Sense of Place

Guest blogger, Deborah Lee Luskin

Like my character, Rose Mayer, I came to Vermont for the summer – and stayed. Unlike Rose, I came to Vermont willingly.

I wanted to write fiction, and the noise of city life – not just the sirens and car alarms, but the overall stimulation – made it difficult for me to hear my own voice. I already lived by myself in a one-bedroom apartment, so it wasn’t just a matter of solitude I was seeking, but a quality of quiet and spaciousness that I couldn’t find in New York.

In Vermont, I’m nurtured by the natural world, and I find small-town life more suited to my creativity. In the city, I was constantly defending myself against the rudeness of strangers. There are few strangers where I now live, and we all depend on one another too much to afford rudeness.

Even though I came to Vermont in the summer, winter is the season that matters here; it’s winter that dictates my activities for the entire year. Happily, it’s a season I love.

Snow erases the landscape, creating a blank page on which the drama of survival is written in paw prints, scat, feathers, fur and blood. Snow muffles sounds, levels fields, seeps into cracks, and transforms the familiar landscape into something mysterious. Once the cold locks up the river, snow erases it. With snowshoes, I walk on water and follow the tracks of the animals for whom the frozen waterway is a swift thoroughfare. Ice can lock me in the house, too. In winter, it is often safer to stay home; the more I stay home, the more I write.

Snow also transforms light, blinding by day and magical by night. Sunlight on snow dazzles and burns; moonlight casts shadows on snow, and starlight sparkles. Nighttime winter light invites me outdoors, makes outings festive, inspires the primitive enjoyment of a bonfire and reveals the world’s vastness. Forays into falling snow or falling stars punctuate winter’s dictate to stay home and enter the deep, internal places of the imagination. It’s a time to stay warm and tell stories.

Vermont winter recedes into spring incrementally, and looking out for those early signs is a lesson in acute observation, a necessary practice for good writing. Long before the crocus and daffodil bloom, scattered pine seeds litter the decaying snow and jumping snow fleas announce the onset of spring. Spring is the first whiff of a thaw, a red tinge at the tips of the maples, and the sweet smell of sap rising in a cloud of steam.

Spring can last a long time in the north. It’s an easy time of year to lose patience. One warm day can seduce a hardy gardener into planting too soon, just as it’s easy to submit a typescript before it’s ready. Seasonal warmth is often spurned by snow squalls and frost; premature submissions yield rejection. Spring is also a meager moment, when the hairy roots from the cellar and the hoary food in the freezer has lost all appeal. The slow-cooked stews of winter now taste mealy and dull, but there’s not much to choose from that’s fresh. Even the woolens and fleece that comforted us through winter appear dowdy; wearing them, we itch with fatigue. By the time the daffodils bloom, I’m ready to shed all things winter, move on to new projects. Green washes across the field like an incoming tide, and I plunge into the garden, forgetting for a moment, that each seed I plant is as much about next winter as it is about the winter just passed.

We eat the first spinach as if quenching a great thirst, greedy for the harvest. But ready greens quickly become the norm, and in no time, we’re slaves to the produce that must be harvested, blanched and frozen, pickled or canned against the next year’s cold. But every activity that feeds my family also feeds the writer in me.

Summer is swimming weather – and dunking into the cold river is a great way to wash off the hot work that summer brings, like slaughtering the chicks that arrived in early May and have grown into 6-pound roasters, or weeding the onions or picking berries under the summer sun. Summers seem luxurious in part because on hot, humid days, we’re rendered limp and survival is a matter of inactivity in the shade, nursing lemonade – or beer. The warmth, the leafy trees, the spaciousness of daylight – all these add to the general sense of well-being that comes from being able to walk outside barefoot and from the freedom of feeding the fire. Living in Vermont has given me double vision: I can gaze across the meadow absorbing infinite shades of green while simultaneously seeing the monochrome of winter that was and will be. Accepting the cycles and contrasts of nature is an essential to living in Vermont.

Autumn is always a relief. It’s a season filled with purpose, and the cool weather ends the lassitude of sultry summer. With winter’s deadline approaching, it’s time to finish stacking cordwood, replace screens with storm windows, put snow tires on the car – and return to work. Something about chill mornings makes it easier to concentrate until mid-day, when the crickets sing summer’s ending. Again, there’s the contradiction of the hardwoods’ leaves bursting into flaming beauty only to announce their own death. Tourists flock to see the spectacle of fall foliage; I gorge on the crisp apples that accompany the season; at home, we start cooking slow, complicated, dishes and spending more time reading after dinner.

The natural beauty of the northern forest and Vermont’s pastoral landscape provide me with the seasonal changes, practical skills, and ample metaphor to live and write here. It’s against this backdrop of the seasons and the purposefulness of living according the rhythm of Vermont’s seasons that I have found my sense of place, but it is Vermont’s history and culture that provide the social setting for my fiction.

Vermonters have a well-deserved reputation for rugged individuality coupled with remarkable tolerance. I credit these two traits to Vermont’s sparse population, where geographical isolation requires people to be self-sufficient and to rely on one another, both. This is no more a contradiction than overheating while snowshoeing in January, or plunging into an icy stream in the heat of July.

I’d been raised in the suburbs and moved to the city as a young adult, but neither place offered me the rootedness I craved. Like the Europeans who settled in Vermont beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, I moved here to escape the relative congestion of places further south. I moved to Vermont to live closer to the land, to pioneer my own place in the world, and to write in the quiet and spaciousness of seasons. Into the Wilderness is one of two novels I’ve set in Vermont, and the first to be published. It’s a story about finding a new home and a new love. Into the Wilderness is very much about my love for Vermont.

Deborah Lee Luskin is a writer by vocation and a Vermonter by choice. Into the Wilderness is her first published novel. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com

Want to write for The Writer’s Life blog? Drop us an email at books@hercircleezine.com.

Related posts: