And Suddenly……

I fill vases and large Ball jars with fistfuls of lilacs. We can’t see each other across the table for the purple. The moment you open the front door you can smell them, their scent short-lived but powerful.

We pull the plastic taut over the green house and anchor it down. I can now see it from the kitchen window as I do breakfast dishes. From here it looks a bit like an igloo, doors swinging in the spring breeze, waiting for inhabitants.

I back the truck up against mountains of top soil at Agway. A large man, face sweating, directs me. Once I am in place he climbs into the small orange tractor and scoops a bucket full of rich, black soil into the bed. Each time he dumps, I feel the truck groan. When he finishes, I roll down my window and we joke about the early heat. He wipes his forehead with his baseball cap. I offer him one of the cold Athletic beers I’ve bought to bring home. He takes it, surprised, and smiling.

Paul shovels the dirt into the newly built beds, already half-filled with manure, in the greenhouse. The tomatoes sit in paper cups lined up in several boxes in the driveway enjoying the newly-warm sunshine.

Near the end of May I open the gate to the sheep’s winter paddock and they turn to look at me. I send Bronte in to circle around them reminding them of the routine. They hurry out and down the road toward the pasture. We have to do some prodding to keep them moving, their mouths stuffed with basswood leaves that they snatch into their mouths as they pass the trees. I swing open the south gate and they charge in: several leap into the air with a Celtic twist. I lean against the gate and watch them run back and forth across the paddock, testing the green grass as if not believing their good fortune.

As I climb the hill back to the house, my legs burn reminding me that winter has softened us all. It feels as if time has been fast-forwarded and there is not quite enough of it for everything that needs doing. Long evenings spent by the fireplace are behind, or ahead of us now. As the days grow longer we push the limits of time, often planting until we can’t see our hands.

On the cusp of June the heat roars in. Monday light long sleeves, Tuesday everyone out in shorts and sandals. Vermonters know the timer has been turned and the grains of sand are slipping: we keep both shorts and snow pants at the ready.

The leaves fully unfurl and the black flies follow. Kneeling in the earth filling holes with seed potatoes I hold my breath to avoid eating a bug, quickly gasping for air periodically, giving new meaning to the term, ‘keeping your head down.”

The local cremee shop opens and we run into our neighbor Trevor in line. In the spirit, we buy him his hot fudge sundae. Paul orders his favorite, coconut with coconut dip and we sit on a bench overlooking the river licking our cones. The late afternoon sunshine reflects up to the trees along the banking creating a golden shimmer. I watch parents spoon ice cream into their young kids. Teenagers arrive, already dressed for the heat in short shorts and sandals. Awkward, they laugh too loud and toss their hair.

Suddenly it is summer.

And like good and bad, it arrives without warning.

I walk out to the barn in the dark. Standing still in the driveway I look up at the Milky way. As I get close to the barn door I look down at the solar light beside the compost pile where Muir is buried. Rings of light on the ground like Saturn. I feel my throat tighten and I turn away. There is no silly leaping onto hay bales, no charging the sheep at the fence, no leaning against my legs. I whistle. There is nothing but silence.

Part of me doesn’t want the season to change, hoping that staying still might somehow reverse time. But summer has come. Trees, whose bare branches rattled like bones in the winter wind, leaf out and lift brilliant plumage to the sky. Cars pass us with kayaks strapped to their roofs and kids leap into the cold water of the Dog river.

I kneel in the greenhouse and fill every possible spot with the tomato plants I tip carefully from their cups. Suddenly there is hope.