Sydney Lea: The Yogurt Cure

I grow more and more reminiscent, it seems, though that’s a relative assessment. Like my old poetic hero Wordsworth, I opted for an elegiac tone very young in my writing career, to which I have allotted incalculable energy ever since. I can’t explain this nostalgic inclination. Although I know very well that many have endured much worse, it’s not as though my child- and early adulthood were uniformly delightful. I’m far more content as an old man than I was in younger years.

I’m often surprised by what triggers retrospection, but in this case the prompt is self-evident. My wife and I tended to our two youngest grandchildren, boys 7 and 4, for the weekend. The visit was exhausting even as it enchanted us, and as I watched their dad’s truck disappear around a bend in our dirt lane, the two kids in their booster seats, I got to thinking in a way growing children can make one do, about the velocity of hours, days, months, and so on. 

On this visit, the older brother spent a good deal of time battling his grandmother on the chessboard, but I suddenly recalled a day in his second year, when I was charged with watching him from the morning through lunchtime. This wasn’t much of a chore, partly because he always took a long nap in the forenoon. Having heard his soft calls from above, I put down the book I was reading, went upstairs, and lifted him from his little bed, astonished at how sunny-spirited he always was, even on waking from his naps.

He smiled at me as I held him in my arms, which I could do thanks be to grace. By that I acknowledge how huge a portion of pleasure has been delivered to me from somewhere, without my having done anything to earn it. I vowed, as always, to earn it as much as I could now, because somehow it made no sense on that bright day– the hard-edged clouds whiter than white above the mountaintops’ radiant winter shimmer– that I should be so indescribably blessed. 

Not that I hadn’t felt blessed in the same way countless times by his father and his father’s brothers and sisters and the boy’s five older cousins, by my marriage and treasured friendships, but that in every instance such abrupt awareness of my good fortune simply jolts me. It’s as intense as electric shock, though far less disconcerting.

Before the child woke up, I’d listened to the weather forecast for later in the day. That news made no sense, either, featuring thunder, for god’s sake, right there in deep winter. I heard the faux cheery voice of the radio weatherman calling for a “nasty rain,”which would doubtless destroy the snow-globe scene I beheld through a window.

What could I do, given the state of the world, but think of the planet’s impending ruin? Apocalyptic floods, wildfires, scorching heat waves, and horrid gales were more and more frequent, and humanity was ineluctably death-bound.

Or maybe not, I unreasonably thought, watching the toddler’s guileless smile again. I felt myself smile as well when he hopped from the sofa, little imp, and grabbed a bowl of yogurt his mother had left on the counter as she rushed off to work.  Before I could prevent him, he poured the stuff onto the bristly tail of the family’s late rescue dog, who looked like a wolf but was in fact a canine saint. The mutt began to lick the goo with obvious joy, and the child with equal joy broke into laughter, and I thought hope should trump despair. So I laughed too.

Copyright 2023 Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea’s many books include Seen From All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life (Green Writers Press, 2021). He was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015.