Vermont

Sun and Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A Sunday of skipping the news, opening the house windows, hanging out the laundry. A brilliantly sunny day — when I put my shovel into the garden, pull weeds, and empty buckets of manure.

All afternoon, we’re in the sunlight, the grass around the garden emerald. On the other side of my garden fence, families walk in the cemetery — teens with parents, little kids running ahead, and dogs on leashes. The neighbors’ three-year-old chases last fall’s dead leaves, blowing in the merest breeze.

The girls make garlic knots for dinner, and we eat them with carrot sticks, talking, talking.

I know there’s a lesson here — about slowing down, staying home, putting your hands in the earth — a lesson that would have been much harder had the day sleeted. Sleet, too, is possible in Vermont’s May. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the day’s rejuvenation, this bright spot to carry us along.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

— Ted Kooser

IMG_7728.jpg

Marvelous May

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Vermont May is a fairytale world — brilliant spring flowers, black manure, green grass — and, this year, the strange lurking demon of coronavirus.

I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, and yet every year, spring never ceases to amaze me with its beauty. Birdsong, a forest floor sprinkled with pink and white spring beauties, gold daffodils. The lilacs are budding — again, this year, we will have lilacs, their fragrance sweetly scented around our house.

The neighbors with their three little boys are home, always home, blowing bubbles to us. I sow pea seeds, pull leaves from the rose beds. Afterward, my arms are covered with scratches as though I have fought a lion. The woodchucks multiply around us. I check my garden fence.

And yet, we seem stuck in some weird pause. Strangely, instead of texting my brother about summer hiking or Maine plans, we text back and forth about trailheads closed, unemployment, printing money.

Day by day, we text. Seed by seed, I sow my garden.

O the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

IMG_7718.jpg

Home — where we are

Spring Beauties

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To combat my lousy mood, my daughter suggests I go for a run. It would be better for everyone if you did, she says.

In week whatever, on day whatever, I run through town, seeing only two older women with masks, walking the standard 6 feet apart, and a few teenagers on bikes. There’s no one else I’ve seen for weeks, it seems. Eerily, I wonder if this is what the end of the world feels like.

In the woods behind the high school, I run up through the sugarbush, where moss greens up the forest floor in places. Then, around a bend, I suddenly see spring beauties — a whole forest field of these tiny, perfect white and pink blossoms.

Later, returning home to play a few more rounds of Uno, I know the run has done its magic. To that field of enchantment, where no one else perhaps has walked that day, I think — thank you, little wildflowers and daughter.

IMG_7687

Kitchen office

Slanted World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In the evening, we walk on a narrow footpath through a cedar forest where I’ve never been. In a worn-down kind of fog, short of sleep, I abruptly realize the trees are somewhat slanted. Through the forest, the dwindling light highlights scattered bit of white birch bark.

Ending, we descend backwards through a trail I’ve walked up many times. From this angle, coming down along a hillside, we hear a running stream. Save for the three of us, we see no one else in the town forest.

Someday, of this strange time, I’ll remember the unusual kindness and intimacy of people towards each other. That day, taking photos of our friends’ farm, my friend walked out of her greenhouse, and we stood apart in the road, just talking, sharing pieces of what’s going on in our lives. She asked my daughters’ plans, and what’s going on with them.

In other days, maybe we would have hugged. But over and over, in this time, I find myself exchanging only words — what we’re afraid of, what we’re struggling with, sometimes threads and stories of our past — who we’ve been and who we might want to be again.

It’s a fragile time, these days. We’ll remember these endless, daily walks, too, threading through our lives, stitching us together. Take heart, friends. Day by day.

IMG_7667

Peepers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Across the cemetery from where we live, the teenagers have moved out into a tent. They’re cocooning out the coronavirus.

Not such a bad idea, I think.

My daughter, to keep herself amused while I’m working, creates a scrapbook of her friends, taking her time pasting in gold numbers and colored bits of paper.

I’ve lost track of days, of weeks; we’re somewhere in April, and that’s about the best I can do. Some days my older daughter disappears to work; some days my younger daughter disappears for a virtual version of school.

I keep on working. The squill blooms. The peepers sing.

60847277244__CBAC3152-F2CF-4803-9FAC-16CE58FD8DC2

 

 

 

Wildlife

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

How many weeks are we into the Stay Home order? Thursday, I let my daughter cut my hair in the kitchen. Delighted, she made her first snip in the back and said, Whoops.

What does it matter, anyway? It’s just hair.

In the evenings, we walk up a nearby dirt road, seeking the sunset. Hardly anyone is out — a few passing pickups, often with a driver wearing a mask. Nearly every night, we see deer in the hayfields that are greening, bit by bit.

Today, kayaking, we saw a bald eagle in a white pine. We paused, watching as the eagle dove over the shallow end, flashing its enormous wingspan above a family of swimming ducks, then swept back into the tree.

One thing I’ll remember most about this time — and perhaps most fondly — are the endless walks. No complaints, because why bother?  This is where we are now.

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

― Jane Hirshfield

IMG_7627