summer

Robin Survival?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

This is now the sixth year we’ve lived in this house. I count these years by June 15th, the date I signed for the house, two days before my oldest graduated from high school, the date the sellers took us out to lunch and I stared through the diner window, wondering if buying this house was a good idea.

On this sixth year, a robin family has joined us, building what appears to be a well-made nest, strands of straw hanging from roof rafter. The nest is beneath the porch roof, covered from the weather. The nest is so close to our house that the mother robin flies away whenever we open the back door. My daughters and I wonder, Why not choose a rafter in the barn? A good old-fashioned tree limb?

The robins’ destiny is, of course, neither here nor there. We didn’t make the nest, and whether this family survives is largely beyond my purview. Certainly, my curious housecats will not harm these young ones. Yet I’m curious as my cats, wondering what drove this family to our porch.

June. We are surrounded by a hungry world that eats wee robins. I’m rooting for these young ones, hoping they’ll pull through. Come what may.

Left the Shoes on the Back Porch…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day of brilliant sunshine, rain moves in during the night. My daughters’ cats, in the screened windows, wake me with their hungry mewing, against the background chorus of steady rainfall and birdsong.

Arriving home from work, I see my daughters have been swimming that afternoon, their hair in damp lanks around their shoulders.

As if in an instant, summer has unrolled in Vermont — verdant and colorful — while simultaneously the woods darken mysteriously with foliage.

90 days, poet David Budbill wrote. Frost-freeze — maybe — for 90 days in Vermont. Hallelujah.

Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.

— Buson

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Delight of the Dandelion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This is May’s golden heart, when blooming coltsfoot crosses over with dandelion blossoms. Years ago, when my daughter was four, her preschool was in a white clapboard Unitarian Church on a lake frozen solid white all winter, in summers sparkling blue. We canoed far out into the lake’s center, or swam at the sandy shore. To get there, we traveled along a back road flanked on either side by enormous hayfields. For a just a brief period, the flawless green was transformed into rolling gold. Endless bouquets and braided crowns. Her four-year-old spring was fragrant with the slightly acrid milk of dandelion stalks.

I remembered her childhood while writing poems today with third and fourth graders. What kind of things fill a Vermont child’s spring? Tulips, a cardinal, water balloon fights on bicycles. Now that’s worth writing a poem about.

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Sandwich board outside The Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont

 

On the Road

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Every now and then, I find myself (generally with my kids) in some space of time, either waiting for this particular thing or that, often under duress, and generally beside some road.

Is this just American life? That so much of it takes place beside the paved (or in Vermont the dirt) road? These spaces of time usually catch me by surprise. Today, with no knitting, the library books left at home, unwilling to enter any store and shop, I lay on the medium’s grass, beneath scraggly southern pines I had never noticed before, although I’ve driven by this part of Vermont – Tafts Corner – for years.

I had the oddest memory being four-years-old. Traveling with my family, my sister and I had run on a lawn one evening beneath a sprinkler. A desert child then, the grass was a fragrant anomaly, a curiosity beneath small bare feet.

Driving back home this afternoon, I kept looking at the spiny ridges of Mt. Mansfield, longing to be off this asphalt road, footloose, following the song of the hermit thrush.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

– Mark Twain

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Williston, Vermont

10,000 Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My math-loving daughter, seeing a page scrawled in my handwriting, asked me what this 10,000 things is all about. I could say infinite multiplicity; I could say maya or phenomena. Or how about something that make might more sense, like September 5th in all its richly earthly Vermont splendor, the seed buds of jewelweed popping between your fingers and the little black crickets singing you to sleep. Watermelon juice on your chin and your sister’s long fingers brushing your hair. Today. Us.

The banana tree
blown by winds pours raindrops
into the bucket

–– Basho

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Summer Woods

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving with my daughter this afternoon, she remarked that time seemed out-of-whack — like the day had already progressed to after-dinner time, when really it was late afternoon.  I told her the longest day of the year is nearly here.  Rain, this summer, has been a steady and weighty companion.

In the woods, the greenery is profuse, the ground sodden mud, everything suffused with a moist verdancy.  Mulching in the garden this afternoon, I was quickly wet, but, working, I warmed quickly, and my garden world was rich with scents:  wet rock, rotting compost, blossoms.

Any visitor to Vermont, throw out that postcard image of red barn with cupola, Holsteins, babbling brook. Go deep into the woods, into the darkest, most concealed and forebidden place, and lay your hands on what’s there.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

–– Robert Frost

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