We walked in the cemetery this afternoon, a new experience for Fate. It is touching to see the statues and representations of the dogs people loved before they died, Fate was astonished to see this ceramic Cocker Spaniel keeping her late human company. Fate went into a herding crouch, and growled softly as she approached carefully. But then, a connection was made, Fate wagged her tail, gave the spirit dog a lick, moved on.
A beautiful and poignant encounter in so many ways.
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in 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 with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
– Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays.
I grew up in urban America, my home is in rural America, I have been surprised to learn. This is where I belong, I have always belonged, it just took me a lifetime to figure it out.
This, for me, was the hero journey.
Here, whenever I am disheartened or discouraged by the ugliness and hatred of human beings, I come into the presence of still water. I thought of this this morning when we stopped by the Round House Cafe to pick up some coffee.
Our bookkeeper, Anne Dambrowski, was there, coming for breakfast, we sat down with her to catch up, shared our stories of Thanksgiving.
Lisa Carrino, the co-owner of the cafe came out of the kitchen to have her breakfast with us. We talked about children, struggle, holidays. After she went back to work, her husband and our friend Scott Carrino came out with his breakfast to join us. He looked tired, we talked about books. Connie Brooks, the owner of Battenkill Books, came in to pick up some cookies she was serving in her story in her own version of Black Friday. I asked her if she had a book I wanted, she did. She held it for me.
I think of the Round House Cafe when I think of what government, the economists and corporate America has done to rural life. once the mainstay and grounding of American life, now considered unprofitable and impractical in the new global economy. The good jobs have all moved to the coasts, they had taken the children of rural life with them and most of the money.
The big businesses are all gone, the small ones struggle to survive in a community of 2,000. Our population is still declining, as it has been for years. We are better off than most, we have a big college nearby, a vibrant arts center, pockets of creative New Yorkers – artists, writers, painters – who have fled the big city for a different way of life. And farmers, hanging onto their cows and their traditions.
But small town life should never be romanticized, life is not ever simple here. Not too many people have extra money to spend, and there are pockets of poverty in the hills that rival anything the urban ghettoes can offer.
The children come back all the time, they tell us sadly that they have been forced mostly into living in places they don’t like, working in jobs they hate for people and corporations that care nothing about them. That is the nature of our world, we are forced to live for the security of things we don’t want or need and can’t afford for the benefit of people who have more than they could ever need. The idea of community pays and pays, nature fights to survive.
But the children aren’t coming back, and neither are those jobs the economists and politicians took away because they have forgotten what people are for, and decided that people don’t matter. Here, we are reminded that we still have one another, and whether we like each other or not is besides the point. We need one another.
The politicians and economists have forgotten the family farmers, the true fathers and mothers of our country, and left them behind, broken and struggling. Here, community survives, even thrives, but they have broken the hearts and souls of rural life, it is hard for the emptying small towns to hang on in the new world with its new and greedy and hateful rules, almost all justified in the name of making more money. Wal-Mart, the great bloodsucker of individual enterprise, is doing well. There are three of them in a wide ring around us, they eat the old small businesses for breakfast and lunch.
The Round House Cafe has become an oasis of community in my town, a place where we can come together, see one another, slap each other on the back, remember what people are for. Scott and Lisa have loved community and fought for it all of their lives, Davids against the new armies of Goliath.They are persevering, and then some.
I’m in the Round House all the time, I rarely take a photo there, but I saw these three people sitting on the far wall under the landscape paintings that are being sold there. One couple talking, one man pondering his coffee, a woman on her Ipad.
Suddenly, I realized it was a beautiful scene, filled with meaning and connection. There, we come into the presence of still water, we can rest in the grace of the world.
Maria and I have been married more than five years now, we know one another very well. In many ways – the core of our beings – we are alike. We want the same kind of lives, we support one another, love one another. In some ways we are very different. Before I met Maria, I’m not sure I had ever set foot in a thrift store. I’m not a shopper, and I wear pretty much the same thing every day – jeans and work shirts. I usually get them online, or in a clothing store like Sam’s in Brattleboro, Vt.
Maria is allergic to shopping in any form. She bristles at the term, but she is viscerally cheap (she would say thrifty) and I have never heard her says she needs anything but a sewing machine, colorful fabrics, toilet paper and soap. She does love thrift and consignment stores, every piece of clothing she owns comes from one or the other.
And everyone loves her clothes, she is always being complimented on the say she dresses.
We love to hop in the car and drive to places, and I’ve realized recently that almost all of those places have a thrift shop there or close by. Yesterday, I found myself in a great thrift store, one of several in Brattleboro, Vt. Maria is purposeful in a thrift shop, she is quiet, alert, her eyes scan the racks for certain kinds of fabric and color, invisible to me, but instantly apparent to me.
Maria can look at a clothes rack and imagine a quilt, or hanging piece, or even, once in awhile, something to wear. She rarely buys anything, and when it does, it usually costs $6 to $10 dollars. I always needed things, she needs very little.
In the thrift stores, I hang back, stay out of her way. Maria never takes much time, hangs around too long, or talks much to the other customers. She touches a shirt or sweater or blouse, sometimes she will hold it up to a mirror. She makes sure everything is returned to it’s proper space. She seems to trawl through the racks shrewdly, she knows precisely what she wants and precisely what she doesn’t want. Once in awhile I will see something i think she might like or wear and point it out to her. I’m right about 25 per cent of the time.
But then, she is not an impulse buyer. If she buys two or three things, It’s a major shop.
I love the smell and feel of thrift stores, I think of a lot of purposeful, sensible women with practiced eyes. They smile and nod to one another, but rarely speak. Thrift stores are quiet. I never know what I am looking at in a thrift stop, Maria does.
Maria is very much the artist, she sees colors and shapes in a different way than I do. I have come to love the thrift stores, I love to watch the people – very few men – work their way through the aisles, I try and guess where they will stop, what they might pick up, try on or wear.
Life is interesting in that way, as in many others. The kaleidoscope changes, if you are alive and awake. Thrift stores are an integral part of my life now, I know where the best bargains usually are. Maria uses them for her art as well as her clothes. They are important to her, thus important to me. When I think of towns and places we like, I now think of the thrift stores that we see, they have entered my neural system. I love the feeling of moving between the racks.
