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TWO ESSAYS It was a nice picture; it contained the color green. The other shot showed her, wearing a light jacket, kneeling in the garden, digging in actual dirt. Digging as performed in a flower garden, for those of you who have not performed the act in so long that you've forgotten, is the act of sticking a trowel into loose dirt in order to move or aerate it. There was not a particle, falling or on the ground, fresh or frozen, of snow in either picture. My response was, "Nice photos; thanks. Will spring ever come to Vermont again? See attached photo of my garden." Thinking it hysterically funny, I attached a blank piece of paper to my E-mail. They later told our Mom I didn't do it right — there was nothing on the photo page. I still think it's funny but then I've spent the winter in Northfield, Vermont, neither traveling further north than Burlington nor further south than Randolph; nowhere east or west; my eyesight has diminished to the strength of a mosquito's; the confines of my house look just swell to me. I bought some film then took a dozen shots of Mom's house and my garden (a white-on-white expanse) to send to Martha's Vineyard. Somehow it's important to make them understand what's going on up here and I figure they deserve more trick shots. I squatted down by the side of the road to shoot upward so that a couple rows of clapboard, the top of the porch and the roof are showing above the snow cliffs formed by the latest two tons to fall on us like snowballs from a hyperactive Mother Nature. The snow shovel and both sleds are buried. I don’t care. I don’t shovel anymore — I can’t lift the shovel that high. I drove into a snow bank and a guardrail on the way home yesterday and told the twins they’re riding the rails with Grammy. My twin grandchildren love the snow, the height of the accumulations, the speed of the ice under their purple flying saucers. In December I actually slid down a nearby hill on one of the darn things. The twins laughed when I screamed for Mother all the way down the moguls. Benjamin wrote in his school journal that sliding here is "almost too much fun." One icy day, up near the pine tree, they jumped on their sleds, slid over the bank at the end of the drive, were airborne a second, skidded half way down the long drive. They had a blast until Kirsten went so far as to slide right under a car parked way down the drive. She looked out from under the muffler, her toque and glasses askew, crying and complaining, scared but unhurt, "Why did she have to park her car here?" Last weekend the twins went sliding on the front yard's ice cap, after the last of our nine nor'easters. The children covered the territory between house and road in an ice-glazed Vermont minute. After several runs, I saw Benjamin looking dogged, angry, marching toward the house (where I was warmly watching from a window). I waited on the porch to see what he'd blast me with. It was "You're supposed to be outside watching us so if we get hurt you're right there." His chin and cheek were scraped. He cried and carried on for five minutes while Kirsten and I hugged and soothed him. She called him Buddy, patted his shoulder. The real reason I have written all this is to relate the comment that has cheered me up and made it possible to continue the trek toward spring. It is Benjamin commiserating with me, "Just imagine being a boy like me with uncomfortable pants in school." Whenever I recall that image, it humbles me. It silences my complaining. Hang it on your refrigerator, perhaps it will also strengthen you. My son is 30 today and I am flying cross-country for the first time. Uncle Burton and Aunt Mary bought me the ticket so I can visit them in the southern Utah desert. I never wished to travel, and as a neophyte air-travelling friend said, “Until now, I had not had many places to go.” I feel the engines vibrating, hear air rushing; suddenly my teeth hurt up into my ears. Climbing on air, I lean nearer the window to see what snow-covered mountain range is towering where there should not be one. Actually, it is a cliff of icy-white cloud. The awe of acceleration, of being lifted, of being high as the clouds, of the beauty, of racing above the motionless green hills of Burlington, Vermont, make me press my forehead against the cool window and weep. Suspension over a land where all activity appears to have ceased and speeding away from ground so far below my feet create a weighted feeling of falling. We rise above the rain, pierce cloud, fall into a solid white abyss. Tipping, turning, leveling. Floating. Awesome! Tears fall out of my eyes. I have lived my whole life among green, easy mountains. They give me limits and goals, define my perspective. They are my reference points. My mountains make me feel secure as a perennial rooted in its own garden. I count on them. This ocean of frothy cloud makes me feel barren. Above the clouds, there is no rise, no fall, no limit, no boundary. I am nowhere. I am nothing. We are travelling at 545 mph with 763 miles to go to Chicago. Being in the sky pushes my life into perspective, forces me to make resolutions, just as standing on the ocean’s edge or Mount Mansfield’s peak do. Now I am looking through the top of the sky, through cloud streaks racing east as we race west. Once I realize it is earth, not cloud, I remember the scripture: For now we see through a glass, darkly. If only I could stand on top of the plane for a 360 degree view. At 37,000 feet, I figure we’re about seven miles above ground, almost the distance from home to Montpelier. Swallowed like a morsel in God’s mouth, I tell myself I cannot fall, there is all this air holding me up. How arrogant, how astonishing, that humankind should force its way up here. I’ve never been this far from home and I am terribly lonely. Here is Chicago at the water’s edge. Trucks and cars skitter like silverfish. The entire puzzle is brown and gray tinged with green, stretching on and on and on. Flat, horribly flat; and dull. There is no interstate splitting the horizon as in Burlington; here the land is cracked and splintered as an old dish. Inside O’Hare International Airport, walking on a moving sidewalk that feels like walking on snakes, lightening-shaped, multicolored, neon tubes of light cascading, strike at the pedestrians. Back home, the only neon lights are beer signs in general store windows or price signs beside the pump-your-own gas pumps and most of us assume in order to get from one place to the next we may have to walk but we don’t expect lights, music or electric sidewalks as incentives. At the B Concourse, Orientals, sailors, a cowboy, a monk in orange robes brush past each other. A woman holding a baby greets an elderly couple: “Welcome to the United States of America.” The runways are crammed with planes idling, revving, taxiing, taking off, landing. Just like the halls crammed with people idling, revving, taxiing, taking off, landing. I feel so confused and out of place, I want to scream. Someone told me to wear my purse around my neck in a public toilet. “Things go very fast,” she said. The purse hanging in front of me is so awkward and the toilet stall so crowded with my two flight bags that the strap of one falls in. I try to exit leaving both flight bags on the floor but they prevent the door opening. With a flight bag on each shoulder I get stuck in the door and if I stand sideways I can’t reach the door latch. I put one bag over my shoulder, open the door, back out, curse as the door bangs my head while I’m trying to wrench loose the other bag stuck between the wall and toilet. The bag jerks free, the door slams, I smack into the wall. A woman drying panties under the hand dryer has the audacity to stare at me but I don’t care, I have now used a public toilet in the busiest airport in the world and still have my purse and flight bags intact. Two hours after my scheduled flight, it’s canceled and I am loaded onto a Boeing Stretch jet; me who’s never ridden in a stretch limo. I’m excited but try to act as nonchalant as the other stone-faced passengers. As the acceleration pushes me against the seat, astronauts, g-forces and skin stretched taut against bone come to mind. In two hours thirty-seven minutes, after flying 1249 miles at jet speed, I’ll be in Salt Lake City. On take-off, Chicago looks like thousands of cemeteries shoved together, square plots filled with gray shafts. Soon I see cloudy blue horizons like mirages and snatches of flat, flat, land. I’ve never seen any place so flat. Rivers wide as lakes and long as railroad tracks. Massive farms in square chunks. Irrigated fields of green. Variegated brown patches. Land tinged with red. Out here, they plow the earth in giant circles; it is mauve-colored and powdery. The sun is behind us as if mounted on the edge of the universe to beam a path. I cry over the colors and the innumerable squares, because it is vast, because it is flat. Words from patriotic songs march in four-four time through my head. Then clouds surge back like waves obliterating a shore. Breakers of clouds limitless as sand on a beach or squares on the plains. They serve a Mexican lunch with a pamphlet celebrating some Mexican event that took place five days ago. I eat everything but the funny-looking cookie. Nearing Salt Lake, the plane turns and tips simultaneously, reminding me of rides at the fair that I flatly refuse to take. Falling. No control. Fears slides into my stomach. I think of God and my mother and my unfinished writing project. The summits of black and ash-colored mountains strain as if they would snatch me from the sky if they could. Someone cries, “There’s the lake!” It looks murky. Dead. Exquisite, strange, steep piles of stony mountains tipped with snow surround Salt Lake City. I hold my breath so I won’t cry anymore. A white church with spirals shimmering in the sun, surrounded by a square of green, flashes beneath. We land. The pressure pushes me against the seat again and I close my eyes. I’m such an innocent. I thought all mountains were green, like mine.
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