Metamorphosis, an essay about change
Enjoy this beautiful essay submitted by Susan Kessler from White River Junction, VT in response to our call to submissions for our "Metamorphosis" writing project. Susan eloquently captures the poignancy of this time this gracious and hopeful piece. Perhaps it will inspire you to put pen to paper!
I’m new. I moved to Vermont in August of 2018 on a wave of wanderlust. I found a job that excited me and came east from Chicago, eager to walk and run new paths, eat new foods, hear new voices, to dig new dirt.
When people asked me where I was from, my answer was invariably greeted with one of these reactions: “Oh, then you’ll be just fine with our winters!” OR “Oh my, do you miss city life?” I concluded right away that people’s sense of place is fundamentally tied to one of two things: the weather, or the rural/urban dichotomy.
Sure, both these things are quite definitive. But over these past twenty months – in mostly pre-pandemic and now mid-pandemic times -- I’ve seized the opportunity to explore what else makes this place itself. It’s been a complicated and beautiful adventure in discovery.
Here is an intentionally incomplete list of my observations so far:
• Mountains. Holy crap! Mountains. They change everything: the view from down here, the view from up there, the way my legs feel as I walk or run up and back down (and the subsequent choice to go up first or down first next time), the soil, the plants, the things that slither, skitter, scatter. Everything is different when you’re among mountains.
• Latitude. I’ve never felt my precise address on the globe the way I do here. The quantity and quality of the light tell me exactly where I am at all times.
• The sky. To me, this feels like sort of the opposite of Big Sky Country. Vermont skies curve low, reaching down over the rocks to cradle each rugged little village. What does that make this? Hug Sky Country? Maybe.
• Trees. I went walking in the late afternoon yesterday, mingling with railroad tracks and river crossings and spring bulbs in varying states of open and closed. The apple trees – at least I think they’re some sort of apple trees, which is part and parcel to the fact that I’m still in reconnaissance mode – were so incredibly fragrant that they led me across a couple of intersections devoid of all traffic, around town hall with its requisite parking lot, and into the playground for which they, the supposed apple trees, serve as a border.
You know how some years flowering trees have a day when they are at absolutely, perfectly peak bloom? How that doesn’t happen every single year, and certainly not among all trees in a grouping like this? Walking underneath this row of (possibly) apple trees yesterday, I felt I was a participant in what is definitely among the very best days they will ever collectively have to offer.
So what’s next? That’s a difficult if not impossible question at the moment. Which for me means there’s no choice but to remain present, right here and right now. It’s apropos of the shelter in place order we’ve been living under for months now, where great solace, a form of shelter, can be taken from the expansive and expanding beauty of the particular place that we’re in, even as we strive to stay open and wise to what’s next. Whenever it may come.
Susan Kessler May 15, 2020 White River Junction, VT
Photo by the author, near the railroad tracks behind the Courthouse in White River Junction, VT