THE DRIVEWAY

by Angela Jean Talbert

2012 by Angela J.Talbert

In a small town in Northern Vermont there is a long driveway that winds uphill for nearly a mile before it spills into a clearing where a house perches with its cluster of barns and sheds gathered around it. The driveway is the lone gatekeeper to the house above, a stony portal that changes wildly with the seasons. Nature blends with man made elements to create characters with passionate reactions. The driveway tries to devour you, delights you, falls down around you and buries you in snow. As each season is a different setting, each object becomes a different character, and we find that we also change. We become the people the seasons demand us to be, we are what they offer us. The snow banks melt, and the mile-long logging road we call The Driveway turns into a shallow river. The coltsfoot blooms along its banks, leafless and golden harbingers of the suns return. In the gulley along the side another stream flows; they feed each other. The peepers haunt the woods in the east and we leave the windows open just to hear them flirt with each other. The night is filled with their tiny grunts and cries. The air smells like melting ice, wet snow and grass, it feels like a cold lake, swirling with currents of warmth, a whiff and whisper of southern wind. The grass in the yard is flattened and yellow-brown. Everything is naked, bare of leaf and snow, shivering, yet flushed from the inside. When we stay for a while, walking or playing twilight games, the house becomes over-hot in comparison to the cool, sweet air, and we feel like weve just jumped out of a cold lake on a hot day; like our clothes are fresh from the dryer. The chimney smokes tentatively, feeling the sway of authority melting into the sun. In June, the driveway is a dry bed and the dust hides in pockets in the gravel. The stream has mostly dried up but we hear the faint trickle, walking along the road, waiting for water. The fields buzz with a million bugs, crickets that sometimes come inside and hide in cracks where we find them. Wild strawberries start to ripen in the field, and we stroke the plants from the bottom up so the jagged, tri-lobed leaves fold back and expose the fruit. By the end of a few hours, our hands are transparent pinkred and weve picked only a few cups of berries. After the strawberries there are red raspberries, black raspberries, and thimbleberries and we spend hours picking them too, with the additional consequence of small red scratches and tiny thorns in our hands. The house roasts from outside in, sunlight pouring in the hugh windows and drowning us all in the living room. At night, we sit on stumps around the campfire, faces glowing and shadows demanding attention. We are one-half smoldering toes and one-half frosted back side. In September, the driveway starts to fall all over us in crimson and gold. Little bits of ice appear at the edges of puddles, the driveway clenches its stomach, feeling the forceful heaves of winter coming on. The stream grows shiny with perspiration and decay. The dew clings longer to the grass, the light is distant and reluctant to warm us. Everything is brown and crispy, ripe and falling all over themselves. Mushrooms pop up, fed by cool rain, dew and darkness. We can smell the woods composting. The wet leaves compressing into musty blankets for seeds. We watch the hills smolder for a month or more, and hardly notice when they become ash grey. The windmill sighs. The

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THE DRIVEWAY
woodstove coughs and gets it throat scraped with a steel brush. As we welcome it, it gains courage, and dares to smoke out in the open. When winter comes, the driveway collects snow around its sides, donning a downy winter oat. We often walk home and sled to the cars, using the snow banks as bumpers. The stream is wearing ice-lace and snow. It smells frozen and faintly smoky. The little square black stove chews peacefully at logs, purring its contentment and projecting its well-being into the living room; the house roasts slowly from the inside out. The chimneys breath freezes in the sky and the dryer spews frothy steam that condenses against the house and drips down. The driveway and its stream, the air and the noises and smell it earned, the animals, our actions, the woodstove and chimney and the way the house felt, these are the things that told us what the seasons were, and the things through which we marked their changing. Their varying persons as seamless and yet unique, blending in cyclic rhythms of year after year.

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