James A. Zoller

In Wyoming, where I was born in 1948, snow did not fall.  It rode in on the wind, stinging our faces when we walked to school and pushing us homeward after.  On the weather side of the house, snow piled up to the windows in wind-shaped curves.  The far side of the house was often bare to the ground.  Both side proved fantastic as playgrounds for bother adventurers when we could tolerate the cold.

Horizontal snowfall is one indelible relic of my early years.  The other is the pang of ambivalence born of silhouettes in the long sunsets.  To the east, figures and faces appeared burnished in the last light from over the mountains.  To the west, all figures were black shapes.

When we moved to New Hampshire in 1958, I discovered that snow could fall at leisure, straight down, that it could sometimes be wet enough to soak through snow-clothes out-of-doors, that is fell on and around the house in rough uniformity.  Our snow adventures changed.  Sunsets changed too.  For the most part they disappeared.  Trees, which grew everywhere without extraordinary nurturing, blocked the sun’s going down from roughly mid-afternoon, so I got out of the habit of looking for sun lingering on the horizon.

I married a girl from Maine when we were still in college.  For a dozen years, while we started our family, we were unrooted.  Thirteen moves in eleven years:  New Hampshire to California to New Hampshire to Virginia to New Hampshire to upstate New York to New Hampshire to the Genesee River valley in western New York a quarter century ago.  Now our four children have grown up and are leaving for other places.  Our first grandchildren call us from opposite directions.

Through this life time of rootedness and chaos we have learned a great deal about people and how they grow, about place and journey, about busyness and quiet, about trouble and God’s love, about learning and helping other to learn, about solitude and community, about who we are and who God wants us to be.  We have learned to regard the future with hope and anticipation, the past with laughter and forgiveness, and the present with energy.     

When I first spoke of my desire to be a writer as a ten year old, I could not have imagined a life to go with that desire.  If I had imagined a writer’s life, it would not have been the life I have lived.  Where would I have gone and what would I have done as a writer if I had followed a blueprint of my own design?  The only thing I can say for certain is that the life I might have imagined or planned would have been a poorer life.  I could never have imagined a life this good, this full, this promising – and a long apprenticeship that has helped me gradually to become a good writer, a useful writer, a poet of both place and experience.

Left of my own devices, the snows of my early years would have fostered complaint.  And the pale sunsets of my New Hampshire years would have signified loss.  No, the life I have been given is far better.  We are too far, for my taste, from the Rocky Mountains and from the rocky coast of Maine.  But on good days this little settlement on the Genesee River is not just a good place to be, it is spectacular.