“Some might say their yard “is their castle” & I used to feel that. As a young single mother trying to tame my fields, & develop strategies for managing land with limited funds to hire guys with tractors, it was both confusing and invigorating. I was not shy with my shovel, and I could see where I wanted to go. I got a ways down that road. Now, as dawn creeps up on me during my final days of “owning” this property, I feel sure I did my best. The witches who warned me that I was not pleasing resident spirits twenty years ago, they pissed me off, raised my hackles & made me all the more determined to do things my way. I wonder if that happens anymore in Vermont. That you buy land & then find out that some coven is affronted by your successful purchase. I don’t know why I was able to live here; I’m nothing special. A dowser who used his dangling set of keys offered more intel: that a native spirit was good with everything, but highly recommended I do an annual blue corn offering. I tried to do it. But I admit, I’m not very good at being the only one keeping up a ritual. It’s hard to hang on to constancy, and meaning, when our culture is so split up. I think that’s why so many people are digging this lockdown. It brings a kind of unquestioning religiosity to our daily lives. We miss that. I do. And so when I got kicked out of my house again today for the building appraisal, I drove. Like my friend who drives to be sad, I drove to take my basket collection over the mountain and hang it over the rafters of my new house. I didn’t really expect that when I arrived there and got out of my car, that a freight train would hit me, deafening the air, funneled down across the wide mountain chute, my new home dead end located up towards the gap being squarely in its path. I haven’t heard it like that for a long time. You get knocked over. Branches all over the road, some almost too big to drive around. Fog, blinding rain, like, where did this come from? It wasn’t the best day to set out to do ordinary chores. Damn. Nor try to relocate my mother’s punch bowl, in a flimsy box that nearly was taken out of my hands by the wind, along with its extra box of socially gentile glass cups. It was enough for my son to say: “Come back here if you have to” ... meaning if I could not make it through Ripton or over that gap over there, it was always acceptable to do an about face. But I’d left my generator on, back in Chelsea. Not wanting the appraiser to run out of juice, as she turned on every off-grid light and maybe left it running. Not to mention the cats. Sometimes you just have to go home. No matter how weirdly impractical, or ill advised. You head back into the place you knew, where you last knew it was safe. Even when you know it’s about to be gone, you’ll do anything to drive back, and hang up your hat again, on it’s familiar rack, just like everything is still normal. It’s as normal as you are now, which isn’t saying much.”
