How Does Your Garden Grow?

June 4, 2019 / 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

The Daughters’ Truths

May 30, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My nearly 14-year-old daughter plays country music in the car, edgily looking at me from the side of her eyes. The girls’ father sends them a text that he honors their truths. What’s anyone’s truth, anyway, I wonder, as I listen to my daughters.

Maybe dreaming with her best friend about learning to drive, messing around on the water with kayaks and a pizza-shaped floatie, adoration of her two cats. A reticent girl with big dreams.

That’s all truth, as I much I know it. Not words, not ideas, not ideology — only what’s around us, what we’re living, how this reticent girl with big dreams is growing.

Let life be like music.

— Langston Hughes

The Black Line Within a Tulip

May 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While the big fad out there is to number things and experiences — the 10 best things to do with your whining toddler — and important stuff like that, one of my minor goals for the summer is to just soak up experiences as a kind of antidote to the ravages of last winter. By that, I mean the subzero days and nights of blowing snow.

In our house, we’re not going to count the days of summer, either. Why put a number on that?

Saturday morning, the younger sister sees the first of the red tulips we planted last fall has opened. She runs back in the house and demands her sister come out, and look down, into the flower. With the day ahead of us, come hell or high water, we stand there, the three of us, for a long moment, gazing down.

Brief Water Interlude

May 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the rain, the girls pushed the kayaks into the water. The wind blew up, and I sat on the shore, my plan to lie on the grass and read foiled. Later, I went down to the end of the pond and sat at the edge while the rain washed through and sunlight sprinkled the water. The inky black head of a loon surfaced.

The girls paddled over to me, laughing. A heron cut across the cloudy sky. The peepers chorused busily. A boy appeared with his fishing pole.

This cold May: every day, a little more green, a bit more Technicolor, antidote to That Winter…

…here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines.

— Ryōkan

Shape of May

May 7, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I always imagine Medieval life as so much field around all those storied castles. In May, the Vermont landscape is wide open. The forest aren’t leafed out yet. The bushes are sticks without greenery. The shape of the land is there for the looking.

The comparison ends there, I know. Contemporary Vermont isn’t bound by class or infused with religion. No holy temples are built here, save what each family builds for themselves.

But there’s still all this land, fallow, ready for seed. All this potential, of yet another growing year.

Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems.

— Basho

Bearing Up

April 13, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I’m nearly sure to lose our household bet of what date the garden will be freed of snow — our variation of “ice out” on the lakes. I’ve picked Monday, April 15, both tax day and the anniversary of Lincoln’s death.

April’s the season of running water in Vermont, the carrying off of snow to Lake Champlain. Nature’s licked us — once again proving the futility of competition, industrial revolution notwithstanding.

On our evening walk up a nearby dirt road, snowmelt reveals a winter’s worth of Bud light cans. We see three deer, maple trees stitching together the sky and the great hayfields brown and drying in the spring breezes. Spring, going about its business.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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