Yes. This is a post about divorce.

Leaving is often a melancholy business. Ten years ago I left the Vermont Studio Center for the first time, and tomorrow I leave it after my second residency here. When I left a decade ago, I was newly divorced and happy to have cut myself off from the life I’d been living. I hadn’t yet established my new life, and I was free but also in a sort of free fall. I spent all of February here that year, and it snowed like it might never stop. I felt buffered by the whiteness as if I was in the blanched room of an asylum, taking some cure meant to heal me. The cold held itself against me, and I held it back, hoping for numbness.

I forgot all this until I arrived back here four weeks ago. And then during this very snowy March I felt these things come back into my body. Remembrances of this sort can serve as a gauge, and it was fulfilling to sense the needle tipping toward full this residency. I’m all right now. More than all right. But I wasn’t then.

Oddly, the Someone reached out to me while I was here---on a perfunctory matter of post-divorce business. That was a gauge too. Winter’s power over us can be absolute during a snowfall that shuts everything down. An adversary’s power can feel absolute too. 

Rally in Montpellier, VT

Thanks to another Vermont Studio Center resident, I made it to the March for Our Lives today in Vermont's capitol city, Montpellier. The population is under 8,000. (No, I didn't forget a zero.) There was a big turnout.

The take away of the day for me was when a little boy pointed at the sign my friend was carrying. It depicted an assault rife in the typical red circle with a slash through it. "See that gun?" the dad said. "That's not a hunting rifle. That's a gun for bad guys." This is an important distinction here in Vermont.

Yesterday a different outing took us by a general store in a little village out in the countryside. The kind of place where you can get gas, your end of work week 12-pack, a bottle of maple apple cider, some maple kettle corn, homemade sausage, and pretty much anything else your household might be in need of. I think the owner must be a taxidermist on the side--because the walls and ceiling of the store were a menagerie of the hunted. When the family with the little boy walked by us a second time today, the father made the distinction about guns for the boy again.

God bless the moose, god bless the hunter, god bless the guy who makes the sausage, the people who tap the trees, and god bless all the fathers and mothers and children who were at the rally today.

We must stop stop stop stop.....

the suffering.

This image just above and those below are of immense puppets housed at the Bread and Puppet Museum which we visited yesterday.

I found the wildlife displayed there more enjoyable.

Weaving

I spent an hour or so weaving this morning. There's a fiber artist here who's asked for some help on a big project in exchange for a beautiful handwoven scarf. The conversation about process would probably have been enough. "Do you have a big sketch or a painting that plans this all out?" I asked. She said that she didn't. That she's working intuitively and often works this way. She has finished weavings on her wall that look like beautiful landscapes. Snow dusted mountains, fields of poppies... or not. You might see something else.

Right now the floor of her studio looks like this:

My desk looks like this. I have two stacks of index cards--story idea cards with ideas for stories or maybe the first paragraph or two. The other stack of cards is images, a snippet of overheard dialogue, a line of information that amazes me, whatever catches my eye or ear or breaks my heart on any given day. When I  begin, I chose a story idea that feels "hot." Then I spend several minutes shuffling through the image cards, intuitively pulling out whichever ones feel connected to the story. I weave them together, following the emotion, the action, the character and the trouble they're in. If they don't fit, images cards go back into the stack for another day.

In the end the weaver has to sew down the ends in that big tapestry to anchor them. I have to edit, and edit, catching up loose ends and pulling some bits out.

In Her Shoes

My mother left this world two years ago yesterday. Yesterday I wanted to write something, but didn’t know what to write, so I just worked on a short story wherein a woman’s 25-year-old daughter goes missing. In the story the mother puts on a pair of the daughter’s shoes and vows to wear them until her daughter returns.

This morning I realized that the slippers I brought with me to the Vermont Studio Center were my mom’s. I’ve been slipping into them everyday here after I leave my snow-caked boots in the front entryway.

Bicycles and Sheep

Last night I met a woman. She asked where I was from and I told her California. “I’m loving my time here in Vermont,” I said.

“You should buy my house,” she said. “You’d love it.” She told me it sat on 40 acres. A studio to rent out that would cover the mortgage. A pond. She tore a strip of paper from her notebook and wrote down the address. “You could have sheep,” she said.

I had fantasies of becoming a weaver once.

She told me the house was on Zillow so I looked at the pictures online. It’s off the market, Zillow says. I think she told me this, but said it was going to go back on. The rooms in the house are painted the colors of the rooms in my house. There’s a bright red table.

I thought I might dream of sheep last night, or speaking French, or standing at the edge of the pond, marveling at how I’d made this new life on the Canadian border surrounded by sheep and sugar bush.

But I dreamed of a bicycle trip and training to ride in it. The training had been going on for months, but I was still learning to repair my bicycle, being drilled on how to take this and that apart and replace it. Parts were laid out on a grimy towel, and the instructor held a shiny metal thing-a-ma-jig in his hand. “This is the piece you want,” he said.” You’d have to pay me big bucks to go on a bike trip. I’d rather just step out in front of the roaring truck than have it hit me from behind. There have been two men in my life in the last decade who were rather taken with me, and these men were serious about biking. That wasn’t the only reason it wouldn’t have worked out, but if I’d made a list of pros and cons, biking would have been written in all caps on the con side. This bike trip in the dream was going to last months. Hundreds of miles. It was a bike trip in which we followed a soccer team, peddling from city to city. Soccer. Sure. I like soccer if I’m in a bar with a soccer fan, or if it’s the Women’s World Cup maybe, or I’m watching some little girl I love.

“I hope this isn’t one of those conversations that changes my destiny,” I told the woman with the house.

“It could be she,” said. There was something about her. Something about the whole idea, something about the dream of the bike race that made me think about how capable we are of changing everything.