LA ÑAPA

In Dominican Spanish la ñapa refers to "the little extra" added on at the end. Just when you thought you'd gotten all that you would get, along comes your ñapa, like a baker's dozen, with one more kiss, one more pastelito, one more mango at the mercado.

March Renga

Often people ask me how a Caribbean woman can stand living in Vermont. They don't mean Vermont in the summer, when the rolling green hills and emerald mountains are actually reminiscent of the lush, mountainous interior of the island where we have our farm project, Alta Gracia. They don't mean the autumn when the maples are blazing, and the woods turn King-Midas gold, and who can complain. They mean winter in Vermont, which begins right after Thanksgiving and can linger into mid April.

Actually, those long winters are a wonderful time to write. The snowy fields outside remind me of the blank page I've got to fill with life.

But come March, after three months of cold weather, my spirits start to flag.

So last March, I decided that rather than speed through the month, counting off days before mid April, I would actually slow down by writing a haiku a day. Some days, I actually wrote two, as one tiny haiku was not enough to cover the wonders I'd seen. By the end of the month, I had a renga, a series of linked haiku. And, an added plus, my spirits were brighter for having stopped to pay attention to each and every day in March.

So, here are the thirty-one (plus two) haiku I wrote, a renga for anyone who needs a boost right about now, either because winter has gone on far too long in your neck of the woods or in the deep snowfields of your soul. If you desperately need digging out from under, read the whole renga all the way through. Or try the slow approach, and read one a day, savoring it, and maybe writing one of your own?

March