homesteading

Yes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I moved to Vermont, Madeleine Kunin was governor — a particular point of pride for the state. Many years later, as a young mother, I took my small daughter to hear Kunin read at the packed Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick.

Afterward, standing outside on the sidewalk, a female acquaintance remarked unhappily that Kunin emphasized the need for child care and greater economic opportunities for women. I’ve often wondered what my acquaintance wanted instead — this woman whose own family economics were provided by her husband’s salary. Putting bread on our children’s table is neither masculine nor feminine, but the power to determine some tenor of the shape of our lives.

Last night, I heard Kunin, at age 85, speak again — how surprisingly funny and how gracious. At the end, an audience member asked the expected question: what do you think of the world now? Kunin stepped back from the podium and raised her hands, meeting this question with just a fraction of silence, before she answered. Be engaged. Listen. Converse. Be persistent.

At the end, she amended her answer: Make trouble.

Poor privilege white men. Their stranglehold on power is slowly being loosened.

— Madeleine Kunin

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Photo by Molly S.

Tasty Treats

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A very first food my daughters ate — or gummed, more precisely — was applesauce and then bits of skinless apples, tiny juice-beading triangles.

One of my daughters — who, I can’t recall, younger, older, maybe both — named this cut-up fruit appleys. Our house had a diminutive child’s kitchen; now on our front porch, the well-used stove and sink look so small. In that wooden kitchen, the girls worked mightily with a small blue frying pan, a white colander, and a collection of found things — miniature jam jars, colored wooden beads, petite bottles in the shape of maple leaves and hearts I filled with our maple syrup and sold as wedding favors.

Every now and then, tidying up, I’d find a silver measuring cup sourced from my kitchen, with the dried remains of tiny apple triangles.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones….

— Mary Oliver

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Late Night Rambles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughters and I often wonder where our cat Acer sleeps at night. His brother takes turns tucking among our feet, or curling on our faces.

In the middle of the other night, I walked into our upstairs glassed-in porch, looking for a book. On the little couch there, Acer sprawled, wide awake in the moonlight. I bent down and rubbed his velvety pink nose, this little cat who needed his own private room.

Here’s a few lines from the late master, Andre Dubus.

So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers…. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth…. in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan…. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

— Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels

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Chance Encounter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Walking home from the library last night, I met a friend on the way, who walked with me up the hill, through the cemetery, and into our back yard, the half moon overhead watchful.

My friend’s decades-long job had recently ended, and she was painting the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink. Laughing, we exchanged painting stories, and I confessed my intention to turn the downstairs of my house into sunflower hues.

Over my barn, not far above the wooded horizon, hazy red Mars kept company with the pearly moon. My 13-year-old, walking barefoot over the dewy grass, came to say hello and remarked how near the planet seemed.

Oh mysteries of twilight, when the impossible seems possible.

Holding the umbrella,
The mother is behind.
The autumn rain.

— Nakamura Teijo

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chicken door

Fat Garden

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A monarch butterfly followed me to the post office. Since the store closed last year, the village is quiet — only a garage and the post office remain open, and the post office keeps merely afternoon hours. Save for the elementary school, the town feels emptied out.

With no one around, I walked with the butterfly along the dirt road, until the winged beauty turned and fluttered over the weeds along the stream.

September: with the weather still warm, the frogs sang last night. Just before dusk, the girls and I picked a mountain — and then a mountain more — of tomatoes from the garden. More to put up. The younger daughter keeps track, satisfied, with our harvest.

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Gold, On a Rainy September Morning

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Good lord, what a mystery this single sunflower holds — and how my creative attempts pale in comparison. This photo is a mere image — the beauty itself fell from a 10′ stalk, pecked where head joined stalk by birds. I picked it up from the grass and carried it into the house into both hands.

I first planted sunflowers many years ago, when I was a very young woman, after I admired a single enormous sunflower in a woman’s garden. The face of the sunflower was so heavy it hung down. I stood beneath this great bloom of pure gold, staring up. That sunflower’s size and beauty was improbable. How, from a single seed, from soil and water and light, did such a beauty emerge?

And yet, evidence to the contrary.

What a forest of sunflowers this year. Weeding in the garden, I hear the leaves rustling in the wind, like a canopy in a forest.

I don’t think there is any other solution than constantly coming to terms with the past, and learning from it.

—  Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

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