gardening

Child’s Footprint

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Stuck in traffic yesterday, overdressed in the afternoon’s high temps as I’d left the house in the dewy cool of morning, I was lost, looking for a meet-up place with my kids. Surrounded by big box stores jam-packed with plastic stuff, that territory is one of my least favorite of Vermont roadsides.

Years ago, I delivered a 5-gallon bucket of our maple syrup every month to a bakery in that area, and afterwards, I let my daughter, who was two, run in the weedy field behind a strip mall, flanked at the far end by condominiums. By chance, I passed that still-undeveloped field and pulled over.

All day, a  white tree fluff had floated around my office windows, a drifting June version of snow. At that field, the white gossamer yet drifted through the air, random bits, here and there. Not that many years ago, this expanse was farm field, with the mountains rising like a blue dream to the east and the Winooski River flowing nearby.

The day was quite hot, and I thought of my own garden’s tomatoes and melons, thirsty on their vine, and I knew I wouldn’t return to water barefoot until twilight.

I had turned back towards the asphalt and the intersections of noisy traffic, when I saw a small footprint in the cracked earth. Crouching, I rubbed my fingers through its chalky dust, wondering what child had run through this field when it was muddy. How I wished that child had found some hidden treasures, secrets just for her.

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

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The Earth Herself

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the garden, on this chilly, almost autumn-esque day, I pulled lettuce from a fattening line, admiring the myriad green. So much of writing is spinning the stuff of language into this three-dimensional world we inhabit. Our world is so amazingly complex, jammed ceaselessly with variations of color and light, that language at times seems a poor descriptor.

I always remind myself, begin at the beginning, with the very first word. Setting aside my basket of lovely leaves, my fingers crumbled dirt into my palm. Dirt? Or the earth itself, but a few grains of this celestial, spinning orb? Or Thomas Wolfe’s “loamy soil”? Or is this broken sod? Tenacious clay?

I held the handful near my face: black earth, lavish enough to devour.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air–these things will never change.

– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

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Woodbury, Vermont

Vinegar & the Lupine Metaphor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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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Butterfly Visitors

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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

 

Reasons to Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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