EAST MONTPELIER – The roof ridge of my house runs almost exactly east and west. I canted it about three degrees off, to 267 degrees west, so as to orient long face of the house due south with a slight nod to the morning sun for earlier solar heat, and on hot days in summer, an earlier relief from the afternoon sun. Thus, on the morning of the equinox, if it’s sunny, the shadow of the western peak of the roof points just about directly west. At the moment it’s pointing farther less south every day. That’s both good news and bad: The heat’s bound to break soon, but the darkness is encroaching.
Meanwhile, most of the windows are wide open, and the interior design of the house somehow draws fresh air (if there is any) in through the bedroom windows, funnels it down the hall, and exhausts it through the back door. Lovely!
As I sit at my desk here in the office on the north side of the house (I ain’t as dumb as I look), the window at my right shoulder shows me what’s going on outside. A tall, perfect spruce on my neighbor’s land shows me whether the wind is blowing, and how hard. The patch of sky above the trees, hazy at the moment with forest fire smoke, is variously cloudy, blue, gray, brooding, damp. Its every aspect influences my mood here inside. The afternoon sun that a month ago flooded the back porch with light and searing heat now shoots only a modest swath of light at the window.
But most of all at this time of year is a universal explosion of growing green. My son-in-law mows my lawn and leach field only twice a summer. They may look a little ragged by suburban standards, but I can see the blooming daisies out there even in the dark. To mow them would seem the work of a brute. My side yard, once a dense spruce thicket, is now a riot of infant meadow where songbirds love to sit and sing, if the racket coming out of it is any indication. There are even two patches of marsh grasses taking advantage of hidden springs. Out back there’s the trace of an old road leading up to a now-overgrown beaver dam. That gets mowed, too, so that I can stroll up there now and then, listen to the trickle that becomes a brook and runs all the way down to the Winooski, and watch the tiny minnows that have lived there since long before I came along, and I hope will remain afterward. It’s pleasant, too, to reflect that some of the molecules of water I’m watching dance past may end up resting at last, no one can know how much later, in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
A few years ago my late wife and I foolishly agreed to let a logger into our woods in return for the cost of removing a few big white pines near the house that my wife felt might fall upon us some stormy night. Before-and-after photos show what a big mistake that was. But a walk up the old road toward the beaver dam now reveals new life springing up where the overstory once inhibited its growth. I’ll never see them to even adolescence, but a bank of young spruce and fir are reaching skyward and elbowing each other for space. I’d hate to have to walk through them. Halfway up the road, a young beech is looking pretty lusty. I can’t see him from the house except in the fall, when his copper stands out from all the somber greens around him.
The soil here, thanks to the wetlands above us, is pretty moist. I’ve had a couple of weeping willows planted on the slope to take advantage of it, and, in the way willows will, they’ve become trees in almost no time. The four red oaks that I had planted hesitantly (I’m afraid that when they get big they’ll be toppled in the wet soil by the windstorms we know are coming) are kind of peeking around inside their wire cages and seem to be deciding whether to go for it.
I love to visit arboretums. There’s a world-class one in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where I also go to visit familiar spirits like Longfellow, Whittier, and Nathaniel Bowditch. There’s another in one of the parks of Boston’s so-called Emerald Necklace. There’s even a rustic one-man attempt at one at the Shaker Village in Canterbury, N.H. These few plantings here in my yard are my feeble attempts at one. I hope whoever comes next will honor them.
My favorites, northern tamaracks, are at the foot of the daisy field, in an arc around my old dog’s grave, where I often go with a lawn chair and a tot of whiskey to talk with her. They love damp soil and cold, and grow right to tree line in the Arctic. In the fall, their short needles turn a copper brown and fall off. In winter, they look dead. The symbolism is irresistible. About the time mud season passes and the shadow of the house moves south, they very timidly turn a pale green. Here we go again!
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
