Go on and wonder.

I skip out halfway through a Selectboard meeting and take a backroad home. Since the floods, I haven’t driven these dirt roads. The roads are back together mostly, with rocky channels on either side of the steepest places. At the road’s highest place, I pull over.

August light.

I’d started that morning in jeans and a sweater, working on my back deck while rain splattered down, the morning large with a cold damp breeze that made me wish for socks in my sandals. This evening, I’m wearing a sundress again.

All summer long, we’ve been collecting complaining about the summer in Vermont. First, no rain. Then, too much rain. I have plenty of firewood left from the tepid winter, and then burned fires into the summer.

The evening spreads out radiantly. For this moment, I’m in no rush to head anywhere, so I park and walk down the road a short ways, crickets sizzling in the hayfields. A pickup rolls slowly down the road. The driver, an acquaintance, stops, and we chat for just a moment, about the particular green and blue surrounding us, then he glides away.

Light in August. My father bought me a used copy of Faulkner’s novel for a dime in a used bookstore. I was a teenager, a fanatic of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, those immense Penguin paperbacks that were so gratifyingly fat. I kept that copy with me for so many moves, thousands of miles, and I’m guessing I have that version yet, crammed on my bookshelves.

Faulkner’s world is the complexity of past and present, the world jammed against our faces right now, floods and fires. This morning, again, a crimson dawn, curls of fog in the blue valley. My east windows need washing. Get on this, I think, get on this…

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.” 

— Faulkner