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August Fragrance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My car stunk of shit when I arrived in Vermont’s capital city Friday afternoon, the debris from an enormous manure spreader I’d passed on a dirt road in Calais jammed in the undercarriage. Add to that, the fat stalk of garlic I’d nabbed from the school’s garden. I’d tugged it out to see how near (or late) to picking it was, and the pearly head, beneath the crumbling dirt I’d thumbed off, smelled so fragrantly delicious I decided to bring it home for dinner. Manure, garlic, and someone’s running shoes left in the backseat.

This past month, fierce thunderstorms have deluged us, and our piece of Vermont fluctuates between sodden and freshly-dried, smelling of wild blackberry vines and the pine bark mulch I gleaned from the town garage. Yesterday afternoon, my weeding interrupted, I read Adam Gopnik’s line in his article about Buddhism in The New Yorker – “…the things we cherish inevitably change and rot…” – which is likely the entire, unvarnished sum of human suffering.

The kids complained about the co-mixture of odors in the car – naturally. And, inevitably, I laughed off those complaints. Even with this early morning rain, I think we’ll swim today.

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More Midsummer, Memories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the crimson-hot July sultriness downtown yesterday, standing on a sidewalk, I flashbacked to what my parents used to call with enthusiasm “being on the road.” For years, we trekked from New Hampshire to humid Ohio to visit the anticipated happiness of cousins, and often far across the Mississippi, spending weeks in nylon tents and cooking canned corn over campfires.

I picked up that thread through much of my adulthood, crossing over from the backseat to the steering wheel. As a kid, of course, meshed in with my siblings, the primary concerns revolved around swimming possibilities and how good a campsite we were going to score.

The landscape from the driver’s seat looks mighty different. Navigation ranks right at the top of my list, something I never would have considered as a kid. Life on the road, I believed, would always get us from here to there. But maybe there’s a real element of truth there, too.

Our road has landed us here, on a dead end street, in a house whose property is bounded by lilacs on two sides. Last night, into dusk, I pulled out the deep weeds along these bushes, listening to the girls laughing about a game they had made up on the trampoline with four deflating soccer balls. We’ve put away the atlas for now, and traded in the scent of fresh asphalt for black soil, damp with early falling dew.

stream in summertime—
this joy of wading across
with sandals in hand

– Buson

 

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Growing Girls

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not that many years ago, the enormous trunk of my old Volvo held a stash of gritty plastic buckets and shovels all summer, tucked to one side, opposite spare oil quarts and a yellow jug of coolant: well-used childhood possessions.

This beach trip our family is entirely without sand toys, although we’ve been to numerous beaches, and even created castles with our hands and this fine red sand, with smooth stones and dried seaweed. I am likely the only one in our family who remembers those sand toys.

Here’s what we do now: on a chilly morning yesterday, the older daughter filled out a college math assessment on-line. At a particularly knotty problem, she looked at me. My own adolescence of function and cosecant reared up before me. I could feel myself teetering on a edge, before I said simply, Call your uncle if you want help with that one…. There’s only so much I can do, and cosecant no longer falls into my skills.

Which blended in perfectly with Jeffrey Lent’s beautiful new novel, Before We Sleep, about a daughter growing up – and much, much more.

There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense.

– Jeffrey Lent

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Photo by James Dailey

Oh, Joy!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about taxes.

On the street, I see young mothers everywhere, babes cradled in arms, or kicking their tiny heels in strollers. A young man intently mows the State House lawn. I stand on the wide porch of The Pavilion, a warm wind tugging hair into my mouth, as I plot changes in my life.

An old woman walks down the street with two shirtless teenage boys. All three lick ice cream cones.

Collective good will. Collective promise of spring in all her tender green beauty.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

– Yosa Buson

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Primordial Ooze

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

If there’s one overarching image for springtime in rural Vermont, mud might be it.

With this rain, we’re deep in the season now, rutted roads and marshes of mud surrounding the house, bleeding up through melting snow. Come, come, bring us the woodland trilliums and spring beauties.

Restacking my fallen woodpile in the shed, assessing what remains, I find a hard-used outgrown child’s scooter, the green ball from our croquet set, a valuable cache of birch bark I’d stashed for kindling, and the center row of wood that was mud-covered when I’d stacked it.

The firewood had been delivered on a sunny August afternoon by a young woodcutter who dumped it in piles around the shed. A quarreling neighbor, in a fit of pique, had used his tractor to shove one of my piles into the mud. Now, that neighbor’s moved on. I lifted a piece of wood and banged it against the woodshed, loosening the dried mud.

How’s that for a literary metaphor in one piece of maple? The craziness of human relations, the sullying of sacred hearth, metamorphosis of mud, and that spinning cycle of change and unending Becoming.

Spring is not a season of Hallmark pastels in my world, but tiny treasures of crocuses  and snowdrops, the memory of my teenage daughter as she stepped out on the porch when the young woodman arrived that August afternoon. She was cooking dinner and carried a clove of garlic and a sharp knife. Welcome, she said to woodcutter, with her wide smile. We’re glad to see you.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

– Alan Watts

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Free Stuff

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Freezing rain last night. An acquaintance from years past walks up the icy driveway this morning to inquire about an old claw foot bathtub. We talk for precisely three minutes about one of the most difficult problems I’m facing now. Three minutes, tops. And yet, somehow, that’s all I need. In a better frame of mind, I’ll return the favor to someone else.

It may be that we have lost our ability to hold a blazing coal, to move unfettered through time, to walk on water, because we have been taught that such things have to be earned; we should deserve them; we must be qualified. We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift. But a child rejoices in presents!

Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water

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