“Was it just a few days ago when in a cavalier attitude I left the house with no long underwear? I’d regretted it. And today, in sneakers, I wished I had boots. But spring does that, unapologetically. Makes us want to move things that are suddenly in the wrong place, like piles of broken slate, bridges over ditches, or lovers who ended up in another state. Its been a week of blustery wind rising up out of nowhere, a week of blowing tarps, muddy embankments, & rain that’s ice as the sun comes up, that melts when you notice it.A week of putting tarps back in place, or using them as vehicles to drag heavy shrubs across the yard, a week of switching coats and hats, 3x a day, or more. I was happy with the rocks we moved, some heavy enough that two of us were barely enough to bring them uphill. It felt good to be knocking earthworms out of the way (carefully) in order to build steps, and begin our future again, another spring, another hole, another set of hands filled with the tiny pricks of roses, and fresh smell of sap. Never the same, but familiar, and sorely missed, like a beloved husband or wife. Honestly, if I’d been dealt a different hand, I would have sung fifty songs about spring by now, before May 1, which has always been my favorite day of the year. Instead, i walk. On two legs a little older, a bit more brittle. If eyes were radar, I would see what I feel and would never regret knowing the truth inside those eyes. “May the road rise up ...” it begins ... and so, it begins again, my search for what I know is there. it makes me pull off the road, and park, and re-park until I have parked so well, I’m invisible. This would be my goal on any Saturday morning in spring, when it appears that most of the town is still sleeping, or cooking eggs, or looking at Tik Tok. At first, it looks like the pond has interrupted my trip to get a coffee, but walking in my old pair of Keds, now it appears that there is other talking water, just below my shoes. Tall grass bent over into hummocks and traps, makes slow work into the heart of the marsh, but the sound is getting louder, and then I see it, the hidden channel and perhaps this is my song, a branch of the one song I always go back to. The twitter of a red winged black bird, and then its darting body, make an arc, an archway, for me to enter. Why ever go home, when home is here? This is the child’s thrill of rushing in to find presents, or the midnight rendezvous, where everything is lit by moon shade, and throbbing with biological, electrical realism. Call it drugs, call it hormones, call it fantasy yet it lives in the body of every body, on this earth. How the water can charge its way thru reeds, feeding marigolds, willow & alder, I will chalk up to mountain secrets, and the downward motion it prefers. I dunno why I’m so smitten. My cup of nothingness here in the cool, mucky nether regions of Vermont is always near to running over. I need to be fulfilled. There is no cessation of life. There is only loss and relocation, bursting tender times of transition, and lonely periods. Walking back to the truck, I figured this was a place I’d never been, only passed by over a thousand and one times before. And been called in, but only this time, went in.”
