"Just browsing around ma'm, browsing around"

Many years ago, I read about an entire classification of people who do not see the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Instead their near death experiences are conducted in a vast and seemingly endless library: row upon row, shelf upon shelf of books. Well, if I have any choice in the matter, you can be certain I am raising my hand to exit under that "sortie" sign: heaven or hell, come what may.

The relaxing quietude found in browsing through library stacks holds a unique and subtle quality, as calmness is simultaneously joined by an expectant stimulation and time seems to slip into itself as you wander through the limitless reading possibilities, gathering and discarding. It sure beats tunnels and bright lights...

But living in a cabin in the middle-of-nowhere Vermont with a one year old Little Miss, places distinct limits on browsing around. Of course, it isn't that Vermont is without libraries. Montpelier's Kellogg-Hubbard library, a rough hewn granite building with oval windows tucked beneath its eaves is a beacon of warmth and light on a cold winter's evening and I've come to enjoy the small-town atmosphere where the librarian knows my name and I don't even have to show my card to check out books. But the library is small with a limited selection of popular titles and browsing the shelves is necessarily curtailed and frankly not terribly enjoyable.

So I've taken up the next best thing: inter-library loan. Inter-library loan is not particularly new to me. In fact, my sister and I once crossed interlibrary wires when we both wanted to read the same relatively obscure book so we could talk about it together as we were reading. I was living in Baltimore and she in Iowa and when she received her copy she realized that her library had requested the copy from the Baltimore Enoch Pratt Library, essentially "stealing" my copy from beneath my nose.

Nevertheless, I've never been too keen on waiting for a book but in a few days time I should receive my limit of three books requested from The University of Vermont's Baily Howe Library. I may have to wait and may only be able to browse the online card cataglogue, but I couldn't have more anticipation for some "real" books. Books that I am actually interested in reading. It has been a long time.

Momento mori

The past two days have produced five jelly jars of grape syrup (intended to be jam), some blackberry vinegar, one pitcher of apple juice (squeezed from our own rustic apparatus) and innumerable jars of apple butter. Meanwhile we are eating tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and chard from the garden along with the few remaining blackberries from the late bushes. All this succulent food makes you wonder (good and hard) what in the name of the gods is so terribly wrong with the food from the grocery store.

The flavors that we've been sampling seem to burnish the mouth with a rich complexity of sensation and are impossible to compare to the food fraudulence we are pretty much forced to consume the rest of the year. What, pray tell, is wrong with the world when food no longer tastes like food, taking on the qualities of recycled cardboard, instead.

Okay, I know this is an old topic. You can read countless books published in the past decade that will enumerate the heart-wrenching problems with food production in the U.S. but when the real hard-won harvest comes in, it is difficult to refrain from complaining in earnest all over again.

So, I've been setting a few flavor samples aside for the coming winter months as a momento mori of summer as well as the eating sensations that are lost to us by agribusiness. For some reason trying to capture these taste sensations reminds me of the smell-o-rama machine that produces the "olfactory banquet" in the movie Harold and Maude. And if you follow along with me on that theme, I suppose the rest of the grocery-shopping year would be likened to the odorama scratch-and-sniff of Polyester.

Creation and Destruction

Today saw the last of the logging trucks leave the clearing. I had been planning to pelt them with the ripening apples from the trees as they left, in a sort of variant of the ticker tape parade, but alas I was cheated of my fun by their surreptitious leave taking while I was at the grocery store. Bah to that, but I'm glad they finally made an exit.

And to remain on a hopeful note I can report that I'll be getting a new phone soon to replace the one so cruelly abused by the darling Little Miss. The poor dejected old phone has lost some buttons and the earpiece dangles out from its side as if attached to a slinky. I've been thinking it's a shame my new phone couldn't have a few Dali attributes to keep the Little Miss at bay or better yet, skip the applications and the web connection and any other buttons I no longer use on the mountain. I need something that makes a phone call with decent reception and is practically bomb proof. Although, come to think of it, such a request might put me on some Federal list somewhere or worse. I had better stick to the Dali method and try my luck.

Which reminds me that the same darling phone smasher incurred her first library fines for a torn book the other day. Yes, yes, it was in part my fault for leaving it within reach, and I suppose I was taught my lesson well enough. The librarians gave the little culprit a mocking "what for" as she stared at them with her big blue innocent eyes and that was that - after paying the fine, of course.

Well destruction always hastens the cycle toward creation and so the tomatoes and cucumbers are finally ripening in the Vermont September garden. Little Miss and I are eating them by the handful from the vines. I find it curious that she calls the tomatoes blackberries even though I've told her numerous times that the little red balls are, in fact, tomatoes. But it seems that our earlier blackberry foraging, when more blackberries made it to our mouths than the basket, has set a precedent in her language acquisition. Anything you pick from a green growing thing and eat while standing around under the big blue sky has been transformed to blackberry. And in the Little Miss' creation of the world "it was so."

Untitled, (to Keats), 2010

August sure did stir the pot, rock the boat, switch the cards, or fill in the blank with your pet phrase to indicate change and transition. Now, the first day of September has nearly passed (and with it, summer), and I remain firmly entrenched in that liminal place we all must occupy from time to time, trying to orchestrate new responsibilities, while also attempting to maintain a small space in time for the development of the "self".

I suppose the finest I could aspire to at the moment is a "negative capability" described by Keats as the ability to "be within uncertainties, mysteries, or doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Within this perspective I am wholly certain it's only the irritable part that I've managed with any success so far. Perhaps I should devote a little more attention to Keats and far, far less to my chaotic domesticity.

Regardless, September should be an interesting month. Here goes it.

A Show of Hands

Last week, I killed one bird with two stones when the middle finger of my left hand was smashed between what seemed like two boulders, provoking a free form dance of pain and forcing me to forego any Birch Bark Papers for a while. The bird is in working condition again, although it is a little fuzzy-wooly, but the most lasting effect is the constant awareness of my hands and how I use them.

So as I flipped through a book today, an image of Gertrude Stein's hands gave me pause. They were roundly plump but stolid and seemed to indicate as much about her personality as the lines of her face. Looking down at my own sad hands I realized they reveal a great deal about my life in Vermont: bruised, scratched, scared, calloused, and often slightly grubby. Well, as Scarlett O'Hara says to her sister in Gone with the Wind, "I guess things like hands and ladies don't matter so much anymore."

Throwing Stones

Nobody much cares for the smug self-satisfied individual. So, fair warning dear reader, you may want to detour from this garden path.

But a finer path could not be had.

I found every last stone.
I hauled every last stone.
I dug the dirt for every last stone.
I placed every last stone.

Alright, alright you are more than justified to throw a few stones. I know the smug look on my face is wholly intolerable.

If Walls had Ears and Stones Could Speak

Some places seem to have an animated echo of the people and events that have come before, as if the walls or stones or trees hold fragments of another memory. Over the year, I've lived in a few places where the past seemed interwoven, quite nicely, with the present. But for all my interest in the history of the places I've lived, I've never been curious enough to do any research - until now.

Perhaps it is the steep pitch of the road, the lack of electric lines, or the length of the Vermont winter that provokes a sense of camaraderie with the hapless souls who have set a stake here, but whatever the brand of madness, I've developed a keen interest in learning more about the people that have made this mountain their home.

This past week I took to the mountain with an old undated map that listed families and their long abandoned farms as well as marked the spot of an old mountain schoolhouse. Of course, the summer months are not ideal for seeking out old foundations. Blackberries are at the height of thorny lushness, ferns have grown above my head and beneath all the green growing things, unseen things lurk in wait to twist an ankle. Nevertheless, off I went, roaring up the dirt road on the ATV like a nineteenth-century archaeologist in search of the prized find.

With a little guess work I stumbled upon a small rectangular stone foundation set back from the road about thirty paces. As I walked along the overgrown foundation wall I easily conjured up the children sitting at their desks in the below-zero normality of Vermont. Little faces focused on their slates as their cold fingers marked out pesky sums. The spirit of the place was there.

But so were the circling horse flies and the swarming mosquitoes. And after finding myself engulfed in a thicket of blackberries and having to pull out the thorns from my hands with my teeth I decided that perhaps the spirit of the place was inciting me to go a bit too native. I will have to wait for another elusive spring for more foundation hunting.