for one year when we planted some lettuce.  She had me put the seeds into the ground, evenly spaced but I spilled the package and a pile of seeds ended up in a clump.  When the lettuce finally came up the plants were pretty meager except for the spot where I had spilled.  We had a green bouquet in that one spot and we ate from it.  I remember how good it tasted.

In recent years, however, I have gotten caught up in the notion of being able to feed my own family off my own little plot of land, as I have seen many of my neighbors do.  Particularly here in Vermont, people are used to growing their own food, sometimes most of it.  In Los Angeles where farmer’s markets are open year-round, it’s not easy to find the motivation to grow my own food when others do it so well.  But I have tried.  I have taken workshops, read books and asked lots of questions. And I have grown a few things successfully; tomatoes, greens and squash, mostly.

But this year I am a new person.  I don’t know if it’s living in this agricultural community or growing out of an old stubborn feeling of being inept with plants.  Maybe it’s just my own natural ripening into this stage of life, or the dream I had week ago about pulling bright blooms out of a toilet.

A big influence has been the incredible show that has emerged this spring in Vermont.  We had unseasonably warm dry weather for two solid weeks, and the sun and coaxed out the leaves on all the trees like I have never witnessed before.  One morning I peered at tiny buds on a bush and by dusk they had opened.  A bright green halo appeared on the hills and each day it grows darker and denser.  I had gotten used to being able to see into the woods along the sides of the road but those brown and gray windows are closing into green walls.

All my hard work last fall, cutting the plants in my garden down to their base and clearing the debris is paying off.  I get to watch these new strangers come up, curious about their names and what colors they will exhibit.  (I try not to focus on all the invasive plants I need to eradicate because if I do, I might get discouraged.)

This year I have ambition and no fear.  This year I am planting a raised bed with vegetable seedlings I started weeks ago.  This year I am working on my neighbor’s vegetable beds, knowing I will help her harvest them later.

This year I will resuscitate flowerbeds with new plants, and a blueberry bush with fertilizer.  I will dig out the brush surrounding an old blackberry bush and cultivating the wild raspberries that grow in our field.  I might even plant an apple tree, or a pear, or even a cherry.  We’ll see.

A year ago I could not have seen myself even thinking about doing all that.  I would have dreaded the demands of spring and worried that I wouldn’t know what to do. But miraculously my attitude about myself as a gardener has radically changed.  I feel excited instead of fearful.   I have enough experience under my belt to know things will fail.  Plants will die or be consumed by vermin or just not come up.  I know I can finally own being a gardener because the other day someone actually asked me for advice.

Woke up from a dream that I was sure was real.  While I was sleeping, the one clue I was in a dream made me remark to my friends there, “this is exactly what happens when you’re dreaming.”  That is how convinced I was that I was not asleep.  When I woke up I was happy to stay between the two places.  It was perfectly clear to me that the dream was reality and what I woke up to was just a sketched out, shorthand version of what is really happening.

We are here in Vermont in our new house, which has two stories, is beautifully furnished, appointed and luxurious.  Laura suddenly shows up and is asking Dave about a drawing she is missing.  I ask if it was one of my drawings and she says no and he says no and then she complains a little about how people always come to pick up their work years later and its hard to find by then.

Laura has brought some tea with her made of flowers and I notice she left the remains in the toilet.  I ask Dave, “How could she think it’s okay to put a plastic bag in the toilet?” and he shrugs.  I fish them out and there are three bags and inside them are beautiful, colorful flowers and I start looking for a vase.  I am excited because they are so beautiful.

I learn that Ciara and Joseph are here.  They are staying with us.  I am delighted that we have room for them in the downstairs suite and they love our new house.  They seem very happy to be here.  The next thing I know I am in the bathroom peeing into the toilet with Grace and Frances who are helping me find a pair of shoes to wear when Joseph walks in.  I have to shoe him out of the bathroom but he doesn’t leave so when I pull up my pants he looks at me in my underwear and smiles as if calling my bluff about not wanting him to see me.

In the bathroom is a very emotional note, written to Ciara by someone else, but it looks like it could have been from me.  It’s not signed and when Joseph picks it up I laugh at the idea that Ciara might think I wrote it.  I hope he believes me because I know I don’t feel that way anymore but I’m not surprised someone else does.

Then I hear that Ciara needs a ride to pick up her car and I offer to take her.  I just need to put on some shoes.  As I try to put on some complicated sandals I notice Ciara looks sad and I assume it’s because she wants reassurance that the note wasn’t from me.  I want to tell her that I am over all my old feelings, but the moment isn’t right so I try to show her with my enthusiasm and bright mood.  She seems excited to have some time in the car together if I could just get my shoes on.  I give up on the sandals and try on a pair of red heels that have separate compartments for each toe but I can’t get them on.  I decide to just wear some brightly colored sneakers and start messing with my socks so they look better and I realize how bad sneakers and socks look with a skirt.  I will just quickly change to something else.  Are heels too fancy for just going to the mechanic?  And where are my heels?  It all feels so happy, despite the shoe problem which is so odd I tell Ciara it’s almost like I’m dreaming, but I know I’m not.  I am delighted the missing drawing isn’t mine, that the flowers are so beautiful, that it’s warm enough to wear a skirt and spring shoes, that we own a beautiful house and that our old friends have come to visit, but mostly I am happy to know my friendship with Ciara is on the mend.

Waking up from this world, reality broke.  I saw around the corners of it.  The idea of a real world seemed thin compared to this other landscape that is really my unlimited consciousness.  The dream was furnished with all the small details of things that have happened in the distant and recent past, but all were swirled into a new context where they made more sense and came together in fascinating ways.  The plastic bags I pulled out of a stream on Saturday, muttering “how could anyone think it’s okay to throw trash out their window?” became the containers for my gardening aspirations.  Laura gently reminded me to pick up my drawings.  An old lost friendship was mended.  My former boyfriend called me out on my latent exhibitionist desires just as my husband did when he put  pictures of me in a bathing suit up on Facebook.  The weather has changed and I have been sick of my old shoes and excited to put on flip flops but also wanting something different.  A pair of wonderful new shoes that I haven’t yet found.

I managed to stay in between the two places all day.  I decided to write a book about this year in Vermont.  I bought beautiful flowers to hang on the front porch, I worked in the garden, I swam in the lake and every moment sparkled with possibility.  (No I didn’t go shoe shopping, but I will.)  Something has shifted in me lately.  I feel lighter.  I feel like I am walking a new path, where old resentments don’t weigh me down and I am free to love without the fear of being hurt and try anything without the fear of failure.  I’ve been noticing it for a week or two, and even though it’s a fairly dramatic shift I can’t point to anything I did to make it happen.  It must be the cumulative effects of being here.

I had a strange day.  I felt like I was slipping backwards, tasting a very unhappy version of myself.  The version I haven’t been close to for a long time but who I remember so well it’s like she’s right there, ready to come back any moment.  She doesn’t feel like getting out of bed.  What’s so important?  Why leave the safe cozy cloud of covers and softness that always feels like home and where I can get away with doing nothing?

When I was eighteen I went to see a shrink for the first time.  It wasn’t my father’s idea, though I was suffering from ulcers and anorexia.  It was my seventeen-year-old friend Rachel who sat my father down and told him, your daughter needs help.  He thought I’d be fine if I just went to church with him once in a while but he nevertheless agreed and off I went to a high priced lady on the upper west side.

I remember the waiting room.  It was small and dark, probably the hallway of a regular apartment that had been converted into office space.  Did she live there?  I remember her elevator and the wreath that was hanging inside it just like the elevator of my apartment building in Brooklyn.  Nowadays everyone knows what Brooklyn is, but back then living in Brooklyn compared with the upper west side was like being the ugly cousin at a wedding that nobody wanted to dance with.

I still remember exactly what she looked like.  She had long straight hair that she wore up in a loose bun and a long elegant nose that was bent in the middle like a gentle cliff.  Her body was all length as well.  Tall boots that went up to her knees and a straight skirt that almost met them there.  Her fingers were long and thin and so was her face but she wasn’t strange looking at all.  She was beautiful.

Her name was Jo Lang and I had to bring a check for $90 made out to her every time I came which was once a week.  She never spoke much.  It was just like in the movies.  She just sat there and waited for me to talk.  A lot of times there was no conversation and we just sat there, but sometimes I would let her in on all the anger I felt towards my Dad and stepmother.  She rarely said anything useful but once or twice she made me feel like I wasn’t crazy to be feeling the way I was feeling.  She made me feel like it was normal.  But most of the time I didn’t really like her.  She was just another adult who I felt misunderstood me.

I saw her for a year and when it was time for me to go off to college she said, “You will probably always be depressed.”  That really pissed me off because it was such an indictment.  I felt it was a terrible thing to say, especially to a depressed teen.  It felt like a curse.

Other than short bouts of serious depression, my fate was fighting an insidious low-grade depression that shadowed me for decades.  I have had periods where getting out of bed seemed like punishment day after day.  I’d say it was really that dense fog of depression that motivated me to push hard to shake the dark cloud off.  And there has been much pushing over the years and all sorts of work and at a certain point I decided Dr. Lang was wrong.  I had beaten depression.  I was truly happy and satisfied.  I was past it.

Today something interesting happened.  It has happened before but this time I saw it more clearly.  I felt that old partner depression back with me and instead of running from it and cursing that old witch Jo Lang and her judgment, I decided it was okay to admit and accept that I am a depressive and that I’m fine with it.  In fact, I love it.  I love my partner.  I’ve said similar things before, but today was the first time I acknowledged, that old beautiful witch Dr. Lang was right.  Maybe she saw something in me that was always there and maybe was even supposed to be there.  I think she would be impressed by what I have achieved despite her assessment.  I know I am.

I have slogged through many memoirs about grief, including writing my own, and I know how dismal it can be wading through the leachy swamps of deep pain.  That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate what it takes to translate an intense period of grief into words.  The gut wrenching effort required to get through reading (or writing) about grief is more than most are willing to endure.  But I often find it hard to digest other writer’s grief because it looks, feels and tastes so different from my own.  I seem to be waiting for something to fit perfectly or feel so familiar it hits me like a satisfying slap across the face.   At the very least I want a grief memoir to teach me something about grief, but very few of this genre satisfy.  But there is always hope, and two recent books impressed me with their brutal honesty.  In both cases extraordinary circumstances led the writers to explode the many myths of what grief entails.

In Emily Rapp’s, The Still Point of the Turning World, the writer’s 9-month old son is diagnosed with an incurable disease that will rob him of physical abilities and ultimately his life by the time he turns 3.  Rapp writes about her grief while her son is still alive, sparing us her reaction after his death, which may have seemed more ordinary to her.  Her sons fleeting existence and his backward development (he never hits milestones like sitting up or rolling over and eventually loses his limited muscle development) force Rapp to be fiercely present and love him as much as she possibly can without knowing if he even knows who she is.  She learns to just be with him as much as possible and to enjoy the subtlest displays of joy, like his smile or his gurgling response to a diaper change.  How many of us know we could rise to the job of parenting a dying child, and yet what choice would we have?  According to Rapp, the parents she met whose children had the same rare disease all managed to be intensely present for their children’s brief lives.  The rest of us would do well to learn from them.

Rapp also makes a compelling argument against the notion of luck.  She writes from a position of understanding the pitfalls of physical disability having lost one of her legs as a child.  She knows what it is to feel unlucky and the shame of other people’s pity.  She grew up navigating awkward situations and even published a book about her experience as a literal poster child for disabilities.  In Still Point she wrestles with her own ideas about luck and is annoyed when people around her offer platitudes of “being blessed.”  She wonders if people realize how self-determining it sounds when they use such cliches in her presence.  As if her terrible losses were just the result of bad luck.

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagalas is tougher still.  The book is written by a survivor of the 2004 Tsunami, that killed her husband, two young sons and both her parents in an instant.  Deraniyagalas’ writing is extreme in it’s simple descriptions of a ruthless truth.  Reading Wave is like being behind her eyes and inside her mind as she runs from the water with her family, is tossed violently for what seems like an eternity, and then wanders in a daze wondering what happened.  That feeling of being in shock is one that she maintains throughout the book leaving us to understand that something that horrific leaves a person completely unable to get back to anything resembling “normal” for years, maybe even forever.  Her grief is so extreme it borders on psychosis as she manages the first few months by not allowing her thoughts to rest on her family but instead focusing them on her own suicide or on terrorizing the family that bought and moved into her parent’s home.  Slowly, over years she heals, and by allowing herself to remember her family she eventually comes to let the memories come back into her mind and finds comfort in them.  In the end, those memories are all she has.

Both books were written by highly successful women, who were used to being able to get what they wanted through hard work and determination.  Grief is never on anyone’s to do list and yet both books remind us that no one is immune to tragedy or hardship.  And both are testaments to the tremendous ability that we all have to survive whatever shit storms life throws at us.

Up here in Northern Vermont spring takes its time.  It has been a very slow transition unfolding in stages.  March was an intense push and pull of enticing warmer days and winter storm reprises that had me sorry to see winter go and then excited to see it return (with the possibility of one last good ski day).  Now that we are halfway through April, spring is definitely showing up, quietly, amidst the last remaining ragged edges of snow that line the edges of fields and hide among the shadows in the woods.  Dave remarked last night as we were driving home from Burlington past farms, woods and fields that the remaining snow is like a reverse shadow, illuminating in white where the sun shines least.  The very first crocuses have busted through out back and their purple heads are magnificent against all the dead brown that surrounds them.  The ice that has covered the lake for months is starting to recede and fray at the brink.  It will be another few weeks for the trees to start showing new leaves, but when that happens all that fresh bright light green will overshadow and eventually overtake the barren browns and grays of winter.

What astounds me most about life up here is how dramatically everything changes, not just season to season but day to day.  Every day is different outside the walls of this cozy house.  And in the landscape that surrounds it, every day is a feast.

A few weeks ago when there was still a good amount of snow, Peter and I went to see the beaver pond on our skis.  He had taken me there in the summer a few years back and I remembered that it involved battling our way through tall grass and low branches.  On the many visits he has made up here this year he has mentioned the beaver pond, asking if I’d been up to see it lately.  He never asked outright and I didn’t really answer, feeling somehow sheepish that I hadn’t tried to find it again on my own.  I have gotten lost more than once following the snow mobile and logging trails in the woods behind the house, and they all start looking the same after a while.

One time in late fall when the streams were just starting to ice over I went walking behind the workshop and found a stream and a beaver dam, freshly made.  I knew that if I followed the stream up hill I would find the famed beaver pond that Peter loved so much.  I tried walking up a little ways but quickly realized it would be too hard to get through the thick undergrowth.

“There will be a fair amount of bush whacking” Peter warned me as we set out on our skis.

“I know!” I yelled to him over the wind that was starting to blow.  It was about 20 degrees out and I was regretting not wearing my face mask but I figured I would warm up soon enough pulling myself along on the skis.

We cut through dense woods to the stream a little ways above the spot where I had seen the beaver dam in the fall and we followed it up through the woods. The stream was just a slight depression in the snow and we skied right over it.  Most of the undergrowth was dead and covered with snow so it was fairly easy to make our way up the stream, most of the time.  We did have to cut through areas that were dense with young spruce trees and other places where we had to duck under cedar and birch branches, but then we reached the first pond and it was all wide open spaces.  The beaver pond was eerie in a way with all the dead trees that they had drowned.  A forest of tall leafless sticks.  Then we were back into the woods for a while until we reached the next pond and it was bigger than the previous clearing.  Finally we reached the third pond and it was an incredible sight.  A wide, white open space surrounded by forest and dotted with black tree skeletons.  Tall trees with bark chewed off them stood far apart or had fallen over.  Piles of gnawed on sticks that looked haphazard at first but were the actual dens where the beavers live.  Peter stopped and turned around to look at me.

“I haven’t been up here in years!”  He yelled over the wind.  I hadn’t realized that but it made sense.  He moved back to New York four years ago.  “And I’ve never taken anyone up here before!” he yelled.  That surprised me.  Peter lived on this land for ten years.  He told me he skied every day that there was snow on the ground.  This was his favorite spot.  He’d never taken anyone else up here?

We took in the awesome beauty of the beaver pond for a while before we headed up over a ridge, past an old sugar house that would be busy soon, and down around to the snow mobile trails that would lead us home.

When we got close to the house we stopped on the edge of the woods and gazed over the field that stretches behind the house.  “Who knows Pete,” I said.  “Maybe our dream will come true!”  His eyes danced the way they have danced since he was a kid and we used to make up ludicrous games together that no one else thought were funny.  Pete has been like a brother to me since I can remember but our lives have not intersected for decades until recently.  And there we were, standing at the edge of a piece of property that he loved with all his heart, the same property that pulled me across the country and has made me cry just walking on it.  We stood there daring to dream of owning it.  It seemed difficult and out of reach.  Many things seemed to be pulling that reality closer but there was still a good chance it would not work out.

Do dreams really come true?  Or is there something else at work here?  I have dreamed up many things in my life that have miraculously come to be, but this time it wasn’t just about me and the forces that seemed to be bringing it all together were numerous and coming from different directions.  So many things seemed to be at work and the people who would benefit were many.  In my meditations I could see it quite clearly.  The interests of people who wanted us here and our own desires to be here were woven together in a great web of circumstances falling into place.  Things kept going smoothly at every turn.  Even when I was expecting there to be issues or things not to work out, they magically just happened.

I’ve just finished reading two different memoirs about people dealing with terrible things happening.  In one, a terminally ill baby teaches his parents how to live and in another the Tsunami of 2004 shows how a woman survives losing everyone.  I know things go wrong and turn out terribly sometimes.  This is life.  I don’t live under some illusion that if I think positively enough I can make anything I want happen.  No.  I believe in something  slightly more complicated than the notion that “everything always works out” because it does, and then it doesn’t.  I think a better saying would be, “Shit happens and you deal with it.  And sometimes, things fall into place in a way that seems completely out of your hands.“

The best feeling is when something I’ve barely dared to dream about is suddenly falling in my lap and all is right with the world.  It feels exciting and also comforting:  “Things really did work out after all.”  But I also know nothing is perfect and even when dreams are coming true, there are bumps and problems.  Just as there are bright spots amidst tragic circumstances.

Skiing with Pete that day was one of the highlights of this year in Vermont.  It was a gorgeous day and we were both relishing the landscape and the idea of being able to come back to it for years to come.  I guess what really counts in life are the moments that surprise and astound me,  not necessarily the way things “turn out.”

Yesterday was April fool’s day but the weather was the only thing playing tricks.  Inspired by what looked to be a warm and breezy day, I decided to run a few errands.  It always takes a while for me to get out the door and by the time I got into the car a light mist was brushing the skin on my face.  The air was colder, knocking out what I realized had been the faintest odor of spring.

This winter, well maybe this entire year, has made me feel a little like the odd “Pushmi-Pullyu” character in the old Dr. Dolittle books.  In the movie he looked like a llama that had been chopped in half and had an additional front half attached so he had two fronts facing in opposite directions.  He was a confused and confusing creature.  Not that I feel confused, but I do feel like I am being pulled and pushed in two directions.  This is happening in many aspects of my life so it’s sort of interesting.  But in terms of where I was going with the weather, yesterday was a real tease.  By the time I made it to the bank, it was pouring out.  It continued to rain most of the morning and then around lunch time the rain turned to snow.  I shrugged, knowing it wouldn’t stick to the wet muddy ground but the snow kept falling all night and by morning we had an inch or two of cover.

Having spent the last 22 years of my life in Southern California where winter consists of a few cool days and some rain, I have relished this winter in Vermont.  We received so many dire warnings from native Vermonters when they heard we were about to experience our first Vermont winter.  They shook their heads as if we might not make it through.  They laughed as though we would run home come November’s first snowstorm.  But we have delighted in every aspect of winter, even when the weather was decidedly arctic and we threw water outside to watch it freeze in midair.  In March when everyone around us started pining for spring, we were mourning winter’s passing.  My husband and I were squeezing in as many days of skiing as possible.  The kids would come home from a full day of school and want to play outside as long as possible, knowing the snow was melting.  When I opened the door to the shed in the morning to smell the air and feel the temperature, I was disappointed that it wasn’t biting cold anymore.  The warmer air felt like a cruel foretelling of the end.

Of course it’s different for us because we won’t be here next year.

This is our Vermont winter adventure and we don’t have next winter to look forward to or dread.  And so the coming of spring also carries with it the beginning of the end of our time here.  We will be here for half the summer and then its back to the desert.  What a strange feeling it will be to go home.  I know we will miss Vermont in ways we can’t even imagine.

Today it is snowing again and the roads are white once more, a sight I had assumed would be finished until next year.  Oh how I love the white road.  But a week ago I bought seeds and dirt and I have to say I think I am finally ready to start moving on to the next phase. I am looking forward to going home to friends and the world we left nine months ago.  I love California and I love Vermont and they couldn’t be more different.  I guess I will just have to get used to this Pushmi-Pullyu feeling because I refuse to choose between the two.

We walked into the town hall a little late and Randy was already standing on stage holding his guitar like a baby and singing a love song to everyone.  We struggled with loud metal folding chairs and failed in our efforts not to upset the quiet room that was warm, filled up with the town.

I settled in behind a woman whose name I’d forgotten and stared at her long grey hair falling over a rose-colored sweater that looked hand-knit as the second act came on.  A couple of white-haired men, not far in age from Randy, sang something folksy  and strummed a banjo and a mandolin as a toddler protested and little kids spun like tops on the floor, bored and excited.  As I listened to their voices I looked around to see who was in attendance at the talent show and pie auction that would benefit the public library where I still have a book out.  Tables lined the room with dozens of home made pies on display and up for grabs.  Many of the women in the hall had their names proudly displayed next to the pies and many, like the woman before me had long gray locks, some pulled up in fanciful ways like grandmothers from another era with gold combs or bobby pins so that it billowed around their softened faces.  Many of the men in the room had long beards and big farmer hands that I imagined were so rough and flattened out they could slap a hide hard and barely feel it.

I sat wondering about what everyone in the hall was feeling.  Togetherness perhaps.  I think many, like me, may have been caught up in a nostalgic idea that this is what people have done to entertain each other for eons.  I wondered if it made anyone else sad to think about the evening as a relic of the past, not what most of the world does for fun ever since TV took over our living rooms and the Internet invades our peace.

And then I thought, maybe I’m the exception.  Maybe everyone else is just enjoying the music, not thinking about the future or the past of mankind.

And why is sadness or nostalgia my go to emotional response?

I stared at the long silver hair in front of me, struggling to retrieve the name from my banks.  I couldn’t pull it up but I remembered a conversation with her at a dance party a few weeks before in detail.  We talked easily from the start so I wasn’t surprised to learn she was widowed.  Can’t remember if it was a couple of years ago or many but we had a nice conversation about the slow ebb and flow of the grieving process before moving on.  I asked questions and she described the house she had built with her husband and raised their kids in.  So many of the people I meet here have lived here forever, built their own homes on land belonging to ancestors and enjoy the luxury of having their extended families close by.

I was talking to someone just yesterday who was one of those who had lived here all his life and whose children and grand children all live walking distance from his house.  As I told him how lucky he was, we both had tears well up in our eyes.

Maybe it’s just the power of love that made us both tear up.  Or maybe the fact that he doesn’t take any of it for granted moved us to produce tears of joy.   Perhaps I felt sad because I had the opposite experience growing up.  Maybe there is a part of me that really longs for that kind of a family community where everyone lives close and is forced to get along with everyone else.  Maybe its why I am drawn to this place.

In my family, we were never really close to any of our relatives and it is the same situation for my kids.  When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my father’s brother lived in our building and his sister lived a few blocks away.  But still, we didn’t see them regularly.  We saw them when it was deemed appropriate, and they rarely stopped by for no reason.  My mother’s father and step-mother and half-sister living in Staten Island were visited only on holidays.  My own siblings live continents away from each other.

Maybe that’s it.  Or maybe the sadness I feel from losing my mother when I did gets brought up by witnessing the mere closeness of a family, of a community, of a town.