From R. Frost, "New Hampshire"

I have not been writing this spring.

During the course of my father’s illness, and since his passing last month, my walks have continued to meander on nearby trails through the woods, following the same paths I’ve grown to know these past eight years, and even now, ideas still bend toward me like this year’s new growth, still bright green, at the ends of beech boughs arcing over the trail, but they seem always to spring again away, before ink or pencil can make its mark on my notebook page. Essays half-written eclipse one another on my desk and precipitous heaps of books teeter threateningly underfoot. Not unlike those slender branches of beech, I wait for my thoughts and feelings to grow solid under the cover of hardened bark, ready for the colder weather of a winter that seems already too close. I sense the urgency of growth beneath the waning gold of early spring.

As I’ve been seeking solace elsewhere than in my own words, walking the fragile, frayed edge of unfamiliar emotion, I’ve sought comfort in the words and sentiments of others. Though I am not wont to resort to cliché, my own boughs have sometimes been bent toward T.S. Eliot’s invocation in “The Wasteland” that

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But such an outloook can spiral no where but down, until, with Eliot, after footnotes measureless to man, we enter the ninth circle of the Inferno at Dante’s heels (e io senti' chiavar l'uscio di sotto a l'orribile torre). In an effort to re-ascend, I have of late been retracing the softer contours of footsteps taken by the poet Basho as he wandered his native Japan more than three centuries ago, having chosen a wayfarers life in his later years. He writes, in the timeless tercets of haiku,

A wren of a single branch:
The fragrance of its plum blossoms
Throughout the world

So many many
Memories come to mind:
Cherry blossoms

From what tree’s blossoms
I know not:
But such fragrance!

With sun darkening
On the blossoms, it is lonely –
A false cypress

Passion lies in these words, the poet’s language able to describe feelings I somehow can not. But these verses from a different time and different place frustrate me here, today. I cannot find myself in Basho’s peripatetic muse nor, thankfully, in Eliot or Dante’s somber verse. The poet can only mediate the place he or she knows and I can but try to meet those verses halfway.

On Sunday, I wrote to a friend of my belief that art – good art – can both slip unbidden into a person’s soul and, at the same time, draw that person outside himself.

For me it is like this: just beneath the surface of things, there is the fact of change. A shallow enough plough this spring can indeed scratch painfully into these furrows impossibly long. Change is a fact we all front.

Of an 1839 trip that found Thoreau passing only a few miles south of our home here north of the White Mountains, he wrote,

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house . . . and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea . . . But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said, "Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short"; but it is all superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

Across the road from our door, just before the left-hand bend where the frost-cracked pavement turns to gravel, the pink and white petals of an apple tree, all but forlorn at the edge of the wood, have begun to wither and yield themselves to the coming autumn’s fruit; off to the east, the snow of last month’s storms slips deeper into crevices high on Mount Washington, dandelions everywhere are turning to seed – facts of change front me everywhere.

I have been counting down the last few walks Pemi, Pika, Orion, and I will take through these woods, the times we will pass through our doors, anxiously waiting for the next step and the next place. In these past weeks, as my own departure from these White Mountains to the Green Mountains next month has become more immanent, as I face a ragged emotional ridgeline nearly each day, I realize that my strength lies in the facts of place, and I fear still more change of this time, of this place to another.

Stumbling as I often do with words as through pendulous morning spider webs – where I sometimes crouch low to preserve the spider’s work, and other times pluck them from my clothes to watch them abseil onto a tuft of balsam fir – what I suppose I mean to say here is that in this time when I find the comfort of the familiar largely lost, it is in the experience of the every day that I am challenged to find the cairns and blazes that mark the new path I find myself on. Without those who walk this path with me, I fear I might be truly lost, and for that guidance and comfort I am grateful beyond words.

Dust of Snow Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Brilliant sun and biting cold greeted me each morning earlier this week, and I’ve had to curtail my walk with Orion and the dogs to only fifteen minutes in the woods across the road. I held Orion tightly in my arms to keep both of us warm in the single digit temperatures; his face peered out from under a thick hat and behind his mother’s scarf while the dogs tumbled though clumps of spruce still heavy with snow from our last storm and left clouds of fine flakes in their wake.

Monday, we ventured a bit farther to the crest of Wedding Hill, which overlooks the school’s orchard and farm with Mount Washington and its neighboring peaks framing the eastern horizon. The angle of light that morning illuminated the peaks from the southeast, so the details of their western slopes – finely veined with ridges and ravines descending to meet the rising inter-mountain plateau at their feet – lay occluded behind a shadowy subfusc mantle.

At the crest of the hill, the four of us stopped in the still air to listen, first to little more than our own breathing – mine a bit ragged from carrying a little boy who seems far too big for his age (or mine) – and then to the exploratory taps of a woodpecker near the top of one of the maples that border the sloping meadow to the east. I pointed to the bird for Orion, and after a moment, he craned his neck to follow my gloved hand upward toward the intermittent tapping. I don’t know if he saw what I saw, or if he was able to connect the sound with the bird, but he continued to look skyward for longer than I would have expected, perhaps trying to see the tiny figure nearly hidden in a labyrinth of barren branches.

He turned his eyes back to the snow, searching again for the dogs, whose large black shapes are easy to spot against the white ground, even in the twisted undergrowth of the third or fourth generation woodlands around our house.

On our way back down the hill and home, Orion seemed to point toward a tree alongside the trail. Of course, I’m sure I was projecting my intentions onto his own, but he made me look at the tree nonetheless. The red maple was one of the larger trees in the vicinity, and its gnarled trunk of braided furrows was overgrown with a bounty of lichens and mosses. We stepped off the trail to the tree to look closely we’ve passed together at least a dozen times. This tree’s story was seeded in this patchwork of pale greens, browns, and grays, and as Orion and I stood there, I traced my bare hand across the uneven surface of roughly textured bark and smooth lichen, and I tried to tell him what I felt under my fingers – not so much the physical touch of fingers on bark, but the sense of what lay beneath the surface, the stories that encircled the maple’s dense heartwood and that would lay hidden until the tree passed on. For now, I marveled at this ordinary tree while Orion looked at the bark for the same stories I saw and, if nothing else, humored me for a short while before we both walked back down to the house for his morning nap.

While I was finishing one of the earlier chapters of my dissertation, I was also working as a docent at the Robert Frost Place, a small museum in Franconia which hosts an annual poet in residence and a writing program each summer. After closing up for the evening, I would set myself down to write in the farmhouse that Frost and his family had occupied full time between 1915 and 1920, and which has been home to a different resident poet every summer since 1977. Although I wrote by the west window, which was in a newer part of the house, and which did not look upon the mountains to the south, as I sat in the yellowing autumn evenings, I couldn’t help but feel a part of the poetry of the place.

Sometimes, when writing was slow (which was often), or visitors were scarce (which was rare), I would meander along the poetry trail that wends for a half-mile or so through the mixed hard and softwood forest of what remains of the original property. One of the first poems on the trail I could walk to and almost still keep the barn in view was “A Dust of Snow,” which is just about as close as Frost gets to haiku (though perhaps more so without second stanza). It is in the unexpected moment of winter’s day, after days of cold, or more recently, of fierce wind and rain, have forced a retreat inside, that I can find even the briefest of stories to lift myself above the long dark winter nights.

I imagine Frost, whose tempestuous darker moments have fallen under scrutiny among his many biographers, tramping, as he often did, in his winter wood alone, bending under a low-slung hemlock bough, maybe reaching with a stout leather mitten to pull back the snowy screen and steady himself as he stepped across an old fallen mountain ash he chided himself for not bucking up into firewood in the fall, suddenly finding himself surrounded by a cloud of fine sugary snow as a caw caw echoed in the woods and sleek black wings steered off toward his barn.

I see that I’ve steered off a fair bit myself here, but after all of my own tramping through memory and metaphor, I return to the little boy who joyfully lets me take him along on my walks through the winter woods and who started a year ago to let me see through his eyes what I had been missing out there all along.

There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall,and so it always was,
on one hand Venus,on the other Mars;
fall,and are one,just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.

From "After the Storm" by Derek Walcott

Late Thursday afternoon, shortly after 4:30, I stepped out into the cold with the dogs, and I walked, unexpectedly, into a moment of beauty. The western sky longingly held the last memories of the sunset, a spectrum of muted light from umber to umbra hanging above a slope of darkened trees, while Venus, Mars, and a waxing crescent moon worked in unison to keep night at bay. This celestial triumvirate was brilliant enough to occlude most of the early evening stars and cast delicate shadows on the snowy, matted field across the road.

I understand that this year, specifically in late November and early December, Venus has been particularly bright -- indeed, bright enough, according to some, to cast shadows here on earth. Even as its brilliance begins to wane, our sister planet is bright and distinct enough to help me ease into the late autumn darkness of ever-lengthening nights.

Lately, as I find life filled with family, teaching, writing, thinking, I have found that the days become stories written in the shorter verse of moments rather than in the expansive prose of books. I recall reading once that the writer John Updike often moves daily from poem to essay to novel, juggling his ideas as inspiration warrants. In my own daily rituals -- waking with Orion before the dawn, walking with him and the dogs to the pond each morning, and stealing a few minutes in the evening to seek my son's namesake hunter, rising ever earlier in the east -- I find in these glimpses of sudden beauty inspiration for the more challenging times of the day.

A slight crescent moon appearing for but an instant over a craggy alpine ridge, Orion's wide laughing grin as we slide together over the frozen pond, Pemi looking up at me from behind her snow-crusted muzzle after a trail run, the arcing shadows of a snow-laden fir on a windy night. A day composed of verses like these is poetry enough to carry delight throughout this darker season.

It has been snowing a little almost every day this week, and though the accumulation around the house has been slight, subtle snow-limned pentimenti nonetheless make the world anew every day. Days which can resonate with the frustration or joy or disappointment or peace that I carry with me.

Over the past year, I have often looked to metaphor and poetry to try and explain my feelings about being and growing with my son. But there are, of course, no words that could paint a picture as complete as the one I see in Orion's eyes when he looks into my own. The bright broad strokes of color, the subtle shades of light, depth, and shadow -- I see the full harmony of meaning looking back at me each time I lift him from his crib in the morning, when we play in the bathtub together, or when I look back at him snug in his pack during our walks in the woods.

Every glance is full to overflowing with love.

The Snow-Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Kajiwara Hashin

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to live in a climate where the seasons actually correspond to the dates of the solstice and equinox that cleave our year into four equal and distinct stories. It is tempting to think that here in northern New England we live somehow outside the neat rectangles and numbers of the wall calendar, and, when I have found myself struggling against driving snow in September or sporting a t-shirt in January, I have felt that sense of separation. The calendar is, of course, driven by our own earth's tilting axis, and the earth, in all its billions of years of practice, certainly can't be entirely wrong.

Yet here I am, writing as the snow flies outside our window, exactly one month before the winter solstice. Four inches in as many hours, much of it now seemingly melting off the dogs' fur and onto the living room floor as they lie at Jen's feet as she nurses Orion. The woods, quieted by their sudden frosted quilt, were bright enough to walk through without a headlamp when I took Pika and Pemi for their evening walk. As I wove my way through beech and striped maple saplings bent across the trail, I would occasionally spring some larger tree and dump a load of snow on myself -- the dogs are smarter and more nimble in these conditions, though they are kind enough to wait, albeit smugly, for me to catch up.

I am a collector of symbols, of harbingers, of images, and as much as autumn lingers in my mind and prose from the mid-August appearance of the first goldenrods to the late October morning when I notice the tamaracks have lost their ochre glow, it is the coming of snowfall that abruptly changes my sense of the season from fall to winter.

Orion continues to astonish us with his growth from a baby into a little boy, and the images with which I try to anchor those changes move past so quickly that I have difficulty believing he was ever any different than he is at this very moment. He is fast approaching his first birthday, and even now every week is a new season of change, growth, and of becoming accustomed to a different part of our son's nature. There are days when he moves around our apartment, circling from kitchen to living room to hall, secure in his world. Other days, as he struggles to stand or tries to climb on the sofa, a sudden nor'easter of frustration can send his world tumbling in space. Like me, Orion, too, seems to be trying to frame his life -- and his growth -- in ways he can understand. As I read him Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" before my walk, I hoped that he might learn to understand the seduction of both the dark, depth of the woods in winter and the beauty that a late autumn snowfall leaves in its wake.

Please note: Interested readers may want to look at the newly uploaded entry for October.

from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi

I woke last Saturday to the unmistakable strings of a Vivaldi concerto -- one of his Dresden Concertos, I later learned. The slipping of time from the season of daylight to one where night outpaces day this past week made me pause and think about Vivaldi, whose Four Seasons is surely among the most played (perhaps overplayed) piece of baroque music on classical radio today.

Although I am no expert on Antonio Vivaldi, nor on the music of his era, his oeuvre has always had a certain resonance for me. As I lay in bed and the timbre of the final notes gave way to a moment of silence, I reflected on my last connection with Vivaldi when Jen and I visited Venice a few years ago.

Among the uneven cobbles of the piazza before the San Giovanni in Bragora (where Vivaldi was baptized), we sat before a stately building, which stood out from the many other facades of peeling paint the colors of sunset with its detailed scrollwork and window boxes overflowing with red flowers, still brilliant in the evening light. Through a row of open high windows, we could only see the top of an ornate chandelier, but we could hear the strings of Vivaldi easing their way through the open window and into the Italian evening air.

I was thankful for such a serendipitous radio broadcast to transport me across the seas and across the seasons in the still dark of a mid-autumn dawn.

Vivaldi's Le Quattro Staggioni, The Four Seasons, is a series of four concertos, each of which echoes one of four sonnets, most likely also written by Vivaldi, which portray appropriately seasonal tableaus. Each concerto is divided into three movements, shifting tempo from -- in the case of Autumn -- the upbeat dance of a harvest celebration to a reflective slumber after the last of the wine is gone and the farmers take a deserved respite to, finally, the drama of hunters chasing down their quarry.

This morning of "falling back" into slumber is eerily reminiscent of the adagio molto of Autumn's second movement, though I wait, too, for the sounding of the horn and the harried march to winter in the coming month.

Vivaldi's violin concerti, with their playful resonance between orchestra and soloist (or select group of strings), draw on the echoing repetition of the ritornello, resounding like the rhythmic movement of branches deep within a field maple as they match the push and pull of the tree's trunk against the cold, matted ground below. The clear, discrete melodies of the single voice both echo and guide the sound of the full orchestra, each learning from the other and drawing on the other to create the final harmony of the concerto.

As the memories of Venice fade from my mind and I think about today, the coming darker months, and my son's fast-approaching first birthday, I cannot help but see in my relationship with him the sounds of a concerto as he learns to tune his own instruments and I wait to follow whatever melody he brings to me to share.

Passar al foco i di quieti e contenti
Mentre la pioggia fuor bagna ben cento

from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi

Stanley Kunitz, from "The Mulch"

For someone whose connection to place is most often through the sight and the sound of trees and sweeping mountainsides of granite, spruce, and balsam fir, an island, ringed by dunes and sand and sea can be disconcerting. Like the mountains of my more northern winter home, though, Martha's Vineyard can be a place that demands an inward focus as much as it invites one to gaze out toward the watery horizon where the sea curves away and folds into the distant sky.

As Jen, Orion, Pika, Pemi, and I were retreating from Chappaquiddick’s East Beach late last Thursday evening, I was suddenly moved to turn toward the familiar sound of wind playing through the upper branches of a small cluster of red pine trees that overhung the road. The gust passed quickly through the trees on its way toward the dune grasses and waves beyond, but it was enough to bring me back to the world I knew I would be returning to soon.

These late-summer gusts, perhaps our own echoes of the Etesian winds of another place and time, herald the coming change from the languid, eternal afternoons of summer to the more hurried, harried pace of the coming academic year. Etesian winds also mark, significantly, last Thursday’s end of summer's dog days. The end of the dog days is heralded by the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, when the star becomes visible before the dawn after a nearly five-week absence. The event marked the celestial close of summer for the ancient Egyptians, who based their entire calendar on this day. Sirius, also called the Dog Star, appears in the constellation Canis Major and is the brightest star in our sky. Sirius’ rising was given great significance in the ancient Mediterranean and the Etesian winds that follow continue to be important to sailors from Greece to Egypt. The winds were once thought to cause the flooding of the Nile by pushing back the great river’s current with their power (this idea was summarily rejected by Herodotus in his History). For me, this day gives me pause to look ahead to the reappearance of both Canis Major and Minor along with the whole of Orion's seasonal story as it arcs across the night sky.

Last week, Jen and I sat on the beach at Long Point on the Island's southern shore and watched a metaphor declare and explicate itself in the currents that unfurled just below our sandy, outstretched legs. While the sun drifted slowly toward the dunes to the west, we watched the brackish water from Tisbury Great Pond, which had found its way around a sand bar into the open sea, change its course, and, in a single instant, cease its seaward flow and begin to flow inland, finally overcome by the ocean's rolling waves. Although this moment of both earthly and celestial drama repeats each day, I don't recall ever having seen this moment of change so clearly played out before.

I understand that the opening from pond to sea at Long Point is impermanent, and needs to be regularly persuaded to remain open, so finding it open is always a pleasant surprise. As we sat alongside the gap and watched children of all ages enjoy the flow of warm water out from the Pond, I recalled having visited here nearly twenty years ago with my parents and my father's parents, and I clearly remember my grandfather standing knee deep in the gentle current watching me float by toward the ocean, stopping myself on a protruding sandbar before reaching the incoming ocean waves.

As I watched eight-month old Orion play with Jen and her parents in that same brackish flow, I came to recognize in the changing tidal current the beginning of a new stage of our own lives with our son, as he becomes more and more a part of our lives and our extended family. I feel as though I have only begun to understand each phase of my life with our son, but as autumn looms on the horizon, and Orion's story reappears even more brightly and clearly in the minutes before morning dawns over the Atlantic, I hope that his stars will help to guide us all.

...I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
Stanley Kunitz, from "The Layers"

I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.

From "Sky" by Wislawa Szymborska

Five pairs of feet pad across islands of shadow and sun on the packed sand of the road as my two dogs walk with me under a canopy of low oak trees. It's before noon, but the heat of the day shepherds the three of us into the sparse shade at the edges of the road. The cloudless sky seems to melt into the shimmering horizon and in even seems reflected in the packed sand beneath our feet. We are a long drive (and short ferry ride) from the familiar mountains that define our horizon at home, though the same sky envelops everything here, its air thick with the humid embrace of high summer off the New England coast.

August has always been a time of reflection for me, as the dog days of summer slip slowly by and I begin to prepare for the coming school year. This summer -- Orion's first -- has seen us mostly at home, trying to share everything we love about the North Country with our son and finding new places and perspectives as we look through his eyes at a world we thought we already intimately knew.

Afternoons spent by waterfalls deep in the woods, where I would stand in the water with Orion in my arms, hoping the sun would hover forever above the ridge of white pines to the west; a day cycling through our beloved Notch; climbing to my old haunts above treeline; or just sitting in the shade of the cedars in our yard, listening to the chatter of red squirrels and watching clouds float over the peak of our roof. I have memories from the summer to fill volumes, though little time to record them; here, as Orion dips his toes into the ocean for the first time with a characteristic giggle and the dogs play beside him in the gently breaking waves, I would rather be outside with Orion than in here, lest I miss some laugh or hint of a smile half-hidden beneath the brim of his sun hat.

I cherish these days of sky, sand, sea, and dappled shade, though while I take time to think back on the summer, I also look ahead to bringing Orion -- my little mountain man -- back to the mountains where he became the center of our lives.

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain;
I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care.
As the peach-blossom flows down stream and is gone into the unknown,
I have a world apart that is not among men.

Li Bai

On occasion in the heat of mid-summer, the whole of my childhood can be brought abruptly into the present by the smallest details of memory: a momentary glimpse, a touch, the heady smell of summer evenings, the buzz of cicadas in a forest of newly sprung goldenrod. Among these many intimate signposts are the tiny pale yellow crowns of the diminutive chamomile, pineapple weed (Chamomilla suaveolens) bursting from the gravel in front of my family's mountainside condo. While I played endless games of fetch and chase with our family's old dog, the distinctive aroma of these dense flowers permeated from underfoot and became for me the smell of summer. As they poke their pale heads through the gravel around our driveway these July days, I can't resist plucking a head and crushing it between finger and thumb to release the memories contained within.

...in vacant mood, one sultry hour,
Resting my eye upon a drooping plant,
With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower,
I sate upon the couch of camomile.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As we pass the midsummer mark of Bastille Day, I have found that taking Orion with me has become a similar way to revisit places from earlier years with a new guide. It seems we have spent more time out of doors than in, hiking, climbing, swimming, or just exploring the yard and garden.

On a recent hike with Orion, his first visit to the schist-strewn alpine tundra above treeline, he mostly stared wide-eyed at Pika and Pemi as they explored the dwarf spruce (above which he towered!) and the many cascades of the Ammonoosuc River we crossed. At the top of our tramp, the wind picked up, and though not yet familiar with mountain winds, Orion would face into the wind and smile broadly.

On our way down, after many hours on the trail, we stopped to rest at Gem Pool. Jen and Orion sat on a flat rock surrounded by water, warm in the magic of a summer evening. "Do you want to take a picture?" Jen asked.

Not this time. I was more than content to watch Orion sitting in Jen's lap smiling and laughing, water falling languidly into the pool behind them, everything green and gold and light.

I wondered then, and at many moments in the past weeks, as I share some of my favorite places and memories with my son, which ones he will keep close to his heart, which smells or sounds will draw him back from adulthood to an experience from decades earlier. If he has trouble remembering, I hope that I will be able to remind him.

Answer July Emily Dickinson

Answer July --
Where is the Bee --
Where is the Blush --
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July --
Where is the Seed --
Where is the Bud --
Where is the May --
Answer Thee -- Me --

Nay -- said the May --
Show me the Snow --
Show me the Bells --
Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay --
Where be the Maize --
Where be the Haze --
Where be the Bur?
Here -- said the Year --

from "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats

I returned on Monday from several days away (at the biennial ASLE conference) to find that I had been gone much longer than I had thought.

The field across the road had grown into a thicket of flowers -- apparitions of Vetch, Hawk Weed, shoulder-high Meadow Rue and Queen Anne's Lace -- the night air heady with their ghostly fragrance. The sky was clear, and, though my bed was calling me after my long trip, I watched as cascades of lightning bugs tumbled across the meadow seeking one another in the darkness, pooling only briefly in a dance of constellations. Even though Orion's constellation is guiding people elsewhere this season, the memory and strength of his stars surrounds me even here in our overgrown meadow.

Orion, too, has grown more than I could have expected in a week. He is regularly munching on root vegetables and peas, with the aid of two new (sharp!) teeth. In every hour of absence, I cherish the moments of presence all the more. In my free time, learn'd astronomer-inspired wanderings at the conference, I visited the Oregon coast one afternoon. I think I was looking for something there, in the dunes and sand and wind. I sought my goal in a sheltered cove where the Siuslaw River enters the Pacific. There, behind a jetty lined with driftwood, I found graying, wind scoured logs larger in girth than almost any living tree I had seen in the Northeast. The gnarled trunks, some thirty feet long, gray from their years in the sun, were maps of (and to) places I had not been and did not know. I traced the whorls, ridges, and valleys with my palm, trying myself to find a purchase in this place so far from home and family.

One trunk with its base exposed -- apparently submerged in the high tide, but now bare and visible -- revealed within the concentric ridges of its uncountable growth rings the vestigial sapling of the great tree's early years. Solid, spindly branches radiated out from the heartwood, trapped inside, but preserved by the outward growth of decades, perhaps centuries of rings. I think I found what I was seeking in the maps and metaphors limned by these ancient trees -- a guide to the way home to be with my own sapling before he grows up too much more.

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Our recent weather has continued to challenge any ideas we might have had of spring. Hot, humid days gave suddenly way to cool, wet days with frequent rain, at one point so violent that the lupines in our yard were all broken in half. I, for one, am waiting for the weather, and the season, to find its voice.

I received my first Father's Day card yesterday. For me, Father's Day has always been about my father, and it's still a challenge to see myself in that role. The card I got from my parents superimposes the following from Camus over a photograph of a cairn of smooth river stones: "But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

At times, and particularly of late, this precious, precarious harmony, shaped by time and shepherded by the love and support of others, nonetheless remains out of reach. Camus might well appreciate the Sisyphean potential in stacking water-worn stones, much as he might have an erudite (though ultimately futile – tout c’est absurde, non?) response to the challenge of balancing writing, thinking, loving, living, being -- all as a father.

These stones do not always sit solidly together.

As I prepare to leave Jen and Orion for a conference next week, I already find myself missing them, as though my mind has been elsewhere, perhaps preparing for other responsibilities. Fortunately, I am here yet, and in this moment, as Orion sits on my lap while I type, I can lean over, kiss his head and thank him for reminding me what it means to love, live, and be on this, our first Father's Day together.

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wind;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven --
All's right with the world!

In the pre-dawn morning of a day when spring seems poised to slip suddenly into summer, I wake early and head out for a short bike ride before Jen and Orion begin to stir. As I turn the bicycle downhill toward the mountains to the south, the sky in the east is painted with broad vivid stokes the color of roadside clusters of hawkweed – orange, vermillion, and yellow – while to the west, mist rises slowly from the surface of a placid pond, just as the sun crests the high ridge. I pass the remains of an old iron furnace, a reminder of the early nineteenth-century mining industry in what is now a quiet rural village, and turn right past the farmhouse, which Robert Frost “had to take by force rather than buy,” straight past several country inns built before tourism’s heyday – one of which, hosted Henry David Thoreau and his brother John during their trip to the area more than 160 years ago. Turning back north and uphill toward home, I squint against the now bright eastern sky and think about returns and cycles, and coming back home to ground myself.

This has been a spring of budding affections. While it feels as though summer has abruptly draped our woodland world after a month of wet and cold spring in which we nearly lost our affinity for this place, nature is doing all it can to catch up with the season. Orion and I have also shed our indoor selves and wandered about the woods, fields, and streams nearby.

Of late, I have felt within the world outside much more than I can ever recall. The moments of engagement stretch into longer, hazy afternoons as we stretch our own limbs to the sun (despite our prodigious black fly and mosquito entourage) and, recently, seek a cool respite from the heat we have yet to grow accustomed to.

Although Orion hasn't been quite sure what to make of the new warmer world, he appears to join me in my appreciation for the new freedoms brought by these sunny days. He may wish, however, that his parents wait until the water warms a bit more before taking him swimming again.

Perhaps it is Orion that leads me further into the woods; as I move his hands across the bark of different trees and through the soft new growth on fir and larch, and we tease the rings of hobblebush petals with our fingers, we wonder about the trees together. His vision of the world is what brings my thoughts back home and helps to show me the glory of something wondrous that I had missed all those years before.