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Savor This

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

This morning, when I reached up into my younger daughter’s bunk to wake her, this sweet child of mine sleeping the just and untroubled sleep of the almost-ten-year-old, I glanced through the little window in her bunk and saw a profundity of apple blossoms. Ivory white with centers the crimson of newborn babes’ mouths.

I’ve seen this old tree before our house bear hundreds of apples, and then, last year, exactly six — I mean six — apples.  We ate what the deer left.

Robert Frost, poet premier of stony soil, a farmer who knew this hard earth as well as anyone, wrote these spring lines:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; 
And give us not to think so far away 
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here 
All simply in the springing of the year.

Wholly lacking sentimentality, Frost knew what lay behind, and, knowing that, knew the intimation of what was to come.  In these warm days, the smear of Vermont dirt I find on my child’s foot is a glad sign we are in the springing of this year.  The bees humming on the blossoms just outside my kitchen window and the peepers thrumming in the little pond are the chorus of spring, of insistent, urgent beauty, of this brief season of youthful revel.  The wise poet savors that.  The breeze blowing up even now will whisk these tender petals away.

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The Bull’s Battlefield

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Sunday, a day of lesser gardening and work, and hiking instead with my daughters.  We took a not-so-travelled trail on Mt. Mansfield, winding around a lovely lake before heading into a pleasant woods.

The trail was not overwhelmingly strenuous, ascending gradually through a narrow valley.  My younger daughter counted red trilliums, finally ceasing at 157.  As we kept climbing, she remarked there were at least half a million trilliums, which I concurred was more than likely, and then, after a moment, she thought there were two-thirds of 900 trilliums.  Older daughter turned around and demanded, Why do you have to keep talking about math?

Younger daughter:  Because I like math.

Although the year’s been relatively dry, we passed clear running streams and waterfalls, and near the lodge where we ate lunch, we walked by a series of muskrat ponds.

We saw almost no one.  Wildflowers were out in force; the wild apple trees along the trail’s beginning bloomed like there’s no tomorrow.

Hiking, I kept thinking of Hemingway’s bull.  How reluctant I am to confront a fierce, enormous animal, stomping in the dust, wild curls of steam snarling from its snout.  How much I would rather live in the ephemeral world of wildflowers.

And then, bending down to admire a spring beauty, I realized that bull is within me. Writer, I thought to myself:  you fool.  Where is the battlefield of this age-old unholy of holy wars?  Here I’ve been carrying it around with me all these years, in my rickety skeleton.

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Plant a Tree With Daughters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that a man had to plant a tree, fight a bull, write a book, and have a son.  Taking one enormous giant step away from the feminists’ ranting about Hemingway and his often not poplar notions of manhood and women, I’d like to acknowledge that these four tenets of advice are pretty much as salt-of-the-earth as I could imagine.

As my older daughter and I planted a tree this afternoon, we talked about Hemingway and how that advice might differ for women.  Have a daughter, we immediately agreed.

Fight a lady bull? my younger daughter suggested.

No, I insisted.  Fight a bull.  I wrote a book — not a lady book by any means.  Fight the bull you encounter, horns or not.  Plant the tree you must, wherever your soil lies.

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Mapping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

May, as opposed to November, brims with the joys of living in Vermont.  Oh, November’s okay, but May is exquisite — the apple blossom season — albeit a little fickle.  We’re not free of Jack Frost yet.

In school, my daughter was asked to envision a mental map of her world.  As maps — living with and without them — figure prominently in the novel I’m writing, this exercise set me thinking.  How would a mental map of the world for a Vermont ten-year-old differ from a child in Turkey?  Or say you are a Chilean miner?  Or a skydiver over Dubai?  How radically the topography (miles high or miles deep) of those worlds would differ.

The places we hold dear, a vernal pond or a child’s rope swing; the places we fear, the night’s blind country dark or the midnight territory of our own troubled heart; and the places we imagine and desire….. all these places are marked on our own unique maps in space, time, and memory.  November’s rainy days hold repetition, but these spring days are unfettered by similarity; the world’s busily growing.  These days, the map is not static.

Yet I like driving at night

in summer and in Vermont:

the brown road through the mist…

                                                                                 Hayden Carruth, The Cows at Night

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This Sweet Early Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Here’s some David Budbill lines on this spring evening:

… all this, this sweet

      early spring —

with no bugs at all, none, not a single one —

     this

clear, beautiful, and brief moment,

     this emptiness…

David more than generously read my novel a few years back, and he completely understood the book’s grittiness.  While he championed me, and did all he could to help me sell the book, he also insisted that I remain true to the book’s vision and in no way at all dilute the novel’s dark underbelly.  David Budbill seems to me a man who’s devoted his life to poetry, to pushing the depths and humor and sheer joy of poetry.

On this day, here’s my own handful of poetry, a few garden pebbles in my dirty palm.

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