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Monday this week, like the previous two days, was gray and drizzly. It was also the feast of Saint Francis, that cheerful and optimistic 13th-century Italian brother who is most often depicted with birds on his shoulder, animals around his feet, and a halo around his head. The day before at church, we had observed the Blessing of the Animals: anyone who could bring their mobile or portable pet to be blessed. Kiki and I are usually seated on the front bench, so we were the first to answer the call. From the way the priest held her hands, she assumed he was distributing earthly goodies, stood up and walked out blessed, but confused. I silently thanked God that his feet weren’t muddy.
By mid-afternoon the next day, looking out the window at the dim light, I decreed that once again we skip our usual walk in the park. She seemed to handle this news fairly fairly, but would I mind letting her out to pee? Not at all, I replied. In fact, I’ll even join you.
A few years ago, as part of a deal with the Devil, my wife and I traded the cost of removing six large white pines that, falling in a storm, could have reached the house, by exchange logs to harvest from behind. It was a huge mistake. The piles of slash left behind were an eyesore. But this summer my son-in-law, with his shovel and bulldozer, buried everything and smoothed out the roughest parts of the yard.
He is recovering well. I let everything grow like a fallow meadow and planted half a dozen hardwoods – red oak and weeping willow – which seem to be doing well. Then a man with a hedgehog came over and, while I was not paying attention, laid my meadow flat. No great harm done; it will be reborn in the spring, in addition it will leave new trees. He also mowed down an old road that leads from the yard to an abandoned beaver dam a hundred yards back in the bushes.
As I stood there in the yard watching Kiki snoop around a newly cleared hunting ground, I realized that I hadn’t taken this road for a few years. How was the old beaver dam? The last time I looked it was teeming with tiny minnows. The road seemed easy enough; probably no need to bring my emergency beeper. I left, making my way down a sidewalk soaked in small chippings from lumberjack work, with my little shadow peering impatiently around me.
How calm it was! I heard the bubbling of the hidden stream, and the little noise of the wings of tiny migrating birds, too small and too fast for me to identify, disturbed by our passage. The mosquitoes and summer flies were gone. Around us, new green life sprang up where the canopy of tall trees had disappeared: two species of spruce, white pines, balsam firs, tender maples, birches, poplars and a sturdy young beech that I had never seen before. There was standing water here and there, crying out for larches. My favorite tree. A few of them here among the other natives, shining copper in November, would be the lotus jewel
It occurred to me as I stood there in that thriving grove that this was a perfect metaphor for the state of Vermont: calm; cornfields and pastures growing to poplar and birch; partly hidden out of sight; green and is doing quite well amid the environmental and political devastation. When the TV graphics represent the United States, we are there, tucked away in a little corner and almost invisible. Midwestern presenters often refer to Vermont as if it were Bhutan or Nepal.
My wife, who was a play girl, nonetheless often collapsed under the March cruelty in Vermont. “I got it!” She cried. “We have to go somewhere where it’s not winter for eight months of the year! And where would you like to go? I always asked nicely. Invariably, she was stuck for an answer, tacitly admitting that if there was a better place, she couldn’t think of it.
So the burrow and I stood in the hazy afternoon silence that vanished, me leaning on my cane, she nosed and scratched wherever her nose took her. A crow passed, very high; the stream was bubbling. Finally, concerned about my stillness, she walked over, stood up and leaned against my leg. This time his paws were muddy; but I was not wearing a surplice. – I know, I know, I say. “It’s time to go grab our snack. But this here, now, is as good as ever. ”
Willem Lange can be contacted at [email protected].
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