A Different Kind of Parking Lot

Home now after a wonderful week at Joe's Pond, on the edge of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

Seven adults, four kids - cousins - and two dogs, lots of sweet local corn, bracingly clean water, loons on the lake, dark night skies, kayaks and canoes and horseshoes, this riveting memoir found on the shelves of our cabin, soaring rhetoric taken in by radio and firelight. We made a side trip to Glover to visit the home of Bread and Puppet, where we toured the old barn filled with giant, exquisite, sometimes haunting figures of resistance ("of the heart against business as usual") and left carrying Cheap Art Manifestos to adorn our own walls.

Home now to the neighborhood girls, who have been at our house or ours at theirs since the very moment we pulled into the driveway.

Home now, having slowed down. Home now, doing a shallow dive into the details of afterschool programs and old routines made new again.

When we first moved to Burlington eight years ago, Greg took a job at a start-up company out in Williston. He became increasingly unhappy and restless over the course of his short stint there; the work itself had no heart and he spent his days in a cubicle surrounded by a strip-mall in a parking lot in a town whose bucolic farmland had given way to box stores and developments.

Actually, to say that he was restless is a ridiculous understatement. The man was downright miserable. He did have a couple of colleagues/comrades who became lifelong friends of ours, and for this we will always appreciate the place. But his days were insufferable. In an effort to counsel and support him, I once suggested he go for a walk around the parking lot during the lunch break he never took. He could not see the point of this. Walking around the asphalt wouldn't poke a hold in the business-as-usual that was eating away at him day and night. As the year wore on, he hung in there but barely. I remember him sharing an image of holding on to a fraying rope with bloodied hands.

Eventually, he did let go of that rope - dropping an inch to the ground. I can't tell his story here - but the parking lot image lives on for us. Every time we go away on vacation, in fact, Greg brings it up. "It's just like going into the parking lot," he said, as he cracked open a cold beer and we watched the kids paddle and swim around the short dock. I protested. Our lives are not business-as-usual. Our lives are not cubicles, traps, prisons. But I knew what he meant - taking time out, from one perspective, makes it harder to "go back in" to the daily routines. But only if we experience those as a grind to be survived.

I do not want my life to be something I survive, living from "sugar high to sugar high" as one of my sisters likes to say.

But I am already missing the unstructured nature of vacation time. I'm savoring images of my mom braiding challah dough with her grandchildren. I'm appreciating what was different in me, in all of us, being in a place with no television, computer, or cell phones, and how my body felt when I was running and swimming every day, and how delicious it was to read every chance I got rather than getting online.

I'm home now, grateful to have been away. And also grateful to return and to find myself noticing the sounds of the late-summer breeze and the crickets' jingling, as I did at Joe's Pond, even if it was a parking lot of sorts.

She She shared two Wendell Berry poems recently, one of which captures our week perfectly. Reading and re-reading it keeps reminding me that I am free - in the parking lot, on the water, at work, in my body, here at home, always and everywhere.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.