I made several quarts of chicken stock this afternoon for my big pot of cheddar corn chowder I'll make tomorrow. I read a chapter aloud to Daniel of "Little House In The Big Woods" focusing on Laura's experience of maple season as she celebrated a yearly winter festival at her grandparent's house with extended family. It was winter all day around here in Tennessee (even though the out of doors temperatures didn't get much lower than 50) because in January all of my insides tell me it is. Being a native Vermonter has resulted in a permanent etching on my general perception of the winter months that these are COLD times.
Yesterday rain streamed down our windowpanes violently. It was all cozy and fine until we had to leave the house for some doctor appointments. Then it wasn't all hot tea and fresh bread with jam. On the contrary, it was driving 15 miles per hour with my hazard lights blinking frantically at other drivers with the defroster on so hot to combat the fogging windows that I was sure I would come home with a facial tan (or at least a facial peel). The experience was so revealing of my two very different children. Daniel prayed fervently for safe travel and sang bible hymns in an almost catatonic state while Dominic smiled broadly, clearly thrilled at the near death experience and tried to sneak the radio onto a forbidden station taking full advantage of my distraction.
It felt like an eternity before I got home. The rain pelted the house for another hour or so. I curled up and read some scripture, trying to remind myself that I was not going to pine for the past or for something not in my reach right now. Behind my promise of not wanting what is outside my own backyard, a very far away place within me began to ache.
I miss the maple festivals and sledding with the kids. I miss visiting the "Ferrisburg Shack House" for pancakes and bacon by a woodstove. Everyone got nauseous upon that last heavy bite and stumbled out into the snowdrifts vowing not to go back next year, only to glorify the experience that very same evening saying, "That was fun today, wasn't it?"
About a trillion memories of life experiences set against a snowy backdrop crept by my stoic resolve and taunted me behind the eyes for a while. The magical awe of the first snowfall of the year...the utter exasperation of the last snowfall when a warm and balmy afternoon the day before had teased us all so cruelly. So many memories of sitting in Leunigs eating their seafood chowder and sipping an Italian coffee or a hot buttered rum...the smell of the cold on Dave and getting a biting cold kiss from him on the cheek...snow days...big feathery snowflakes...hearing the sound of stamping boots at the doorway alerting me of an arrival rather than a still unfamiliar accent calling "Hi y'all!" Farmhouses so perfectly suited for snow like a picture postcard...log houses and maple candy...a whitened interstate view without one single billboard advertising cheap vasectomies or a furniture warehouse.
I'll always remember how a lady's lipstick always looked so much more festive against a snow drenched environment as did a child's rosy cheeks. I will die thinking that those enduring 56 straight days of blizzards have a particularly intimate appreciation of spring, and that one can't claim to really experience Vermont mountains until they have 1.) Enjoyed them as an ampatheater for a Mozart Festival performance, and 2.) Cursed their snowy peaks for being so stubbornly cold on Easter Sunday when they would be friendlier being GREEN.
Here we don't shiver hiding our eggs nor do we have to compromise our Halloween costumes with a winter jacket, but we pick up the tab missing out on a smooth and swift ride down a steep hill or watching a mesmerizing display of snow dancing past an open window during a Valentine's day dinner date. I'll never forget sitting by the huge windows at The Waterworks one Valentine's day watching it snow. Seventeen billion individually crafted miracles falling toward me for hours...more than I could have ever deserved and still getting to be with my Dave gazing at me with love in his eyes. Is that much pure romance allowed?
Vermont will always be the place where my heart hears the magic bell. My ears know how to hear the things that Vermont's landscapes whisper to those born walking them. Those snowy hills may impress the tourist and beckon the transplant, but they actually nod at the native. They tell their secrets only to those who know no other life but the one lived in their midst.
I may live in Tennessee, but if anyone cares to know, I don't know this life as well as I knew my Vermont life. It was a tentative Vermont spring morning on May 16th, 1988 when I met face to face with Jesus and the life of light He gave me, and it was a frigid Vermont February morning when I came face to face with the darkness of losing my father. Vermont holds an essence of me distilled from thousands of all types of moments that always remains waiting for me there.
No matter how many winter storms I may dodge here in the South, the wind here is strange and foreign and feels less safe. And because of that I can find a more potent version of myself here where I cannot blend into a background from which my colors were matched and extracted. I live in a place that imposes a contrasting self-inventory assignment just by being a culture and view that lacks any resemblance to a Northern wind that pronounces my name just right. Okay, I'll take that and go with it. Vermont tells me who I am while Tennessee asks me who I am and thus makes me have to really consider the question. An opportunity abounds. Another side of me is to be found on the other side of the Eastern time zone. She's really, really figuring some things out.
In the winter she doesn't waken to the sound of an early morning snow plow but she does find herself still listening for one. Perhaps she always will.
It has been quite an education. Stay warm y'all.
By Robin Michelle Gould Copyright 2006. All Rights Reserved
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