Life mostly consists of the little moments that comprise each passing day, the moments that generally slip by unnoticed as we stumble along preoccupied with whatever has our attention at the time -- sitting at a table near a window, a summer breeze drifting in; looking out at a northern Vermont morning, most everything green except for the shirts, pants and towels billowing on the clothesline in that same summer breeze; waking from restless sleep to the song of crickets.
I haven't been having a whole lot of fun lately, but when I'm present enough to appreciate the pleasures of the passing moment I know I'm doing fine.
It's been a strange time, these last couple of months, a period of transition weirdly similar to one I went through back in the 80's. At that time, I'd returned to the Northeast from 16 or 17 months in Los Angeles. This time, I've come back from a stay of similar length in Madrid (not counting three or four months of brief trips stateside). Both times it wasn't so much that I made a decision to return as a decision was made somewhere down inside me and I found out afterward when it suddenly became apparent that the time to leave had arrived. Both were relocations of major cultural and geographical distance. Both times I returned to places in the country -– then my family's place north of Albany, New York, now a house in northern Vermont -– both places that served me well, providing comfort, quiet and space to collect my thoughts. Also, both places in which (I gradually came to feel) I wouldn't want to live on a permanent basis.
Both were times of flux as far as the relationships in my life. People come and go anyway, but in both these two periods the movement grew much more concentrated. These last couple of months have seen the letting-go of a bunch of friends and such -- some by me, some by other folks, some permanent, others maybe just changing their basis or needing some time off (or me taking a long, long time to reply to e-mail, currently happening a lot, for which I grovel with apologies).
The 80's post-L.A. transition led me to connect with folks who became the medium through which I wound up living in Cambridge, Mass. Though my connection with those people didn't last, Cambridge became my home for many years, the place I've lived the longest in this lifetime of mine, to this point anyway. I seem to have let go of Cambridge when I vacated my apartment there at the end of 2001, though that could change.
When I left Madrid, I told people I would be in Vermont for the warm season, with no idea where I'd be after that. That remains the case -- nowhere seems to be calling to me right now. Don't know where I want to be, don't know what I want to be doing. Not an exceptionally comfortable place to be, though like everything else in this life it will change.
The time has slipped by at a disorienting pace. I have to ask: how the hell did it get to be July? Scary.
It's full-blown summer here, has been for most of the last week. Temperatures in the 80s, the days sometimes clear, sometimes hazily humid. Wildflowers springing up in abundance, songbirds hanging about in the line of trees off the end of the house. The Vermont tourist season is in full swing, Montpelier bustling with people up for a shot of the north country's most user-friendly time of year, the season some consider paradise.
And the World Cup came to a close yesterday a.m. with Brazil's emergence as the best of the bunch (final score: 2-0). The Brazilians played some beautiful fútbol, and the Germans -- a team which did not come with great expectations, surprising many by making it to the finals -- played their hearts out and provided some passages of real competition.
Back to regular life.
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A short article which appears in the current issue of Seven Days, a weekly alternative-style newspaper out of Burlington, VT, from the column News Quirks ("Odd, strange, curious and weird but true news items from every corner of the globe"):
Bad News for Picnics
Scientists have discovered a supercolony of ants stretching almost 4000 miles along the coastline between the Italian Riviera and northwest Spain. [NOTE: I think the writer means here that the supercolony literally follows the coastline from the Italian Riviera west to Spain and all the way around the Iberian Peninsula up to the Spanish provinces of Galicia and Asturias. Off the top of my head, I would have thought that to be substantially more than 4000 miles, but I could be dead wrong. God knows, it's happened before.] The colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests, all related closely enough to recognize each other, despite being from different nests with different queens, the Swiss, French and Danish research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They noted the supercolony is the largest cooperative unit ever recorded.
[Author's note, 11/23/05 -- A brief shot of perspective re: the expressions of Vermont-related discontent that surface now and then during these months' entries.
As I write this, nearly four and a half years after the original entry, Vermont remains part of my life's foundation. Which is not to say that the unhappy mumblings that bubbled up in some of these entries were simply hot air. It's just that through the miracle of hindsight I've come to believe that whatever they were going on about, they were all expressing the same thing: displaced misery at the prospect of leaving Madrid behind.
Vermont has had a hold on me since the first time I crossed the state border, a grip that grew stronger, harder to ignore through summer visits to friends in Hardwick during the time of my one and only marriage. I can't think of any place in the States I'd rather be, am not sure I could live anywhere else stateside.
Blah blah blah.
My point: complaints related to Vermont should be taken with a fistful of salt.]