Rapture

April 14, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Everyone was outside today. In all her golden beauty, Spring returned. I left my library door open, with a few patrons in charge, and walked down the dirt road to post a sign about state reps coming to visit the library in a few weeks.

The melodies of blackbirds followed me.

Rapture, as near as can be…. all afternoon, my nearly 14-year-old daughter and I were out, in a day so suddenly hot. Yes, she’s a teen and wonders why I gnaw the edge of my thumb, there’s blue paint on the edge of my t-shirt, and is possible that I’ve shrunk? I say the word necklace with the wrong intonation of vowel. The knees of my jeans are stained, possibly with coffee.

And yet, on this particular day, I can see clearly how strange a creature I am in her eyes — who is this strange woman and how did she birth me? Likewise, I wonder, who is this miraculous not-girl and not-woman, and how did I birth her?

For the moment, though, there’s this afternoon, there’s just the two of us — as much rapture as I’ll likely ever deserve in this life.

We must risk delight….
We must admit there will be music despite
everything.

— Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”

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.

Heron’s Return

April 11, 2019April 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The snow’s back, keeping the population in Hardwick predictably low.

This time of year is both ugly and tantalizing — the trash bleeding up, the tree buds fattening, robins chittering. And yet, the snow lies ubiquitous.

What else would we complain about? a friend asks at a middle school concert. We sit in the very back row — she and her husband, myself and my knitting I take out of my bag, but no further. Quickly, we’re laughing, giggling, silly, admiring our middle school daughters, intrigued at their age and maybe a little afraid — so new, so new; everything about adolescence shrieks of heading over the nest’s carefully mudded wall.

Often, I think of Robert Frost’s line: In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. So it does. But, like anyone, I’d prefer life to go on better, rather than worse. So, perhaps, grousing about the weather is nothing.

Despite the snow, the lakes have opened up. The herons are back, their great wings cutting across the gray sky.

What I’m thinking of….

14 Years Ago… On a Hot Day…

April 6, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nearly 14 years ago, my friend and I drove to Burlington to shop for a baby carseat. I was pregnant; she was pregnant. In the backseat, our two 6-year-olds chattered and ate snacks. Somewhere in the midst of our errands in Burlington, we discovered it was Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day.

What’s 14 years in the scope of human history? A nearly nothing. But for us, two baby girls, one death, five jobs, one book, a rabbit, two cats, one divorce, and a whole lot of living later — 14 might as well be a trip around the moon and back.

No free cones on this trip. We returned with four boxes of Narcan, oodles of info, and even more talk….

Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.

— Louise Glück

Forcing Spring

April 4, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Just before we leave for the evening, the girls run out and cut some lilacs branches. On our kitchen table, forsythia sticks from a friend soak up water in a jar, their yellow blossoms half-open.

Since my girls were little, our house’s doors were a porous membrane between wild Vermont around us and our domestic space: moss, pebbles, fungus, bark…., tempered off in the snowy winters.

In Vermont, April, not March, is the season of in like a lion, out like a lamb. All night long, wind rushed around our house, the official month of opening the windows.

… truth, which I believe to be both unchanging and at the core of all art. I think the essential thing about truth is that it must be experienced, and in order to be experienced, I think it has to appear nakedly, not woven into inherited notions.

—Karl Ove Knausgaard, So Much Longing In So Little Space: the Art of Edvard Munch

Birdsong, Mortality

March 30, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Where the fields have opened up, robins flock in the trees, singing the melodies that always remind me of spring’s running water — icy cold and much welcomed, harbingers of green. These are the first flocks we’ve seen this year, and we’re doing what I’ve done with this daughter since she was a little one on my back — we’re searching out robins, these beloved spring birds.

Same activity, different backroad. We’ve moved towns and houses, and so tinged through all of this cusp-of-adolescence for this girl is both the headiness of new experiences threaded through with loss. Impermanence, I remind myself over and over, sometimes daily, is the ticket price for all of us, even these little palm-sized birdies, the fat earthworms they’re devouring, and the stones in the fields, gradually giving up their edges to the elements.

We stop for a moment and talk about the dirt road behind our boots, the shape of its crown in the middle. Birdsong, wind, running streams. The fields are so wide open here we glimpse a herd of deer at the distant crest, just a quicksilver moment as they rush across the ridge and vanish again.

My daughter, humoring me, hungry for her late dinner, asks me, Are you actually talking to those robins?

Oh, that thin scrim between mind, body, landscape….