*This* Grasshopper

This Grasshopper is named for a Mary Oliver poem I adore. It’s a gorgeous poem, one I have nearly memorized since first seeing it on the wall of a dorm room my freshman fall. Perhaps you know it:

I suspect this question of what to do with one’s wild and precious life hits each of us with a similar potency. Does anyone ever feel full confidence stepping away from the doors they close? I’ve long known that I wanted to move back to my hometown, which is not a bustling metropolis teeming with glamorous jobs and more cultural events than one can pack into a calendar, but rather a humble place of community, connection, and beautiful landscapes. Even so, it was a harder decision than one might expect, this moving back, one I perceived to be tied up with my aspirations, my values, and with limitations I risked setting for my life. 

Years ago, my friend Anne and I spent a late night sharing the most beautiful scenes we had ever seen with each other. She told me about manning the dawn shift on a boat deep in the ocean without light pollution of any kind, of watching the very first rays of sun rise over the horizon. I, in turn, told her about cool summer mornings in Geneseo and the way the nighttime mist gathers in the low places in my parents’ pony pasture, as if our home is a hilltop castle with a moat of fog.

This morning, Michael and I woke up to find ourselves enshrouded in the mist of one of those mornings. Our new farm is a mile and a half from the house where I grew up, down in the nook of the Genesee River, where (we are learning) the summer mist gathers thickly. I’m living within two miles of the home where I was raised, but I’m discovering new grasshoppers daily: how immersive the bird sounds are so close to the woods, the way the breeze blows through our open windows in the evenings, the high notes of the tree frogs singing. 

Moving home to Geneseo was my answer to Mary Oliver’s question. What was it I planned to do with my one wild and precious life? Well, Mary, I planned to see my grandparents at least once a week, to raise my children to play in creeks and make forts in the woods and be called to dinner with the ring of a bell from the porch, to hike to my great-aunt’s for cocktails and my parents’ for Sunday breakfasts, to buy great binoculars and study my late grandmother’s old bird books, to welcome beloved guests from big cities and accept their offerings of urban delicacies before ushering them to a bedroom made up with line-dried sheets. It is not just any grasshopper I want to study each day, but this particular grasshopper, this place of observation and awe, of the people and places I love so well yet can always know better. 

It’s a funny thing, naming something you haven’t gotten to know yet. The name for this newsletter was something I decided fairly quickly, but it has come to fit. This little writing project is a space for me to reflect on the enormous and complicated simple things in my life, and to hear a bit about yours in return.  

We’re fielding a lot of questions about naming these days. Michael and I don’t know much at all about this baby who will be joining us in the next few weeks. We know that it responds to certain voices, that it bobs around in my womb like a little bat with its head down and its back against my left side, that it will poke at our hands if we touch it softly around bedtime. We say we’re down to a short list of names for boys and a short list of names for girls, but the reality is that we pitch new names nearly every day. We’ve never named someone before, after all. More to the point, there is no name in any language that could capture the hope and tenderness we feel for this small, mysterious being. There is no poem, no person, no place, no flower whose name can evoke enough. We will settle, then, on something with some newness and some tradition, something that sounds nice spoken aloud, something we hope hasn’t started mushrooming in popularity since the last time we checked the charts. And then we will do all we can to teach this little person how to pay attention, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through these fields and how to be tender with a grasshopper: this grasshopper, whichever one might find itself in our child’s path.

This portrait of me was taken by my generous and talented cousin, Lauren Wadsworth. You can see her work on her website, by following her on Instagram, or by stopping by The Gallery in the Valley on Main Street, Geneseo.