Necessary Flowers

May 1, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these last few days, in my corner of Vermont, we’ve experienced snow, raw cold, heavy rain this morning — and now rushing radiant sunlight.

Suddenly, as if reluctant to waste a moment, little blossoms around our house have opened — some I planted, the crocuses and grape hyacinth — but all through the flowerbeds and behind the compost are tiny blue flowers — Scilla siberica.

When I was a novice gardener, I only planted vegetables, with some crazy notion that my labor should go solely towards what ends up on the dinner table.

This afternoon I see the pollinators are already busily working on these beautiful petals. Balance, balance.

If ‘dead’ matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, ‘but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.’

— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Glory of the Snow, Hardwick, Vermont

And A Little More Snow — What?

April 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Talking to my mother on the phone yesterday afternoon, I noticed through the window the heavy rain had bits of white. Snow? The white disappeared.

This morning, three inches of white spread over the porch and garden, the neighbors’ roofs and the cemetery stones and — yes — those little blue wildflowers whose names we haven’t yet determined.

I was barefoot and sweating in the garden on Saturday: Vermont.

Years ago, when I first moved to a steep backroad, I had the snow tires removed mid-April — how I regretted that. A neighbor cautioned me, like some strange commandment, Never take off your snow tires before May. Subconsciously, her advice must have rooted deeply. Maybe I should be grateful for her advice, but maybe the snow will melt this morning, too.

A Gift of Sticks, Maybe

April 29, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a fantastic use of Facebook: a friend and colleague offers hydrangeas — come thin my patch, dig and carry.

I’ve known this woman longer than I’ve had children, so our conversation, while we dig, winds in and out of family and bits of gossip about the local library scene.

We pack the back of my little silver Toyota with boxes of sticks and fibrous roots, black crumbles of soil. I cradle a fat earthworm in one palm while we talk, then gently return this creature to damp earth. The early, misty morning is fragrant with the unmistakable scent of opened-up soil.

In the afternoon, at home, I plant two long rows of these hydrangeas, separated by a path down to the woods.

My girls are skeptical of planting what they see as sticks. Really?

Act of faith. And not that extreme. These sticks will grow.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water

Coltsfoot by Molly S.

Z39.50

April 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On a rainy day, I’m at a cataloging class at the state library. Through the open window, rain pours from the roof. I admire the library world for its insistence on precision and order, its intensely democratic approach, the unapologetic quest for knowledge and creativity.

In Vermont, numerous tiny one-woman libraries like my own hold the same democratic importance as the large city libraries. Such a complicated network laces this system together — like Z39.50, the mysterious (for me) way library systems speak to each other and exchange information.

Later in the morning, the rain stills. Through the open window, robin sing. The teacher pauses, says, Spring’s here, and waits for just a moment, a subtle acknowledgment of the beauty of communication.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.

— Albert Einstein

Community Bonding

April 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!

I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….

Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?

Why not?

A single day of rain has pushed up green.

As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….

This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —

— Issa

And Then We Receive This Day

April 24, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As if the air is transformed into honey, the afternoon moves languorously. I prop open the library door — an everyday event in the summer — but fresh now, the parents and I leaning in the open doorway. I’ve been rearranging, and my arms are full of children’s books about the moon landing and the Middle Ages.

The children in short sleeves play in the mud, even the big boys in the sandbox, and tromp over what remains of the icy patches of snow. Crocuses bloom against the library.

A man who lives in town and helped build the library, years ago, returns books and pauses to talk, telling us about a close call he had with a tree falling on his shoulder — a lightening, averted brush with disaster. He’s alive and well on this fine April day.

He tells one of the littlest boys that he married the boys’ parents, as a Justice of the Peace. The boy is serious, amazed. Could his parents ever have been not married? Not together?

The afternoon wanders along, as if out of time, suspended in sunlight. Spring.