Acceptance

I have lived in Vermont all of my life and yet there are still things that surprise me; two weeks ago it was sub-zero and the hills blanketed in white. Feeding animals required gloves and speed just to get through. After finishing, I’d walk through the door, Seamus hot on my heels, my cheeks cold and be slightly breathless. Today the thermometer reads 53 degrees. This being the third day of sunshine and a light wind.

Paul and I spend a slow Sunday morning and decide to walk up the road with the dogs and frisbee.

Jason pauses from building his garage and walks down to chat. As we stand talking, the sunshine warms my back. I’m not wearing gloves and there are now patches of grass visible. Rivulets of melting snow trickle alongside the remaining snowbanks, glinting in the afternoon sun. Spring has arrived.

The shift is sudden but tangible. The winter paddock has softened and wearing mud boots a non-option. As I walk, the squeak of the snow is replaced by a squish.

Our shearing date is for the end of March and I begin shooting emails to get a crew in place, my mind thinking forward to skirting, weighing, tagging bags of wool.

Eggs reappear in the hen house and I’ve sold three dozen this week. I’ve ordered chicks and talked with Paul about building a larger brooder.

We ponder seed selections and purchase a new seed starter with overhead grow lights strictly for red and yellow onion seeds. We heft it through the music room and into one of the back bedrooms.

Sunday we spread seed starter soil into containers. I open the onion starts and micro-manage the tiny seeds into long rows. Soon we have red and yellow onions planted and warming under lights.

Each time I go into the back I’m struck by the not-unlike-a-spaceship glow. I delight in the start of the process, the daily watering and fussing over the newborns.

Soon, but not too soon, we’ll begin tomatoes. Our house will become green.

The moment the temperatures cross 40, Vermonters are out in shorts, t-shirts, wool hats and mud boots. Outfits that adapt to, pretty much, all five seasons. Considering that over fifty percent of roads in our state are dirt, mud boots are standard fare. I was reading for a book event at a school recently and noticed (and loved) that all kids in the room were wearing some type of mud boot. It just doesn’t make sense to take the time to tie and untie sneakers.

Our road is a barometer of true spring. Even if the wind is blowing bales of snow across the road, February/early March sunshine is warm. The top of our dirt road becomes slick and shiny, like the skin on chocolate pudding. Coming off pavement I begin to drop our truck into four wheel drive. After a week, I do so without even thinking.

Walking the dogs is an exercise in futility. Each trip of the day ends with a full-on wipe down. Grooves in their paws hold mud and the fur fringe along their undersides is stiff with frozen mud-cicles, until they come inside and thaw all over the wood floor. It doesn’t take long for me to get to the place where I simply look away until I grab the mop..again.

In line and in the aisles at the co-op, I overhear joyful conversations about the coming of spring. About how tired people are of the cold and the snow.

Back in my truck I sit quietly for a moment thinking about why I don’t feel the same. It’s more complicated than loving the snow and cold.

We fill the hours when the light is long. Before I begin teaching there are animals to take to the pasture, green houses to check, gardens to weed, dogs to run. When I finish teaching there are animals to bring back up from the pasture and feed, fencing to move, dinner to prepare, and of course, practice. I feel a tug from the myriad of things to do: even if those things are wonderful and I recognize them as wonderful. They tug. People stop as they pass, wanting to stand and pass time. The calendar is full. When dinner is done, ice cream calls and we hop in the car. The river beckons in the late afternoon heat and I set aside laundry.

I spend the dark months doing my internal gardening, tilling my mind’s soil, planting new ideas.

With the darkness comes early there is quiet, dinner on the card table in front of the fireplace: the pop and crackle from moisture in the wood is our background music. We begin early, we finish early. We watch a movie with my feet on Paul’s lap, and from time to time I pause to take in the cozy beauty of the room, watching the shadows play on the wall.

We walk down the snowy road, dogs racing ahead of us, and see no one. I enjoy the buttery light spilling out onto the snow of neighbor’s front yards, sometimes able to see families inside laughing as they sit at their dining tables. The dark, the silence, lets me become a voyeur. I don’t have to comment, laugh or join. I can just be, and maybe that is the all of it. Just being.

Transitions are difficult. Perhaps even more challenging this year because winter arrived in late November and planted itself solidly in place until now. There wasn’t the push and pull of the freeze and thaw. There was no thaw, allowing me to fully embrace the white.

Hiding inside me is also fear, a powerful emotion. For me, after the devastating floods, white is always better than wet. Winter makes me feel somehow protected.

Seamus, almost a year now, sprints to the barn as soon as I put boots on. He has worn a race track and waits for us at the starting line, hunched like a black and white gargoyle. When we finish chores Paul fishes the yellow frisbee, full of teeth marks, from his jacket pocket and together we walk down Magic road to the fields where the snow has made a rather hasty retreat leaving flattened, still-recovering-from-winter, grass. I stand and look at the bee hives, dead silent in the evening light. I take notice of the way naked branches of the maples resemble ink scribblings against the pink sky and study them for a message. Bronte, now eleven, happily rediscovers the corners of the pasture, sniffing coyote trails. Seamus does not take his eyes off Paul, waiting for the launch. Paul uses large gestures to take out the Frisbee, waits and then sends it flying. Seamus explodes until he is just underneath it and then rockets high into the air, all four legs hanging, like someone tossed up a small table. He twists, like he has radar, chomps down on the Frisbee with an audible “snap.” and lands on the same four legs.

I laugh out loud. I’m overcome with promise, hope and joy for the next throw.