Happy Spring!

Happy Spring, my friends! The weather in Vermont has been a bit fractious lately and this is one of those mornings seemingly meant to convince us the season has commenced. There's a stream and pond behind the Inn and I tiptoed around after breakfast this morning, trying not to disturb a pair of ducks (or loons?), and snapping pictures with my phone of the damp hillside and the daffodils.

What makes you think of spring? Do you have any special rituals you associate with the season? 

This Must Be

I've moved about twelve times since leaving home for university. I love traveling...I rather detest moving. I'm a planner, I like things to be figured out in advance and organized. Moving = chaos. Still, I'm excited about this journey and the place I'm about to live.

Moving house, 2008

 Found this in a file of poetry I wrote while packing up my apartment in 2008:


"The four square rooms of my flat are white, bare, and clustered with stray, over-filled  boxes. I stand in the middle of all this, unseeing, my mind already gone to my new home.

This must be what waiting for heaven is like."

  

Fetching Lambs

For friends who asked, here's a link to my essay "Fetching Lambs" which won the Ralph Nading Hill Literary Prize in 2011. The contest is sponsored by Vermont Life Magazine and GMP.
 

Hinesburg, VT, 2009.

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Grammie and Gramps

Found this photo of my Grandma Alice and Grandpa Pasquale "Charlie" LaRosa in an old photo album the other day. I snapped the picture on their anniversary at my childhood home in Putney. As I turned the album page and saw their picture, I thought I smelled Grandma for a moment, then realized I had tucked a sample of her favorite perfume behind the photograph. Love these two, miss them. How did I get so lucky when it comes to loved ones? 

My mom had some family film reels from the late 1950's/early 1960's preserved on CD. It's fun to watch my mom as a curly-haired little girl chase her brother around the beach in Maine and my Grandma looking serene and gorgeous in her cotton shirt and shorts and red lipstick. There's footage, too, of a cabin in foliage season in the Northeast Kingdom, ice skating with uncles, Harris Hill Ski Jump in Brattleboro, and my Great Aunt Fran and Great-Grandmother LaRosa's return to Sicily on the Andrea Doria in the 1950's. Beautiful!

Hope you have a happy Monday. At the Inn, we just said goodbye to some wonderful guests in town for a taping of NPR's Says You at the Opera House. There's cleaning to be done, and packing. The sun is reflecting off the river below us and it's a perfect day for a run. Here's something I've been listening to while writing recently...  

  Rue des Trois Freres, Fabrizio Paterlini

Year of the Blog

In the ancient Chinese tradition, I believe 2013 is the year of the blog...? :)

This seems the perfect time to start blogging again, lest I "pave the road to hell," etc. etc. 2012 sure was interesting, but I'm ready for a fresh start - or as Anne Shirley might say: "Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?" The retrospective will have to wait.
I've been rehearsing Bob Chilcott's "Requiem" and Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna"  - two of the most gorgeous pieces I've ever sung - with the Brattleboro Concert Choir under the direction of Susan Dedell. (Attend our concerts on the 12th and 13th if you're nearby and thus inclined). Re-joining this amazing community and singing these pieces has been an experience of faith and light - "lux" - learning to let go. 

Part I, Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna"

"All is well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" 
- Julian of Norwich

Photo from our performance. Credit: Brattleboro Music Center.

"A Single Green Thing"

"A single green sprouting thing

would restore me..." 

-Jane Kenyon, February: Thinking of Flowers

 A few weeks ago I found an antique Singer sewing machine table for a writing desk. The intricate cast-iron stand remains intact, but the top is now solid hardwood and there's a pretty painted foot rest where the pedal must have been. I hoped the purchase of a desk, a space of my own, would spur me to return to writing after a time apart.

Naturally, one wants a plant in one's creative place, so I picked out a cactus at the co-op. It's a rather spherical green number with long golden spikes, and I held it (gingerly) all the way home. I placed it on my desk under the skylight beneath the eaves. I'm a first-time cactus parent (though I have always admired the cacti of others), and called the co-op a few days later, trying to find someone who could tell me how to care for my new charge. Alas, I was passed from person to person and eventually told I would hear from their plant expert. Needless to say (yet I do), I didn't.

My chief concern was when or if to water it, and I longed for a book along the lines of "What to Expect When You're Expecting Your Cactus to Croak." After all, I faithfully water my other plants weekly on Monday...or Tuesday...or usually Wednesday or Thursday when I finally remember. As the base of my succulent friend seemed a bit sunken and became strangely pale, at last I gave her a little drink the other day.

A surprise! The following morning I called Dan over to see the small nub which had appeared at the top. (I called it a " cactus baby," he said "cactus poo"). The day after, it turned to bud and then flower in a matter of hours.

This flower business has been going on for several days. The blossom is an eerie, protruding, light-reaching thing - white and silken - so shiny it almost looks made. Still, it feels miraculous and makes me hopeful. Restored.

Snow Day

When I awoke, the promised snow had come and I could see it resting on the trees in the blue light of morning, in that stretch of time after dark but before light. I readied for work and a perilous drive to the mountains. Mom tucks sheets around my car's windshield and rear window so I won't have to scrape too much when we have blizzards. On days like this, I want to be indoors with a nice mug of chocolate and people I like. But my Subaru and I wound our way down the driveway and onto the main road. I was surprised at how untouched the thoroughfares seemed, and when I turned, with misgivings, onto the first steep bit of mountain road, I soon found myself (and vehicle) moving horizontally rather than vertically up the hill. I am admittedly a wimp when it comes to winter driving--having been party to too many accidents and incidents involving careful drivers bereft of any control over their wayward vehicle. In these conditions, I become intensely focused on the road and arrive at my destination to realize my hands are shaking. However, in my defense, I have already driven in several bad storms this year and left the house this morning thinking, "I can handle this." Or perhaps not. I turned around and came home. So here it is, my snow day, after all. Sheets of sugary powder drop from the evergreens around the house and a cardinal sits in the forsythia bush finishing his breakfast. Schemes of sewing dresses and writing dance in my head, along with the thought that I need to catch up on my correspondence and do laundry.

Christmas was spare this year, missing a few souls. But I can't help loving this season. The tree is rotund and loaded with homemade ornaments new and old. When I help decorate, I sort through the boxes and put aside any ornaments I deem too corny or too decrepit to grace our tree. This year, however, my family did the tree without me, and I have to say, it still looks amazing. There is a wonderful continuity in seeing the same decorations we used when we were small and Mom and Dad would hang the lights while my sisters and I hovered near, liberally offering our professional opinions. My Dad would disappear into the dark, snowy evening and reappear with the tree we'd cut earlier, dragging it onto the deck. He leaped in his rubber boots and clicked his heels to make us laugh. The whole house would smell like evergreens. This year, I found pieces of Dad's Christmas village and tried to reconstruct some of it. They're very tiny--z-scale probably, with delicate houses bought in England and teeny-weeny figures probably bought from Germany. Daniel found a few faux evergreens in Boston and I used a mirror to create a pond, so the villagers can skate by the windmill, surrounded by sheep and collies. Mom dug out the pine-cone carolers and fabric bells from before I was born, and these and other vintage decorations have found their place around the house.

In New England, I find there is something more primitive about this season than any other. In the summer we concern ourselves with dried-up wells, in the spring it's mud, autumn--flooding, but in the winter, we keep fire. We work harder during this season, our competition with nature, our daily task of survival, is more evident. Winter strikes and we shovel ourselves out, we cover our faces against frostbite, we drive carefully, we stock up at the grocer's, we grow a little winter fat, we put on the kettle, we chop, stack and bring in wood. Warmth is a regular struggle, and in the wood-stove we're cooking logs. It's a ritual I've come to appreciate, an art--this tending flame. Fire from fire, our own homemade inferno of newspapers, scrap-wood and logs fills the air with smoke and smells. Forest fires start at the drop of a match, but to get some wood to burn takes real effort. It's a harsh scene outside: the roads are slick and steep, the wind goes right through you, and the days are terribly short. We accept the darkness, we cannot fight it. We put candles on our tables and lights in our windows to guide the travelers, to tell our neighbors, here is the road and a little light, you're nearly home now.