Be Still

It is hot and breezy in NYC on these summer mornings. You can smell fried food in the air and the curbs are loaded up with towering trash early in the mornings. The delivery guys have another swig of coffee before they unload and call and shout to the waiting cabs to hold their horses. The garbage trucks all have back-up warning sounds, while the early morning traffic cops blow their whistles, and this cacophony of smell and sound is New York City.

In Vermont the birds are noisy in the mornings as if they are headed off to the office and the kids can't find their homework or their shoes. They are hungry and they fly around singing and chattering
to one another like a bunch of women in a Starbucks line. The chickens too have a lot to say in the mornings. They lay their eggs early in the day and each egg is cause for much conversation and celebrating. The dogs lazily chase an imagined chipmunk and occasionally bark at nothing much just for the joy of it. And these, are the only sounds, in the mountains. We make most of the noise up here ourselves. Very little of it was already here. Oh, there is the swish of the trees when the wind kicks up in the afternoon. It is a low hum and the leaves whoosh and rustle. Sometimes it is so loud that the dogs bark in response. But sound is a relative thing. In the city that same wind would go unnoticed except for what it did to your hair.

Right now this minute the birds have all flown up to their homes. They are snuggling in since it feels like rain. The air is that sort of motley green it gets sometimes before a big rain, but the trees are absolutely still and the woods are quiet. I sit on my porch and observe this silence. When we lived in the city at the end I ached for some quiet. The sirens and the buses, and the cheerful noise of the delivery vans had started to prick my skin once we'd decided to move. I wanted a stillness that had never been mine, and I thought that I might find it in the quiet of the mountains. I was a classic type a, running around never staying too long anywhere, worrying, fretting, advancing. My overcrowded schedule was a source of misplaced pride. So I gave up wearing a watch the week we moved. It was a symbol. In spite of all the business travel and the meetings and the hustle of the Blackberry world I had to reenter I have never picked up that watch again. It was a lovely thing too. I'd mooned over it for weeks before I'd actually laid down the cash. Now it hangs next to necklaces and bracelets, a silent testament to the commitment I made to myself when we came up here.

And this morning anyway I am keeping it. I don't always. My heart still pounds and I can feel the worry of being late which I rarely ever am. We gave up our old city problems when we came to Vermont but before long we'd made up a bunch of new ones. Some of them caused my heart to race and fear to follow me to bed. We lost buckets of money and are still recovering. Our life savings evaporated in a trice and we are still paying off the mess that was the horrible quaint country store. ..(It is still hard to believe after buying and selling companies for twenty years it was a little million dollar store that almost took us under) So the lovely quiet didn't always ease the pounding in my chest. But it is always here to remind me. As I sit in this utter stillness where not so much as a single leaf moves I remember to savor the peace. I inhale it and try to make it mine. My Gram used to say..this too shall pass..about whatever worry was pestering me when I was little. And it does. And this morning as a new batch of worry snuck in I grab big lungfuls of quiet mountain air. I look at the dappled light, creeping through the trees and arguing with the storm truck that wants to make rain. Summer, autumn, winter, spring, and then summer again. Always. Sunshine and rain and snow and sunshine. The rhythms of life continue without our permission. And no matter how much noise we manage to make... when we stop, even for a minute... it is quiet again.

Sound is a relative thing.....

Not yet....

Summertime. The morning breaks, the critters chatter and chirrup, and we linger on the porch with coffee and news. As the children wander down work begins to beckon from the next room. The scent of lavender wafts by and the hummingbird comes to the porch to quickly sip her breakfast from the hibiscus in the corner and together we all inhale the sweetness of this life.

The last days of July and the beginning of August mark the beginning of autumn by the farmer's calendar. But here on this American porch, we grab the goodies from the garden and a few eggs from the hen house and eat an optimistic breakfast of basily eggs, inhaling the breeze from the sweet jasmine and we don't notice. Or we pretend not to anyway.

I have always believed autumn starts in September. When the kids go back to school and the air is sharper in the mornings I can almost tolerate the change that is surely coming. In our old city life fresh notebooks, and new flavors at Starbucks were the markers that meant another season was coming, quick get out the sweaters and make sure the cupboards were loaded up with fast things that could be snack or even lunch in a pinch.

Now we get these more natural markers and we can pay attention or not. When the sun climbs high in the afternoons the kids mess around with Facebook and Utube before heading back down to the river or maybe the colder waterfall if it gets really hot. Then by supper it is cooler and by the time we tuck the chickens in we need sweatshirts again. Our kids live a country life with a generous heaping of city piped in through the airwaves. There's a new boy who was supposed to call, and there's a political rally that is another in a long list of them this year. Mom is bidding on a couple of jobs since a good one fell through a couple of weeks ago. Dad is writing a novel and submitting stories to a few new addresses. And the boys are playing some new computer game ten years apart and still solidly together across the magic of the Internet. But it all goes unnoticed in the languor of July.

Until this morning. This one special morning we ate huge breakfasts and packed the car so the big kids could go back to the Vineyard to a rental and jobs and teenage late nights in coffee shops with ice cream and a place called Back Door Doughnuts that's open in the middle of the night. We made piles of books and towels and fingernail polish for one, and groceries and Ipod and computer games for the other. A few more towels were added at the last minute so they wouldn't have to think about laundry. Then we all had big bowls of peaches and cream and it was time.

And so it was in this speeded up version of my life that I slowed down and sat on the porch and paid attention to what else has been happening just outside. It was cool this afternoon. Or anyway the breeze was too much for my fragile self in my bare summer clothes awash in the bittersweet sadness of mothers throughout time immortal. It isn't that they will be gone for long. It isn't even that I don't want them to have this adventure. They won't and I do. But we have never had more than one gone at a time before. And so it is rather all that this portends. I grabbed an old shawl and headed back outside and looked up at the sky and took big lungfuls of lavender scented courage. And there, high up on the tops of the bushes and the tallest trees, were a very few yellowy orangery leafy edges. Hardly any trees had them. But they were there. There were a couple in our yard and a few more at the edges of the woods. They hit me fast and hard all in a rush. What a message those few leaves sent. It cannot be stopped...none of it. It all moves at its own speed and of its own volition.

How can it be? I am not ready. The watermelon is ripe and sweet right now. Our garden is full and bursting. The corn is only in, just this week. We sauteed our first big batch last night. Oh I know it won't really happen for a couple of months yet. But I am not ready to pretend I am a strong New Englander through months and months of winter. I am not ready for grown up kids going off on the first of what will fast become a series of these leavings. College is hard enough but it is so clearly temporary. The punctuation for now is still a bunch of commas, little breathless pauses, but there are bound to be periods on the way. Big black dots that signify the ending of one thing and the beginning of another. I know i will love the next bits as much as I have loved all of this. I will. And this little trip to the Vineyard is here to remind me to stay awake for it all. How is it I never notice those leafy yellow bits high up on the tallest trees before September no matter when they come? Yellow orangery leaves for which I cannot possibly be ready in July. Because July is the middle of summer. It is not the beginning of autumn. It can't be. Or at least it shouldn't be.

I am not ready.
Oh hell, I guess I'll go put on some colorful socks....

A Secret in July

The chickens are nosing around the garden looking for worms and bugs and fallen delicacies from
the plants. They waddle and scratch, cluck a little and then scratch some more.
I have a secret. It's a garden secret. I think as someone with garden I must have taken a vow not to tell it. But I don't remember the promise and so I am going to tell it to you now. I won't even tell you not to tell. Ready?
Gardens are not hard work.
I know you don't believe me. After all we have been spoon fed the breaking back stories all our lives, right? Well, I at least have not found the garden to be a place of especially hard work or strenuous weeding muscle stretching pain, which all the gardeners I have ever known have told me it would be. They mention various aches and explain with that little nodding half sentence that they've been weeding in the garden all morning. They don't even have to say weeding. They just say, "Ooh, I've been in the garden all morning" with a wince and a bent over shuffle and everyone instantly understands and feels a little humbled. Or they bring you a basket of tomatoes and say they've got to run along..they have to stay ahead of those weeds you know. And the husbands of the gardeners I know mention wives who spend hours in the garden every morning before the heat of the day to stay ahead of the weeds.
Uh-huh.
I think they just go there to be alone with their coffee and enjoy their lovely gardens uninterrupted by requests from the family.
When I planted this thing I wondered how I would keep up with it all. I feared a garden that looked
like a hung-over back alley and fully intended to keep it away from the prying eyes of the Ladies Who Lunch around our town. Only now I show it to everybody. Sometimes I lure people from the bank or the post office so I can bask in their praise. "You want some broccoli or a few tomatoes", I might chime. They wonder how I have found the time...
Well, I haven't. I did plant everything six or eight inches closer together than the books said I should. (This was mainly because I had too many plants and was tired of digging the plot) Our plants seem happy enough. They are producing like crazy. I mixed them up putting Brussels sprouts next to broccoli, climbing things next to ground crawlers so that they would be less likely to miss the room. And it turns out there just isn't any space for the weeds.
Now the farmers up here say the real work comes early when the plants don't block the weeds, and you have to weed every day to protect the tender little things from being taken over. These are mostly fancy organic Vermont farmers. Well, I just put three or four chickens in my garden in the morning and a sprinkled a little corn around on the ground. They scratched like crazy and nary a weed ever showed up. The corn insured they'd keep away from the plants and their clucking scratching shuffle insured no weed every made it up.
It has been a grand partnership. These girls earn their keep. I still let them in a couple of mornings a week. Occasionally they find a tomato before me, but the paths between my plants are pristine and I have my girls to thank for it.
This chicken farmer partnership must be an old idea. I am sure I didn't invent it. But I am grateful to have stumbled upon it. My back doesn't ache and all I have to do is pick and decide what's to eat. Yesterday we had a fresh egg fritata with garden tomatoes, onions, and basil. Today I think we'll have bacon, basil, and tomato sandwiches with a little lemon flavored Mayo. And I'll slice up some cucumbers for the water in case it gets hot. Then we'll sit on the porch and feel smug about this fabulous garden for a while. Because it's July and in July one doesn't dare move around too much....

Summer Reading

It's sticky here in the middle of the summer. We have had some long sweet sunny hot days and now we have rain. Big gloppy drops falling fast and hard with thunder and lightening in the background. It let up this morning for a little while and that has been the story all week. It stops for a while and gets its second wind before the next round. The rain following and marrying all these hot bits has left a mist wrapped around the mountains. It looks like a fairytale forest where you'd expect some strange horned creatures to emerge and invite you to a supper with their wizard.

Rainy summer days send us all to the bookshelves. Summer is a great time for rereading anyway and especially the rainy misty days we are having up here now. As I get older rereading is a particular pleasure. I read a couple hundred books every year, but there are some books I read again every few years. I spent the better part of my adult life in the book business and we have thousands of volumes to show for it. We have a modest collection of modern firsts and among those are the favorite authors who lure us again. JL Carr is nice for summer. Month in the Country is a slow little novel where nothing much happens except a mural in the Italian countryside gets restored by an Englishman looking also to shine up and sort out his own life. There are sweet little village characters whose lives quietly move along. Like all of us they are interested in romance and children, philosophy and good food.

Dick Francis writes horse racing mysteries set on the great racetracks and in the famous stables of England. He is a former jockey who knows the horse world intimately and is a close and careful observer of every kind of humans. His characters are rich and deep and quirky. When there is nothing much to do as the evening cools and the rain persists but drink hot thick coffee on the porch, these stories always serve up an evening of clever comfort.

Ellen Gilchrist writes about smart exuberant zany southern women who love men. Her men are strong and funny, wild and kind. I can open an old novel like the Anna Papers and learn something new my Gram might have taught me had I just been paying better attention. Her characters don't always behave well, but they look for dignity and kindness and respect in whatever messes they have dreamed up for themselves. There is often unrelenting heat in her stories and they are best read with a pitcher of mint tea on any steamy afternoon watching the hot summer rain from the porch.

I know some people who save summer for the big reads. They bring out the list they made on New Year's a few years back promising to read more of the classics. These people carry Thomas Mann to the beach and feel virtuous if the lightest thing they carry is an old Edith Wharton. I think they must live where there is no winter. Because those books are made for the long cold days when the landscape never changes for weeks on end and the short slippery crunching walk to the chicken house in the morning makes you imagine the lives of those Puritan settlers.

Summer is for light reading that can stand to be punctuated by a fifteen minute nap that picks up right at the next sentence without ever losing anything much at all. This is the time for thriller movie blockbusters and books that sort of sweeten up to you like a bowl of strawberry soup. Big thoughts cannot be thunk when it is 100 degrees. This is why those of us living in the North feel so smug. The brain, at least the northern ones, on weeks of heat and sunshine loses their sharpness. They get lazy when the body is cosseted in purple t shirts and orange flip flops with little whales swimming around the toes. Big thoughts need tweeds and serious clothing that really only works in the winter. When you are wearing something with tiny straps or walking barefoot, or the men are wearing short pants, try Dick Francis. Take a little nap along the way and then have a big bowl of this soup for supper....

Strawberry Soup

Puree 4 cups of Strawberries into 1/4 cup of white wine. Chill for two hours
Then add 1/2 cup of sugar
1 1/2 cups cream
1 1/2 cups of buttermilk
3 cups of apple juice
1 TBS. lemon juice
1/2 cup of honey

Chill for two more hours and serve as an appetizer or dessert. Or eat a big bowl on a hot summer afternoon after work and instantly feel exceedingly cheerful and almost virtuous...

I Am the One Who Needs to Buck Up

While we were at the Vineyard our big kids got a hankering to stay at the beach all summer long. Hannah’s summer travel job had fallen through when the program’s admissions slipped and they unhired all the college kids they’d promised jobs. This had been a big disappointment. Benjamin was working for us and helping us fix and repair and paint all the odd bits around the house. But this was not exactly thrilling for him much as it might have been for me. I told them that finding jobs and a place to live was an activity we could likely accomplish while we were there if there were serious. And so resumes were made and emails were sent in the morning to a few promising sounding jobs and apartments. And one day they got an answer back on one of the jobs and they interviewed after we got back from the beach that afternoon.. By 5:30 they had secured jobs and by 7 that night we found a place for them to live. It was a shared nannying job for three little boys ages 5, 7, and 10. And the apartment was the second floor of a young family’s house. The whole thing happened fast and felt right.

The next day Hannah started getting cold feet and I talked her though it. It was only for a few weeks after all and she loved the idea of being at the beach. I’d bring Eli to visit and maybe even her dog. Benjamin was tickled and wanted it to hurry up and get here. He misses the city and loved the idea of late night coffee shops and lot of people his age going to concerts on the beach. And as they started counting all the money they were going to make everybody settled into feeling good about it.

Only now I am the one with the cold feet. This is the first time they will have lived anywhere but home or a dorm. They will be there until it's time for Hannah to go right back to college. (Benjamin too, but he will be living at home for this his last semester) And we are all having such a sweet summer…the five of us. There have been dinners on the porch and hours of badminton. We have skipped off to the farmer’s market, hiked to the river, and read trashy magazines on the porch. What if it was our last summer all of us together and I just shuttled them out the door with all my brave talk about how good this would be for them both? What had I been thinking?

I am a mom of nearly adult kids and the inevitable is unfolding before me. I am supposed to teach them how to live without me, and my default intuitive response was to do just that. It’s a good thing mostly, but some small part of me wants to scream wait, let’s play one more game of pinochle on the porch. My birthday and their dad’s is in August and now neither of them will be here. We have always gone to lots of summer fairs and eaten fries with vinegar and listened to horrible bands play Proud Mary. I am not ready. We had planned all kinds of things for this summer. And they keep remembering friends home from college and wondering if this is the right rest of the summer for them too. (Nevermind that they both also have college friends on the island, or that the place is packed with kids their age looking for summer romances and adventures and new friends from far away) Some small sad voice inside wants to wait for the next second thought and let it carry them away and keep them home.

I won’t do that of course. Instead I will buck them up and send them off to the sun and the sand. It’s my job to make sure they have both roots and wings. But I am just lousy at these transitions. I remember once when I was a little girl and my mom and I had been to the Muny Summer Theater to see Peter Pan. On the ride home I peppered her with questions about the lost boys. I worried abut them missing their mommies. I remember what she said that night. She said growing up is a lot harder than learning how to fly, because one only needs fairy dust, but the other requires truth. And truth always takes bravery.

I could surely use a little of that fairy dust right about now…

Soak up the Sun

Vermont is enjoying the prettiest summer of our five years up here. We had a very wet spring and the mountains are every shade of green nature can dream up. The soil in this high sweet valley is rich with the nutrients that slide down the mountains and land on our smallholding and so the flowers are as vibrant and rich as a tropical garden.

Midsummer. For me the middle of July has always meant halfway. Growing up in American public schools meant three months off in the summer and the middle of July meant you still had as much to go as you'd already had. But now living high in the northland the shaky thought dances across my mind that it is already halfway over. As an almost delusional optimist this negative view with so much gentle beauty around is startling. Is this negative upside down view another marker in middle age? Is it maybe about the times we are living in? Or was it just a moony morning blip that should be ignored and shelved an aberration?

Last night the stars were clear and bright. We could see all across the milky way and Cygnus the Swan flying along it. I thought about the stories I know about the stars, the ones the ancient told to their children so we could someday tell ours. Everybody knows about Orion the Hunter because his belt is so easy to find. But there is also the Great Bear in the north and Pegasus carrying Cassiopeia's daughter away as she cries on the king's shoulder. Last night we could even see Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own. It is two hundred million light years away. That means the little shimmering light we see left that galaxy two hundred million years ago. That little twinkling light makes me feel like maybe I have a secret. It makes me feel connected to all that has come before...

Maybe the secret is to soak it all up and hold tight to this lovely mid summery warmth and this sparkly night sky. Maybe if I can just get enough I can hold onto to it through the long dark weeks of winter. Last winter was long and cold and hard. But what will this one be like? Oil prices are climbing as the dollar drops and there is no natural end in sight. Obama offered that gas could go to twelve dollars a gallon. America cannot just keep sitting this one out. Lots of us on the left want us to drive smaller more efficient cars. The guilt over America's excess is brimming over. But I am just realizing I sort of like our excess. I think all those SUVs are a particular symbol of America's optimism. One of the best things about America is how big we are capable of being. Innovation is what will save us. We need big ideas not smaller meaner ones. The stone age didn't end because they ran out of rocks and the oil age is not likely to end because we run out of liquid fuel either. My car with its multiple cup holders, phone, and GPS looks nothing like the old Model T and yet its engine remains virtually unchanged. We need big incentive programs to kindle the imagination of the inventors and the entrepreneurs. We like our cars big and our houses bigger. This is not what's wrong with America. It is what's right with America. We are the land of cowboys and action. We dreamed up this whole democracy thing and we can dream up a new energy vision the same way.

"Soak up the sun, dodododo ".... goes the song. These green worries give it a whole new meaning...

One Fair Summer Evening

You can only have good ideas when you have enough space. Last week I caught crabs in the sand and walked endless beaches with kids in search of the perfect wave. No time for the pressing emails or worry over projects gotten or not. The kids woke up early and the perpetual motion began anew. They ran us ragged. I exhausted my body which opened my mind. I was thinking, hanging out at Gay Head around July Fourth where Jaws was filmed, that watching Jaws in our yard would be fun. I don't know where the idea came from. It was just there. It seemed so fun in fact that we rented it on vacation and watched it at the beach from our cottage instead, where we scared ourselves silly, and giggled at the 1970s street scenes.

But the idea of a movie in the yard lingered. I called all our friends and asked them to come to a classic drive-in right after we got home. Okay, well it wouldn't exactly be a drive-in since we wouldn't be in cars, but still.... I'd make a picnic supper and nail a sheet to the side of the house. This felt like a great summer idea.

There were skeptics. My son wondered about the technical aspects of the thing. "It won't work" he flatly declared. "The picture will be awful, we won't get everything hooked up. Mom this is not a good idea"

Not deterred I started planning what I would cook. The movie could flop but a whole bunch of fun food can save almost anything. A drive-in seemed to call for a picnic. I'd fry chicken for 25 people. And make a bunch of deviled eggs fresh from our chickens, and potato salad with potatoes from the garden. The basil is bursting so there could be a tomato salad. I have an old metal red checked lunch box that I could fill with blue and red napkins. And we could eat supper on the terrace with the chickens wandering around our feet. The whole thing would scream summer.

My husband worried about the bugs. A movie outside at night with fried chicken was sure to attract mosquitoes. And where would people sit? He bought three million gallons of citronella and a special funnel, ( which he tried out IN THE STORE, leaving a puddle and a confused check out girl who was last seen looking for orange cones to protect customers from the oil spill), with which he filled the torches and still he worried. I think he may have gone back for just a little bit more.

The party was yesterday. We hooked the VCR to the projector that I use for sales meetings. Then we hooked the stereo to the DVD player and the speakers to that. The sound and picture quality were simply superb. (That oldest son, the one who'd been so sure we'd have fuzzy pictures and rasping sound, wants to play video games out in the yard next) We nailed a big white sheet to the side of the house and the yard was filled with quilts and LL Bean chairs wrapped by a bevy of torches casting their little firelit glow onto the circle. We showed Jurassic Park and the ten foot high dinosaurs roaring from the side of our house could likely be heard way down on the Green. We had a free for all concession stand on the front porch with Dots, and Snow Caps. There were Rasinets, and M&MS too. And there was buttery salty popcorn and lots of licorice. The yard was filled with loud little boys drinking coke and grabbing two boxes of candy at a time evidently afraid that the adults might come to their senses at any minute.

Eloise our big Bernese Mountain dog meandered around the edge looking for scraps of chicken. Stuart and Pippi worried about the dinosaurs, and snuggled on the blankets next to the kids. Our friends' dog Milo barked every time the T Rex came on screen.

Surrounded by our best friends, all of our kids, and the gentle funny man I married, I sat plunging my hand into a box of snow caps getting teary eyed over the sweet perfection of this one moment. Because sometimes, well sometimes, it just all works....

The Backstory

I always wanted to be one of those women who had a garden. I envied the them going out in the mornings with their broad brimmed hats and baskets waiting to be filled. There was such a sense of history in that gathering of the food. It seemed almost primal, harkening back to when the men were the hunters and their women the gatherers. I usually thought about these things after passing some woman in her yard early in the morning while I was headed to grab my Starbucks and running, always running. The thoughts stayed with me, or anyway the yearning did.

Only I grew up a feminist. I wanted equality. Wanted...want. I had something to prove. We could do anything they could. I was raising a daughter after all. She deserved to know that her life needn't be limited as her grandmother's had been. She could be a judge or a Senator...(maybe not President, or at least not yet) But somewhere along the way I noticed we seemed to be trading the very essence of what it meant to be women. Feminism became a different kind of tyranny; career versus mothering. It wasn't feminism's fault, but the frailty of the humans trying it on. We pitted women against women. The intrinsic value of mothering and nurturing our babies could be hired out even to minimum wage workers. Our husbands didn't have wives; they got partners instead. It was like some sort of modern law firm....different last names, an expense account, and equal billing.

The men too made trades. They got to share in the child raising and this was sweeping and good. But hired help made the homes and take out took over where supper used to be. Boys began to get shifted to some kind of new androgyny. They couldn't be too loud or rowdy. We invented ADD and they had to learn to sit still. We forgot that those wild little boys used to grow up to be our hunters and our warriors. Desks were a poor substitute for the woods or the farm. Buying your daughter dolls seemed almost irresponsible. She needed to be in team sports to compete in he boardroom. What did you want to raise her to be... barefoot and pregnant?

I am forty-five years old. I have a different last name than my husband. And I am a hunter in our group. Our daughter does think she might want to be a judge. But she plans to raise her own babies. She expects to mother exclusively especially in those early years. Maybe later she can be a mommy lawyer and share a practice that represents women and families. She doesn't believe that you can have it all. Neither did we. We took turns and we raised our own kids. Day care wasn't right for our family. I wonder which mommies and whose babies it serves well.

When I was forty we moved to this place where life seemed older. There aren't any strip malls or subdivisions. The houses are older than the country some of them. And the trees and the mountains are older than everything else. The Internet is spotty up here. Cell phones work on their own schedule. Blackberries are as rare here as chickens in the city.

It is here that I have planted my first garden. We have big fat bushes of basil and last week's tiny little cartoon shaped peppers will be in salads by the weekend. The broccoli was cut this morning. The tomato plants are already over six feet high and they have hard little green fruit filled with promise. Behind it all there is a row of sunflowers....they are my backstory. They are tall giggly tangible reminders of this middle-aged flowering. It is a time of gathering..of picking up, sorting through, and putting away.

My grandmother, another one of those without so many choices, was a wife and mother. She had a huge vegetable garden and a house filled with flowers from her yard. She used to put up tomatoes, and pickles, beans, and jam. He husband fought in two wars and he made whatever money that she frugally saved. They house was filled with homemade curtains, and birthday cakes were made from scratch. Sunday dinner was at noon and the table sagged from the weight of all that food. My grandfather fished on the weekends and they played pinochle on Saturday night.

I am pro-choice in just about everything. But choice is a funny thing. Give somebody three and they will often make the best wisest choice. Give them thirty though and things get confusing. Nobody would argue for the limitations of the way things were. Only I just wish we could stop arguing for the limitations of the way things are. I am forty-five and I finally have a garden. This fills me up like no deal ever quite has.

My gram used to tell me secrets in her garden. She would always say how lucky I was to be a girl. "You are going to get to have the babies" she would whisper as we poked holes in the lid of a coffee can frog house. "It is a secret. We have to act like it's a big deal or they will want to do it too and then who will pay the bills when they come due?"

Indeed. I hope my garden gets a whole bunch of frogs....

Summer Storms

The whole island woke up at about two thirty in the morning. The air was thick with an unusual humidity and the storm was rolling in fast. The barometric pressure dropped and our ears tingled and twitched. We threw off bed clothes in the heat and glanced at the clocks. That was how we would all tell it sleepily the next day. "Something woke me up at 2:30 and then what a storm that was. I couldn't get back to sleep"

There was a blast of cold air on the North end of the island, and as the wind stiffened and whipped around the beaches the waves began to roil. Their edges were a brilliant bubbling white against the black of the night sky. The cold air met the hot currents down where we were and you could feel the vibration. The air felt electrified and even my thin cotton nightgown was plastered to my side. We threw off our nightclothes and stood naked staring out at the sea watching the sails which had been put to bed on tranquil waters now whip and fly like in a sort of frantic harbor dance. There was a brief hush and then the rain started. Big gloppy drops that fell hard and made a racket on the windows. They mingled among sheets of whiter streaks of rain. Thunder rumbled and the lightning streaked across the sky and lit up the bedrooms in the cottage. In the distance we could hear sirens and dogs howling with the wind.

Pretty soon it settled down to a steady rain and the air began to cool. It wasn't long before we were putting clothes back on and looking for robes. As the air relaxed so did we. We climbed back into our beds in a sweet tangle of sleepiness and felt like we had borne witness to something spectacular.

Living in Vermont means we are only three hours from the lights of Broadway, or four to Montreal. Three also to Boston and four to Cape Cod. Moving here has expanded our notions of travel to include quick trips to the beach or slightly longer ones like this one to the Vineyard. The Vineyard is filled with people buying fancy wine corks covered with beads and wampum for people with nothing but time and money on their hands. The island is tiny and wrapped by gorgeous beaches with clay cliffs formed in the last ice age and wide stretches of sand just made for building vast sandy villages with forts and imaginary dragons. The tourist trade with its popped collars and matching pink and green wives and kids might tempt some to forget about the windswept beauty of the island. But not us. We ran straight to Gay Head the day after the storm. The beach was covered in rocks that had washed up in the wind the night before. We picked our way over them and made for the cliffs where the mist hung around and made the whole world look like an old master come to life.

We got home yesterday after a crabby tired car ride and were all revived and thrilled by the green mountains that rose in waves of their own to greet us and welcome us back home. Because it is. Vermont after five years has become home. We all started talking at once about the trip and we knew what it meant. After the saga of the HQCS we had made it through. Oh of course it isn't completely behind us. But still our gardens are full and bursting. Our animals were giddy with delight that we were home. We all rolled around in the grass and I filled fat vases and the house began to smell like lavender.

Storms wake you up. They remind you that you are not in control. They blow away all the cover and leave behind only what's real. I am tempted to quote the old spirituals, and say they wash you clean. But on the morning after, even when there are rocks everywhere, the real stuff lingers. You can begin anew. Lessons learned, we five have been picking our way ever since. We are here with gratitude and love. As storms go it was a big one. But we were lucky. We made it through....