Vermont

Rain

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Rain fell yesterday morning. I stood in my dusty garden, thinking, Bring it on.

Halfway through the morning, the light held the thin green translucence, like we moved in a piece of sea glass that was alive.

All afternoon in my library, people wandered by, singly and in pairs — nothing more. Most had tidied up, wearing sundresses and ironed shirts — all with masks — as if swinging by the library was an outing. Which, perhaps, it likely was. We spoke with the same underlying uncertainy and loneliness, and a tender care with each other.

At the very end, I loaded up two bags for a 10-year-old hungry for books — my good deed for the day.

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June

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Hello, roses!

The day I bought this house, I realized roses bloomed beneath the dining room windows. Of all the things I scrutinized when house buying — location and purchase price and paint — I never considered these old, overgrown rose bushes. So early in the season, Japanese beetles haven’t yet set in with their hunger. The blossoms emit the sweetest fragrance, drifting around the back of the house.

Hello, gorgeous and ineffable summer.

There will never be more of summer
than there is now.

— Alex Dimitrov

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/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

This morning, the world smells so good. With my coffee cup, I walk around the dewy garden in my bare feet. There’s weeding to be done and more sowing of seeds and plants. We’re in a long dry patch, and I’d love some rain. Every night, I water patches of my garden.

But this morning, for this moment, how good this all smells, the crickets singing, and this whole day spreading before us.

I recently remembered that, when I was a girl, I wanted to live on a farm with a blackberry thicket. I didn’t particularly want a cow, but how I lusted after fruit trees and garden rows and overgrown lilacs. Behind our house now, the wild blackberries are profuse with blossoms near that fox den.

The pandemic continues. The virus spreads. But, for now, we’re home and outside — and it’s glorious summer.

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu/Caspian Lake

 

Yes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving home from work, I see my daughter and her friend walking through town, talking. I pull over, and they run across the road. We stand there for a little while, talking. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this at all. They tell me a little about kicking around a soccer ball that morning, and remark how hot the day has suddenly become.

They finish their walk, then we all go swimming.

These days, I sometimes think of my grandparents, whose lives were marked by the depression. As a kid, when we went out to eat with my grandmother, she’d swipe ketchup packets, because, she said, you never knew when you might need it.

For these teens, the pandemic will mark their lives, too. Someday, I imagine, they’ll be saying, remember when high school stopped, and we all stayed home?

They won’t forget. Sleepovers and cozy breakfast in the kitchen are on permanent hiatus, but summer is back. Sitting on the bank, watching them swim, I’m happy for just for this moment — sunlight and pollen-flecked water, croaking bullfrogs in the weeds, laughter — a little more childhood yet to come.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together…

― Tracy Kidder

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu

Day by Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In library land — as if the masks aren’t enough — I keep reminding myself that the world isn’t the same. I’m not supposed to say, hey, kick off your shoes and relax. Lie down and read if you want.

In my library, an older woman comes in wearing a mask, looking for a locally written book that apparently no one can find. Maybe she has a copy. Maybe someone else in town has a copy. Do I? I don’t, but I manage to find one copy in a library in southern Vermont. That library, of course, appears to be closed.

A young couple arrives next, excited to print out a copy of their nursery license.

The afternoon passes in fits and starts. While I tackle the backlog of details, I listen to The Daily podcast about George Floyd’s funeral. A friend wanders in and leans against my desk, listening, too. By the end, we’re both weeping. I close my laptop and ask how her life is going. What’s happening? We stand apart, talking.

Shortly before I lock up for the night and head home, a woman and her daughter appear. The daughter shyly tells me, I’m in second grade now.

Goodness! I say.

She’s lost a front tooth.

We move outside, into the breeze and sunlight. I listen to her mother who’s working and in school. While I marvel at how she’s kept what appears to me an impossible life tougher, I keep looking at her little girl, holding a stack of library books. Step by step, I think.

I’ve seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.

— Rev. Al Sharpton

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Early June

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

June is the time to remember why it’s good to live in Vermont. These little bits — fresh greens from the garden, twilights hazy with lilac blossoms, a breeze through the open windows at night, swimming in water so cold your elbows hurt.

Happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

— Jane Kenyon
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