homesteading

sometime in late March, collage

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughters and I place bets on when the snow in the garden will completely disappear. The stakes? Yet to be determined….

End of March: either the dusty or snowy or rainy season in Vermont. The back roads are miserable, rutted-mud driving. In this season, I no longer take the narrow dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais, that long slow rise (or fall) above #10 Pond. Instead, I drive along paved Route 100, road of my past years. Over the highways hang clouds of dry road sand and salt, rising like our Vermont-esque version of insect clouds. The roads wind between the mountains and along the rivers — ancient traveling paths I follow on my way to that long-ago sea of Lake Champlain.

I hang the bedsheets to dry on the clothesline, snapping in the breeze, teach my daughter to play euchre. We read in the evenings. I’m awake before dawn, drinking coffee and talking to the cats and wondering if I’m heading down the crazy woman path…. I decide to paint my bedroom blue.

Evenings, the light lingers in the sky now. I show where I intend to plant two oak trees this spring. With a bit of a shock, my 13-year-old realizes she’ll never climb these trees as a child. Why plant them? she asks. I give her the only answer I know: Because.

This morning, I heard a dove cooing.

You that lose nothing
Know nothing.

— W. S. Merwin

Wide Open Windows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hallelujah! What I believed had permanently departed my patch of Vermont returned: sun! Warmth!

Yesterday afternoon while I’m holed up in the Montpelier library, working, my daughter texts me, asking if she can open the house windows. Please? It’s hot.

At home, we open the upstairs glassed-in porch too. Her cat presses against a window screen, entranced by — what is that? — singing chickadees?!

My daughter asks, Why are you so happy? Is it spring?

I answer, It’s enough, right now.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being…

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Spring”

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Reprieve

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At the hardware store in town, the woman ringing up my chicken feed asks if I’m going out partying for New Year’s Eve.

Are you kidding me? I blurt out. Then I apologize and ask about her plans. I like these hardware store folks, with their humor, their can-do willingness to solve my piddling problems — a clogged bathtub drain, a stuck lamp switch.

The cold’s broken for December’s last day. Before dusk, I follow the raccoon tracks from my compost down the snow-crusty hillside, wondering where this creature lives.

Another of my daughter’s homemade calendars folded up and put away, the day-to-day record of our lives — work schedules and friends and dentist appointments — the stuff of our lives.

For this year? Stay solvent. Paint the kitchen gold, my bedroom turquoise. Swim in the Atlantic with my kids. Follow wild tracks and fill the creative well.

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.

— Hayden Carruth

 

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Putting It All Together…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

No earthshaking moment, but satisfying nonetheless, last night I cast off the second sleeve on the sweater I’m knitting for my daughter, and she slipped the blue sweater over her head.

Verdict? Unravel the hem and lengthen. But this will fit; I can see it now. Whether she wears this or not, my knitting eyes and fingers, a little math, some decent yarn, are pulling together.

I love knitting because it’s functional — especially in Vermont — creative and satisfying, because it’s portable, comforting when alone, a source of interest when together, because fellow knitters are often decent and curious people. Knitting never ends. Sure, eventually I’ll tie in the loose threads of this sweater, decide the length will do, and pass it along to my daughter. She will wear it; if not, I will. The cornflower blue yarn will hold dirt. The sleeves will fray. I’ll repair with a silver needle and scrap yarn. Maybe eventually her beloved cats will claim this sweater, nestling and purring.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

― Alan Watts

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Breakfast with a Stranger

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On this Thanksgiving morning, a dream of our house burning wakes me. In the haze of my dream, I’m first insistent my daughters leave, their two cats found and taken to the neighbors. My laptop. Then there’s an odd pause, where I’m alone in the house, as if what next? what else?

A former sugarmaker who burned countless cords of wood on a 14′ long arch — wood stove user — and firewoman to seven enormous burn piles when I left our old house — I’m intimately familiar with the curl and lick of fire, of its wicked smartness.

I wake, happy to be in our warm house, one cat hungrily biting my bare toes, the other nuzzling my cheek, my daughters sleeping. Downstairs, a pecan pie waits, uncut, on the kitchen table.

Yesterday, I met an incredibly accomplished writer in the Hardwick diner, and here’s a snippet from our conversation over coffee and tea and the diner’s savory shredded hashbrowns.

Despite all the irritating experiences around Thanksgiving that happens when families get together, there’s also moments when we’re all sitting together and eating together and someone is telling a story, and you think how great it is that we’re all together hearing these stories together, and then living stories together….

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