In Vermont, Spring is a short window of time before Summer. We go from bone-damp chill in the air, where the ground feels cool, hard, and unforgiving under our feet, to a quick softening that makes us adjust our footing, our movements and balance, and our way of traveling away from home. 

It is not that we become distrustful or overly-cautious about these environmental and seasonal changes, rather we acknowledge that weather and its conditions are absolutely out of our hands. The rapidly changing climate elicits some concern, and we cannot help but wonder if with these changes (or, reality) we are shifting to something else that we can not so easily predict or anticipate. 

Witnessing fewer salamanders, fewer bees, and other species we once associated with this time of year, are the footnotes we make on hikes into the woods after a gentler rain passes. We know we need to know more, that we should probably be doing more. But what? What we identify as the returning markers of Spring, are still there, but we must look a little closer to find them. And, we want to find them, because they help us to usher in the changing of the seasons and prepare us for what is to come. 

For me, it is noticing the ephemerals that seemingly bloom overnight, the various forms of fungi that flourish in great ruffles and puffs among last year’s fallen leaves. It is listening for the songs of the Hermit thrush and warblers in the mornings, and the peepers in the evenings. We all seem to be eager for the taste of warmer weather. The Trout Lilies, Carolina Spring Beauties, and trillium rise even before the grasses or the foliage appear, catching the corners of our eyes with flashes of color against the muted tones that we became accustomed to during stick season.

I love how the light changes with each new sunrise and sunset, with each seasonal transition, how serene moments of change become warmer and richer, as atmospheric and ground temperatures adjust. The earth, the plants and trees, and sky are all in communion, warming together.  I have photographed the same spot in our backyard through all the seasons, for five years now. The colors and hues are never the same; they are always in transition, growing thinner or deeper, more saturated, pallid, or nearly opalescent. 

By the time our roads dry out from the rutted washboards, we are ready for different routines. Near-summer speaks to us with daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, volunteer rhubarb and mint, buttercups, dandelions. Along the road ways, our yards and fields become softer and more lush, lined and speckled with lilacs, tree blossoms, and various shades of purple (vetch, iris, coneflower, bluets) and sunny yellow. Domesticated and perennial poppies, tulips, and peonies flare up. The black locust sways in the wind with tendrils of blossoms.

We fight the urge to cut our grass, because we want our pollinators to flourish. We gossip about those who have. Our instinct to clean out, rearrange, reorient, and construct something emerges. We develop an itch to put something into the ground earlier than we should. Frost still surprises us, though it shouldn’t. This isn’t our first rodeo.

We want to move our bodies from the inside spaces we have been inhabiting for the last five months, out. We just have to get out! We are ready to be in the world again, it is not just a mindset, we are anxious to embody aspects of this time and its growth, rebirth, and rejuvenation. We want things to feel new to us, and we may even confuse achieving this fresh experience with consumerism. We discreetly and intimately welcome the Lady Slipper’s, and the quiet covenant they bring. 

Summers in Vermont keep Vermonters in love. It is a known fact that we are willing to endure the other, less appealing, longer, and colder seasons, because we know summer will come again. Like the birds. We have learned from our avian neighbors, the art of setting up camp. We know this is all temporary. 

Summer brings the sounds of construction, the diligent and industrious work of repairs, of building new, and rearranging specific spaces for the season. Even our toddler and his friends knowingly take part in these activities. I am reminded of what Edward A. Casey said about the places we build– we build structures to inhabit, though not to dwell. We often build places for shelter and temporary retreat, but as a species we struggle with dwelling, we struggle with being content, present, and connected with a space or a place.

It could be argued that this behavior harks back to our ancestor’s innate migratory instincts and patterns associated with survival and environmental/ecological factors. These were not only instincts they possessed, but our ancestors once built cultures around their movement with the changing seasons.  They once sought out resources in different climates and regions during times of scarcity, and they all held special place-based wisdom about various geographies, paying special tribute to the places that gifted them with abundance. 

How our ancestors interacted with a variety of places was very different from how we interact with places today, at least in Westernized cultures where we boast economic growth and development as hallmarks of civilization. For some, I suspect regular migration would not only be greatly disorienting, but would cultivate much fear and insecurity. The shelters we build now are built as testaments of our industriousness, of wealth accumulation, and as a form of protection from the outside world. They are not built to dwell, especially in our sprawling bedroom communities. It could be suggested that the main motivation for our movement now has to do with socioeconomic and political reasons, and more rarely for environmental or ecological reasons. Though, that might change in the near to close future. 

When we feel the pull now to move, what is this telling us? Is there anxiousness in this provocation? Is this another form of retreat? Why we struggle to dwell could be very much related to our general discontentment, spurring our need to build more, consume more, have more. And, the more we become disconnected from our natural environments, building walls to separate our bodies from other species, the more suspicious, reactionary, fearful and defensive we seemingly become. We have forgotten how to be close to nature, and in turn we have forgotten our place-based wisdom. We have forgotten how to dwell in the sacred openness. 
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I am learning (through mindfulness practice and experience), that dwelling in place is a form of love. It is an expression and a devotion to a place or space or a community, as you are in relationship and communion with others. And, it is through dwelling in place and being at home there, it is where you may find true belonging. 
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As we anticipate long, overdue, and extreme winter conditions in the Northeast (with temperatures as low as 40 below with windchill), I notice a turning inward in preservation and efficiency — to keep one’s inner furnace firing, even when it has been reduced to a flicker of a flame. Just the scent of snow — metallic and melony — makes the glands in my mouth water. It reminds me of how severe thunderstorms can be detected by the pressure drops in the air and a staticky* sensation upon the skin. How joints and tendons ache with too much moisture, or too much cold. 

It is common to develop an intuition in regards to the weather here in Northern New England. I have been told this sense becomes finer-tuned with age and experience. It is also a badge of honor worn by New Englanders who have endured the seasonal occurrences for multiple decades or generations. Traces of a Libertarian mentality can be found here, where nothing provokes or discourages. It is a stubbornness and a geographic toughness that is almost biological and masochistic.

February is my birth month, however I was not born a cold-weather baby. I was born in the deep South, at an army hospital in Alabama. When my father was released from his military duties, we moved North when I was a year and half old. I have called New England my home for nearly 36 years, but according to true New Englanders (those born in the land of maple and stone walls and white-washed buildings), I am an interloper. 

I have no memory of my earliest beginnings, though there are times when I retrieve age-old, bodily knowledge that predates my Northern occupancy: I am instantly hypnotized when I catch the shimmering light through the leaves of the black locust, and the sweet scent of the untamed honeysuckle in our backyard is both dizzying and disorienting at the height of summer. Pre-verbal imprints have resonated in this body, carrying on a place I once knew.

It is not place alone that gets stirred up spontaneously when I have familiar experiences or encounter recognizable scenery. I would neither describe such recollections as projections on a movie screen, nor have they been distilled from childhood stories retold and rehashed until they feel real. There is a deeper emotional attachment. Folded into this bodily suitcase, there are inherited maps and landscapes; and there are sounds, smells, textures and sensations that almost personify my place of origins. They are details that are more sentimental and personal, than they are Other.

A recent study has revealed there is a place-memory bridge between the part of the brain that processes visual scenes and the part of the brain that processes spatial memories. That is why when a person recognizes something in a new context, for example, a landmark or a piece of architecture, they are immediately connecting to prior place memories and either forming personal attachments or aversions. They are engineering a hybrid experience, with details pulled from the past, which in turn provide context in the present. I imagine the span between place and memory to be like Monet’s bridge over the lily ponds of Giverny — a distinct focal point can be found at its center, surrounded by a landscape abstracted.

Human beings bring many things into the landscape, whether on purpose or by transference. The ego, time, and politics are profoundly impactful. “It is a simple equation,” wrote Terry Tempest Williams in her opening to Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. “Place + people = politics.” She implies that this dynamic and relationship is unavoidable. On a solo excursion into the most desolate deserts of this planet, even if we are the only inhabitant for miles, we are still left with our many selves and our bodies. If the human influence and presence is taken out of this equation, we are left with geography. 

Edward A. Casey believed that regions and environments are conceptual geographies too expansive to really take into consideration or the consciousness. As a result, our identity is relatively less impacted by the notion of an environment or a region, as it is by specific places. The elements of a place are manageable to process, portable to carry, and can be easier to access.

I feel no specific loyalty as a Southerner or Northerner, but the sounds of cicadas and cats paired with summer heat is grounding. 

Last year on my birthday, when our thermometer hovered around 20 degrees, I was invited to take a dip in a mountain spring. My friends used icepicks to open up the frozen surface just enough for us to slip down into those frigid unknowns. We sent encouragement from the shores, as chunks of ice and patches of slush bumped up against our half-submerged and vulnerable bodies. Immediately, afterward, we stripped out of our swim suits and sandals in our cars, and had warm beverages and salty snacks on the roadside. 

Invigorated from our toes on up our brain stems by our dip, we traded new year, new us stories, personal goals and well wishes. Brave or stupid, we had invited the cold and elements right on up to our bare skin. Then we drove on our separate ways, imprinted upon, altered. 

Some of our desire to take that plunge was our way of being antagonistic, of sticking out our tongues and raising our arms in defiance. And, there was also something therapeutic about testing the body’s elasticity and wherewithal. As a child, I felt little inhibition diving into the North Atlantic in mid-November in my underwear, yet I have found as an adult with collective experiences, I have a sometimes detrimental aversion to risk. Like the cold, practicality sneaks in, inhibiting spontaneity, and grounding the lively, rising spirit that beckons to be untethered, challenged, perhaps, changed. 

I will forever remember that day when the burning hot-cold quickly melted away, and how it revived in my body something that had a quality of possession.

* Static electricity is an oxymoron in this sense. By definition, static means lacking in movement, action, or change, while static and electricity used together implies an imbalance in charges which are circumstantial to the activity taking place in the environment and between “material objects”, that are in fact capable of transference, adjustment, and travel.

Here — in, at, or to this place, position.
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I have taken speaking for granted. I am just shy of 40, and I do not have a memory of learning to talk, nor do I have a memory of being taught to speak. There is no dreamy sequence lodged in the deepest parts of my consciousness that conjures acquiring this skill, no unique moment of acceptance when I realized I will forever be settling and compromising with language.

Picking out words and concepts from an internal dictionary may as well have come to me from the borders of the ethereal–I know I climbed that ladder, I know I arrived at this present moment with this knowledge in hand. There were witnesses, of course, however this does not compute the same experience as retrieving a personal and visceral recollection.

My memory of writing is different– I have managed to hold onto snippets that predate my learning to write. I do remember practicing letters by following dotted lines. Two, aquatic tanks radiated with heat lamps and purple lights nearby my desk, as monarch cocoons developed and dangled from wire mesh. Together, we were making progress each day.

I can still tap into that feeling of embarrassment when my S was corrected; the first letter of my name, which I wrote backwards for a whole year before someone pointed it out. I had to train myself cognitively to correct this mistake. It had been more natural for me to write it the other way. How I perceived the letter was tied up in other senses, how I heard it, and even how I imagined it to move like a little garter snake through grass. Much like a neurodivergent student I once worked with who saw letters in different colors. When I had given him a pack of markers to show me what he meant, he created layers of rainbows across pages. Prior to this he had been labeled dyslexic and illiterate, and his case managers assumed he never learned to read and write at the developmental age of literacy. What they failed to see was that in order for him to see letters on a page: He saw, had to be written,
HE SAW

“We do not have the time for that,” I was told by those same case managers, insinuating that the student was just belaboring the work we were doing.

Of course, it came down to time. I wanted to celebrate the fact that this student had read and written sentences beautifully and independently, yet his breakthrough did not align with the expectations and schedules of others, so again he was casted outside of the norm.

When our son, age 2, interacts with children who are developmentally further with their language, who are speaking in full sentences, and can articulate that they do not understand our son’s babble, it makes me wonder whether children even as young as two and three have a memory of being nonverbal.

There is no doubt that children are communicating with us long before they learn words and syntax. Feeling comes first, as E.E. Cummings pointedly and poetically declared. Jacques Derrida argued that our Mother language is not our own– that we adopt the language of the Other immediately — that there is a disconnect between what we feel in relationship to the constructed world and our reality, and the words we use and choose to describe our experience.

So, when our son, O, began using the word here about a month ago, as in, I am here, I took a pause from what I was doing to quietly reflect on what he was conveying in the simple language he held. It was not just that he had discovered a new word, it was that the word itself contained an entire embodied experience and narrative within it. And, he had chosen the word intuitively.

My husband and I attempted to interpret what this expression meant to our son, in context to what he was doing in a given moment, and how he used the expression. Sometimes it was in the form of an announcement, I am here! And, sometimes it was the answer he gave us about his whereabouts. Our son was learning how his bodily position related to his environment, and he seemed to be aware of being present in the experience he was having.
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The definition of here — in, at, or to this place, position.

There are, in my opinion, few words (in the English language) which capture a complex existential experience in a nutshell the way the word here does. Here rolls with time, a complimentary passenger. Even the word near does not capture the same presence. Near tells us we are close, but not part of. Here, when our son uses it, it has a contented quality to it: I am here, and okay with that. I am not in conflict or distress, you do not need to rescue me.

I agonize over how that change will come, when he calls us up one day to say: I am here, please come get me. I don’t want to be here.
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I imagine the Welch word, hiraeth (like the German concept of sehnsucht, the Portuguese saudade, or the Romanian dor) possesses a related longing for hereness, something that becomes more difficult to achieve in age, and in a postmodern era so dictated by time and driven by progress.
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For the time being, we will savor our son’s hereness, and how he holds his palms wide open to enhance what he is simultaneously experiencing and trying to say.