Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Vinegar & the Lupine Metaphor

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My teenage daughter asked me if I knew Christ, dying on the cross, had been given vinegar to drink. Why? she asks, mystified.

Why is it that these profound questions so frequently appear when I am about bled out of energy? Could I not write a veritable book on this subject? Our kitchen holds five vinegars – apple cider, balsamic, white, rice wine, an herb infusion – and we use it for preserving, cooking, cleaning. But soak a spongeful and press it your lips? My daughters are horrified at the image.

I offer what my children consider an unsatisfactory answer: the antidote to drinking sour wine is wild lupines. I remind them of the children’s book they both loved so dearly, Miss Rumphius. Could this be the weekend’s challenge, in a realm beyond folding laundry? Amend that: could this be the existential challenge?

You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

– Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphius

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Where You Can Find Us

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Late last night, cleaning up my desk for the morning’s work, I found a flip book my daughter had made, with scraps of white paper from my recycling box and stapled together. On its cover, she had written in pencil Where You Might Find Me.

The first page began with a band of rainbows stars drawn in colored pencil – the Milky Way – followed by the classic solar system with orbiting planets, and then the azure and emerald orb of Earth. Her maps decreased to graphite renditions of North American, the United States, New England, Vermont, Washington County, and finally the town of Woodbury.

At the very end, I anticipated her typical drawing of our house, with a second floor balcony and the cupola that yet remains unfinished, the front door flanked by tiger lilies. Instead, she drew the Woodbury Schoolhouse, smoke cheerfully curling from its matching chimneys.

I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the Union, and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.

– Calvin Coolidge

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Yin Yang, or Giving Rise To Complements

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Here’s a simple thing which took me a ridiculously long time to learn: that famous yin yang symbol isn’t particularly about a dot of white in a tear of black or vice versa. Instead, the black and white are all smeared together.

As an American woman, for years I perceived the world as opposites: you’re in the house or out, it’s light or dark, we’re dead or alive. Through gardening, I began to perceive growth demands decay, and then I carried that notion to writing: creation depends on destruction. The universe is intricately braided with myriad shades of being, color, sound….. There is no one single thing separate and opposed to the whole other rest of the world.

So when my daughter comes with me on a drizzly and rainy afternoon in the woods behind our house, I’m grateful this the childhood world she knows, the place she is rightfully at home in.

….These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders….

– Tao Te Ching

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Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont

 

Onamonapia

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This afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter walked around the house saying 0namonapia,  over and over, desperately trying to drive her sister nuts, by repeating this beautiful word, richly rolling off her tongue.

Years ago I used to nurse this child at the farmers market where my then-husband and I sold maple syrup. One afternoon, I nursed my baby on the grass behind our tent, leaning up against a pole. A couple sat down somewhat near me, in the shade beneath a poplar tree. Eating, they casually spoke in a slavic language I didn’t recognize. I generally knew they were talking about the day, but I couldn’t really piece together much more than that.

My baby fell sleep, and I pulled a blanket over her soft little limbs, then leaned my head back against the pole and closed my eyes. While the couple kept eating and talking, I listened to their words, this beautiful language I couldn’t precisely understand, but I knew the language tied them together.

Surely, 0namonapia relays much more than cluck or moo. This is a word whose meaning can stretch to entire languages: an audible beauty that makes us human.

 

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

– Edgar Allen Poe

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sweater weather in June Vermont

 

Butterfly Visitors

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Finally bursting into growth this year, our lilac bush is covered with swallowtail butterflies. All around us, the pollinators steadily work: hummingbird, bee, wasp. The butterflies are uniquely magical, though, wholly silent, almost tame enough to touch my hand near the fragrant blossoms. Then, like a shimmering cloud of colored papers, they lift off one-by-one and disappear, upward, into the apple tree’s canopy.

My daughter’s favorite scene in My Neighbor Totoro is when little Mei lies sleeping on the Totoro in the forest, while butterflies flicker and rise. In that same spirit, the book I’m writing holds spring azures near its end, these exquisitely beautiful creatures who appear mistakenly fragile, yet are graced with flight and fertility, mightily powerful.

….Come often to us (butterflies), fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

– William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

Alive Within: Generosity

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A number of years ago, I was leaving a lake after a day of swimming with my daughters, and the gas tank fell out of my ancient Saab. A friend, also leaving the lake with his two young children, stopped to help. We put all the children in his Subaru, including my baby in her carseat, and he drove to a hardware store where we purchased straps, returned to my car, and then he tied up the tank. The gas tank was still secured in that way, when I gave the car to someone else.

The following summer, my baby had an allergic reaction at their pond, necessitating a terrifying ride to the ER. While it seemed my life was always in crisis around these folks, their barn, greenhouses, and farmhouse a few years later were incinerated by a gas explosion. That was in sugaring season, and one of the last things Kate had done in her kitchen was prepare a meal for my family, a gift during our arduous work season. She didn’t keep that meal for themselves; rather, she retained the presence of mind to have a mutual friend drive up the muddy road to our house the next day and deliver that homemade meal.

When I returned her dishes, with a meal I had made for her family, she exclaimed, “These are my things!” In that fire, she had lost nearly everything they owned.

The truth is, I think, that neither my life nor her life was so very far out of the ordinary; there’s undoubtedly differences in degrees and certainly in details, but all our lives are filled with some kind of traumas and miseries we would never willingly accept.

And yet we do.

Today, buying pepper plants at High Ledge Farm, their greenhouses filled with flourishing seedlings, their house beautifully rebuilt, I thought again of the time these folks took to be generous. May their gardens grow well this year.

There… was my answer for why the homeless guy outside Gillette gave me his lunch thirty years ago: just dead inside. It was the one thing that, poor as he was, he absolutely refused to be.

– Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

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Woodbury, Vermont