Member-only story
Looking for the Light
[It’s time to pull together all the searching of the past few years — the recaps of trauma and triumph — and make it into a real book. Here we go, with the first chapter, short but I hope you enjoy it.]
1
It’s Vermont autumn, close to September’s equinox. A dawn temperature of thirty-six has me squinting at the remaining tomatoes on the vine and making plans for them. With such crisp air, I expect bright red and gold leaves, acorns underfoot, and swirls of Canada geese making test flights, calling each other: “Are you there? I’m here. Which way do we go?”
Vermont is a good place for loving autumn. Despite climate changes, each year there’s a hard frozen core of winter, and my neighbors down the ridge stack long rows of split logs in anticipation. Any day now, woodsmoke will scent the morning air and I’ll sniff in appreciation. At forty years distance from the housefire that came so close to killing the kids and me, I can even sit with a friend near a campfire or woodstove for a couple of hours at a time and appreciate the transformation of trees into comforting heat.
The energy of an autumn morning stirs me. As gardening demands preparation for the cold, I’m already adapting, urgent, eager. The “kids” (they are in their early forties, but the relationship crosses a generation) complained a few weeks ago that I hadn’t come north…
