Vermont

Small Town Vermont Connections

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Rain falls heavily not long after dawn, and I close the windows, the cats in the upstairs hallway watching me silently. The rain pounds on the metal roof. Too hot to sleep in the night, too noisy now — if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

Three years divorced, I’m back in court, seeking child support — maybe just one payment? — but he’s not there. He’s elsewhere, traveling, his pockets full of under-the-table cash. In the afternoon, I’m in another Vermont county, in another courthouse, for another hearing, having worked in a library between the two, made an interview phone call on a bench beneath two enormous maple trees. Tell me about your farm program for kids and please ignore the ambulance siren whizzing down the street. Hot, hot, I’m barefoot, my hand sweating on my notebook.

In the courthouse — through a metal detector again — I wash my face in the women’s room and admire the high ceiling, the marble tiles. This courthouse — like the one in Orleans County where I’ve also been — were built with such craft, such pride, such respect and belief in law.

While rain crashes on my roof this morning, I remember that courtroom — those who are paid to be there, and those who aren’t — how desire in its myriad forms snakes through all of us. The public defender and I are introduced. A few years back, he was an attorney on a wind tower protest case involving people I knew. He doesn’t look at any of us. Instead, he gathers his files, says, That was in my other lifetime, and leaves. I’ll likely never know, but I can’t help but wonder, What’s his story?….

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention…

— Mary Oliver

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Cicada Songs

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I find an empty cicada shell beneath a leaf on an oak tree I planted this spring.

That line sums up midsummer, this lush and gorgeous summer. I planted that tree from my bare root order, a mere stick with a frizz of roots. Maybe, my kids said. And yet these trees thrive.

stillness–
sinking into the rocks,
cicadas’ cry

— Basho

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Molly and Fluffy

Thistles, Hemp, Coreopsis

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Rain moves in; the heat moves out. I get up from my desk and put on a long-sleeved shirt. My older daughter and I — just the two of us — make pesto and spread it over a pizza with broccoli she slices. She looks at the pizza before she bakes it and says, Garden pizza.

Swimming holds no appeal. Instead, in the evening, we walk up a long dirt road heading out of Hardwick. I follow her into an overgrown pasture. She hands me her phone and has me photograph her in a field of Scottish thistles. She wades shoulder-deep into the prickles and purple flowers, and the memory of traipsing through forests and meadows behind her as a girl child returns to me. Those summers she and her best friends were obsessed with false hellebore as an ingredient for soup-making in her outdoor kitchen. Don’t mind the snails, she tells me. Let’s keep going.

As here’s a few lines from Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound I kept thinking about, as I drove to Middlebury on back roads, wondering if all these new fields of hemp might positively help to reshape Vermont’s economy….

A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members. This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered. A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy.

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Cultivated and wild in my garden. Photo by Molly S.

A Creamy Moon…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

… rose over the hillside. Like a surprise, the moon simply appeared.

All day long it often seems, I go about moving things — words, dishes, weeds. Laundry from the line to the basket. My own sometimes tired bones. Then the moon, rising infinitely serene and wise.

After a late soccer game, the girls sat at table outside, the air abruptly cooling as the sun began to sink. The girls kept eating strawberries, shortcake, whipped cream. A forkful dropped on the table.

There you are, my daughter said to the moon, laughing. A hello from her to this heavenly sphere. July.

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White Mountains. Hiking with my brother. Photo by Jess.

Same, Same

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The weeds lining the pathway beginning my evening walk are shoulder-high now, wet last night after the afternoon and evening downpour. We chatter this year about ticks, ticks, and Lyme disease, and at soccer games, the parents wonder when did we become afraid to sit on the grass?

Nonetheless, I push through the wet grass while the kids are home, playing Yahtzee or laughing about something or someone, possibly me. Midsummer, gloriously hot, weedy, chaotic. When I dig out the Japanese beetles burrowed into the pink roses, the flowers yield their heavenly fragrance. That’s summer in Vermont — both hungry pest and the ineffable delicacy of roses.

There are other birds too, visitors we hear only
in the summertime, but it’s the screened door slamming
that is the definition of summer for me.

— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”

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Photo by Molly S.

 

How Does Your Garden Grow?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.

My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.

What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?

Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.

Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.

— Basho

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