A LITERARY COLLECTION FROM VERMONT WRITERS

I am grateful for home, sweet solitude, memories, pets, food three times a day (a bit more during the holidays AND my birthday) my town, a car that starts, clothes on my back, hair on my head, what is left of my family and friends in various stages of coming and going. Exercise, what I still have of my health, laughter, books, insight, notebooks, shoes, shampoo, kindness, dark chocolate, just enough money, watches, soft socks, smooth-writing pens, brakes, air conditioning in

A storm of rain but no thunder. Cloudbursts but no lightening. Sudden winds and unexpected magic. I was doing the dishes when something called It was just a small voice Nothing special The voice easy to ignore as frivolous or silly or stupid It said go out in the rain like your mother said you could when you were a child There is no thunder, no lightening, it is okay to be in the rain Have fun with it And so I left the dishes behind pulled my eyeglasses off my head my shoes f

I swim out into the middle of the lake, and treading water with a slow scissors kick stop to have a look around. From here both shores are equally indistinct, smudged in the shadows of the late afternoon. I am the most myself in water, out here where I do not belong and cannot stay forever, where it is my head alone that shows above the surface as if that is all there is to me: my thoughts, my hopes and dreams, the many complicated ways in which I imagine things matter. The m

out the garden by spiders and crawling folksies squatting cross-legged by the bee balm wearing catscratch outfit sunhat deadheading flowers digging clover brilliant overhead birds talking geese on another side of the lake dozed off by hypnotic insects humble bumbling around me tumbling into blossoms other flying things meandering all ways or none rosemary hollyhocks thyme all that sage hiding in the rows of elephant ears crouching with all the wild the mild pret