parenting

Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT, #7

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My friend down the road emails a complaint regarding the break in my signs of spring project — because there isn’t any! she writes.

True, snow returned yesterday. Enormous, lacy flakes that would have been beautiful December — say — rather than April. It’s spring, all right, but spring is a very lengthy season in Vermont. For those two decades I sugared, through an awful lot of cold and sleet and the terrible early March when 70º temperatures ruined that year’s season and a chunk of our year’s income, the word persistence has gradually evolved in my way of thinking to patience.

Every year, although I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, I somehow have this mistaken notion spring will be brief and brilliant. But autumn is gradual, too, the light at that end of the year bit by bit dwindling before it disappears.

Hidden beneath that coverlet of snow, my garlic I’m sure is beginning to stretch and prod in its lightless place. This morning, the sky bends toward blue. Here’s this sign of spring: light.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

— Rumi

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Hardwick, VT, Sign of Spring #6

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. kid skis on snow and field.

Easter afternoon, we skied on snow slushy in open areas, in the woods icy and pine-needle-strewn, pausing to breathe after the vigorous workout. Little streams ran along the trail. My friend remarked on the understory greening as our skis scraped along.

At the top of Elinor’s Hill, we stood for a moment, deciding which way to travel, and I remembered the winter our friend skiing alone fell on this long hill, breaking his leg, and lay on the snow, waiting. Now, in the warmth, we skied without gloves, my daughters sillily lying in the middle of the trail, dramatically waving their skis over their heads. Easter, and no one else was around, save for a few stray folks.

Later, I spoke with these friends, two thousand long miles away, and I realized they must have called us when we stood in the snow and open field at the top of that field, remarking, Remember when….?

The snow still claims more than it doesn’t. Later that night, under a nearly full moon, my daughter returned from a moonlight walk, exclaiming at the cold.

Buying leeks
and walking home
under the bare trees.

— Buson

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Craftsbury, Vermont

 

Hardwick Sign of Spring #3

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A dozen turkey vultures circled overhead, spiraling on wind currents, silently following us on a walk. They’re back, my daughter noted.

A day of serious wet: cold rain, rivers running high with melt-off, black mud thawing.

We walked in no particular hurry, talking, my daughter awkward in her sister’s too-large boots, pausing to study the vultures circling low, their wing feathers black against the clouds. As our path turned, the circling birds followed us.

I’m fascinated by the landscape around us of junco and robin, hawk and vulture, vegetable garden and cemetery. My daughter zipped her jacket against the raw spring. Those vultures are following us, she said. Creepy.

To pretend that all is right with the world when it is not, to use art as a pair of rose-colored glasses to distort the reality of the world, to paint over the agonies of our time, is to misuse art. Any light and life, joy and ecstasy we can derive from art in our time must be paid for with the admission that this joy and goodness comes to us out of the barbarous darkness all around us.

— David Budbill in Yvonne Daley, Vermont Writers: a State of Mind

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Hardwick, VT, Sign of Spring #2

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sign of spring, I suppose, is small-talking with the other parents on a slushy soccer field, watching our kids in a nordic ski relay. Sure, that’s spring in Vermont, borne with the usual good-humor of nordic ski families, and well compensated by an eclectic and unbelievably delicious potluck. At how many potlucks do you find a wedge of homemade sheep’s milk blue cheese?

But a more heartening sign is breaking out the lawn chairs for afternoon in plein air studying. Note snow.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

— Rumi

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Barre, VT, Courthouse

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A retired Barre police officer sat beside me while I was waiting outside a courtroom in the Washington County Criminal Court, and he mentioned he thought he knew my former husband. He suggested that clearly I didn’t know my former husband all that well, and he told me some wrongdoings he knew my former spouse had committed. I protested that the man he referred to wasn’t my former husband.

The officer persisted. Listening, I began to wonder how much I knew about anyone, really, in the end. In my bag, I had a copy of Janet Malcolm’s biography of Sylvia Path, The Silent Woman, which I had read with enormous interest many years ago, right before I was married. In this book, Ted Hughes is quoted as writing, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.”

I knew when I entered that courtroom, again, as I had before, that I would need to relinquish some of the darkest facts of my life. Just the facts, ma’am, and yet the facts seem so much. The reality is, of course, none of us own the facts of our lives. We’re hardly discrete entities, spreading into each others’ lives messily as we do.

Just the facts. Granite photos, the trio of a judicial panel, bailiff, what must be an endless of stream of adults coming and going through the security at the door. Outside, robins sang in the maples behind the courthouse. I’d been there so frequently, I knew the way out of the one-way streets.

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A $5 Rainbow-Bright Kickball

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My cheerful kids returned yesterday with a bright pink blow-up beach ball they found on a back road. The older daughter, driving, had pulled over, so the 12-year-old and her friend ran back along the ice-rutted road for the garish pink ball. At home, they mended the gash with silver duct tape.

Vermont’s March palette lies heavy on variations of white — the pureness of fresh snow, the near-gray of thawed ice refrozen with dirt particles — dark green pine, the black of gravel roads where the town crew has strewn sand, the crimson patches on redwing blackbirds.

Full of spring energy with the lengthy daylight after dinner, the girls and I walked around the neighborhood. The younger splashed through a puddle and noted she stepped over the moon’s reflection. I bought the girls a $5 kickball, striped in rainbow colors. Deep into twilight, so cold we kept blowing on our bare hands, the girls and I played four-square, that brilliantly-colored ball bouncing through the thickening dusk.

And then the girls took the ball inside and played in her bedroom, confusing the cats.

Here’s the artwork from the newest issue of Taproot, with an essay I wrote about our house. The artist’s creation is a remarkable likeness, both in architecture and emotion, although the blossom season hasn’t yet returned…..

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