Vermont

This Old Book

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Walking with my friend through town, we find a cache of free, reeking-of-basement-mold books — a strange collection of Zen and psychoanalysis and car repair that might have come from my own  jammed shelves.

I pull out a skinny book with no title on its cover, only a black-and-white photograph of a long-haired girl in a white dress on a pile of rubble. An early edition of Brautigan’s The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster.

For the rest of our walk, I hold the book loosely in one hand, past the the old granite cutting sheds, houses well-tended and houses abandoned, through the wet woods and blossoming bloodroot and a hillside of trout lilies just beginning to open. I keep thinking about my second book I’m finishing now, how I’m lacing together the connections within that story: a stolen jar of farmers market cash, a dead dog, a torn crimson scarf.

That night, reading the book, I discover a bookmark jammed in the book’s pages, from the Bedford, NH, bookstore of my childhood.

In a Cafe

I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.

 

— Richard Brautigan

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Necessary Flowers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these last few days, in my corner of Vermont, we’ve experienced snow, raw cold, heavy rain this morning — and now rushing radiant sunlight.

Suddenly, as if reluctant to waste a moment, little blossoms around our house have opened — some I planted, the crocuses and grape hyacinth — but all through the flowerbeds and behind the compost are tiny blue flowers — Scilla siberica. 

When I was a novice gardener, I only planted vegetables, with some crazy notion that my labor should go solely towards what ends up on the dinner table.

This afternoon I see the pollinators are already busily working on these beautiful petals. Balance, balance.

If ‘dead’ matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, ‘but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.’

— Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

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Glory of the Snow, Hardwick, Vermont

And A Little More Snow — What?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Talking to my mother on the phone yesterday afternoon, I noticed through the window the heavy rain had bits of white. Snow? The white disappeared.

This morning, three inches of white spread over the porch and garden, the neighbors’ roofs and the cemetery stones and — yes — those little blue wildflowers whose names we haven’t yet determined.

I was barefoot and sweating in the garden on Saturday: Vermont.

Years ago, when I first moved to a steep backroad, I had the snow tires removed mid-April — how I regretted that. A neighbor cautioned me, like some strange commandment, Never take off your snow tires before May. Subconsciously, her advice must have rooted deeply. Maybe I should be grateful for her advice, but maybe the snow will melt this morning, too.

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A Gift of Sticks, Maybe

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a fantastic use of Facebook: a friend and colleague offers hydrangeas — come thin my patch, dig and carry.

I’ve known this woman longer than I’ve had children, so our conversation, while we dig, winds in and out of family and bits of gossip about the local library scene.

We pack the back of my little silver Toyota with boxes of sticks and fibrous roots, black crumbles of soil. I cradle a fat earthworm in one palm while we talk, then gently return this creature to damp earth. The early, misty morning is fragrant with the unmistakable scent of opened-up soil.

In the afternoon, at home, I plant two long rows of these hydrangeas,  separated by a path down to the woods.

My girls are skeptical of planting what they see as sticks. Really?

Act of faith. And not that extreme. These sticks will grow.

We are suspicious of grace. We are afraid of the very lavishness of the gift.

— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water

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Coltsfoot by Molly S.

Z39.50

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On a rainy day, I’m at a cataloging class at the state library. Through the open window, rain pours from the roof. I admire the library world for its insistence on precision and order, its intensely democratic approach, the unapologetic quest for knowledge and creativity.

In Vermont, numerous tiny one-woman libraries like my own hold the same democratic importance as the large city libraries. Such a complicated network laces this system together — like Z39.50, the mysterious (for me) way library systems speak to each other and exchange information.

Later in the morning, the rain stills. Through the open window, robin sing. The teacher pauses, says, Spring’s here, and waits for just a moment, a subtle acknowledgment of the beauty of communication.

The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.

— Albert Einstein

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A Word About the Garden: Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT, #10

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Robins land in my garden — how close these songbirds swoop to my hands curiously digging in leaf mulch for the first green bits of garlic, the sage greening at a few unlikely ends.

The garden at our former house spread enormously, surrounded by buckwheat field and forest, the woods spreading unbroken over Woodbury Mountain, territory of moose and black bear, bobcat. The songbirds, leery, remained at a distance. Always, at that house, I sensed a tension between domesticity and the wild, my garden the sometimes porous buffer between human and animal life.

Here, on a sandy moraine with a view of the river, the sweetening bones of Hardwick’s passed souls lying six feet buried beyond the row of lilacs, cultivating this patch of earth will be a different variation of home and wild. We haven’t moved far, but cardinals nest here; at our former house, we had seen only a single, stray, lost red bird.

April showers have fallen for days, and I expect rain to fall for days more. The girls complain, but I think, Let it fall… Water our soil, the knotty clumps of root, deeply, well.

The leaves are fresh after the rain,
The air is cool and clear,
The sun is shining warm again,
The sparrows hopping in the lane
Are brisk and full of cheer…
It is a happy thing, I say,
To be alive on such a day.

— James Stephens, “April Showers”

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