Running Away

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

James Joyce’s “The Dead” is one of my favorite short stories, with that remarkable line about falling snow general all over Ireland. In my corner of Vermont, these days, the sentiment generally is enough with the snow for this year. April: season of rain, of snow and ice and, somewhere, beneath all that, struggling green.

I stopped in at the Woodbury school, leaning against the foyer wall while a man who grew up on a farm in the area told me the red-winged blackbirds reminded him of childhood. When he snuck away from farm chores, he headed down to the creek where those dark birds with their signature crimson mark sang.

Ridiculously visually inclined, I rely too heavily on my vision: really, as all my photos attest, the landscape here is yet the monochrome of winter. I’m wrong about this, of course, although I won’t point to any sign of spring at my friend’s request. Too cruel, she says, when sleet falls.

And yet — dumping coffee grounds around blueberry plants, fingering their branches and imagining small, perfect white blossoms, I then close my eyes and listen to the birdsong all around, their rising, sweet melodies.

I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil…

— Louise Glück

IMG_1616.jpg

Woodbury, Vermont

Succor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was twenty-eight and living in a hunting camp with my husband, I read Ernie Hebert’s The Dogs of March. The building was heated — well, we attempted heating — with a barrel stove designed for coal. The little insulation in the walls had been gnawed to just about nothing by mice. But this isn’t a story about how young I was then, how naively starry-eyed for so very long, but my first introduction to that word. I was so innocent then I thought the word was out-of-place in that novel.

Much later, my daughter’s kindergarten teacher suggested families acquire the habit of repeating the same family walk, no matter the weather. We had already established this, and likely because my husband and I had walked all through our childhoods. Even now, in a different house, one of the first things the girls and I did — and unconsciously — was try different walks. Where’s a better view? A running creek?

Today, I realized one of our walks has been downtown Montpelier and around the state house — again, in every kind of weather — and in the enormous crowds at the 2017 women’s march.

Walking is succor, a lifting up and an assistance. A widening from the narrowness of ourselves, a reminder of sky above, the eternal steadiness of the earth beneath our feet. The robins nesting in the maples on the state house lawn. Nearly 13 summers ago, on hot July and August days, I nursed my baby beneath those maples while the 6-year-old ate cookies and ran barefoot on the grass.

One repeated the same old mistakes. Each of us has a blind spot in his thinking that defeats him time and again against all teaching and experience and pain.

— Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March

IMG_1602.jpg

Montpelier, VT, April 15

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”

IMG_1579

Sign of Spring, Hardwick, VT #9

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Come what may — more April snowflakes, cold rain, glittery frost in the weeds against the barn — in our corner of Vermont we’ve stepped across the line to spring.

Yesterday, in a chilly rain, my daughters and I peered beneath the pear trees and along the thicket of roses, now merely a brown tangle of prickly vines. But the earth reeked of thaw, of soil melting its cold frozen heart, releasing its mysteries of worm and grasping root.

Thaw begins not with warmth, but with the subtle gradations of less cold. And how darn good our earth smells, breathing.

Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.

— Buson

IMG_1576.jpg

Fox

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early morning, waking my daughter for school, I see a fox through her upstairs window, dashing across the lawn, darting between the trampoline and compost pile, and disappearing behind the apple tree, down into the honeysuckle.

It’s been a long while since I’ve seen a fox, one of these brushy-tailed beauties.

I remember years ago, having a prolonged discussion with my children’s father, in a car parked at the foot of our road, down by the river. We were there so long, verbally going around and around, that the dusk settled in. Three foxes appeared from the dim landscape, weaving around our car. We sat there, watching, until that family disappeared.

Even further back, my five-year-old and I saw a silvery fox one winter afternoon. I was driving home on our back road, and we stopped. The fox leaped on a high snowbank and sat there. The day was brilliantly sunny, full of sparkling fresh snow and cold. The fox was so beautiful we might have imagined her, had both of us not seen her.

IMG_1575.jpg

Still Chilly….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The week after my birthday, my daughters throw me a surprise party — I walk into the house where the girls had made cupcakes and hung streamers and balloons and think, how nice, the girls have been busy this afternoon — and then my office door opens and person after person appears, like that classic skit of clowns unfolding from a tiny car — a skit so dated my daughters likely don’t know it.

Afterwards, my older daughter revealed the plan had been weeks in the making, and I must have known, because I know everything. Apparently, not.

My brother’s here, too: perhaps the greatest surprise. While he grills sausage, we laughingly make our usual pact — no ER or law enforcement this visit. Most of these people I have known now for years; many moved us from our old house. One guest laments the tape on the ceiling holding up the streamers, and I shrug it off. While I love this house and don’t particularly like painting ceilings, we live here now, and I hope to have birthday after birthday in these rooms.

That night, we set off the remaining Roman candles from my daughter’s high school graduation party — yes, we packed and brought those fireworks, too.

Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change form day to day…

— From Hayden Carruth’s “Silence”

IMG_1563.jpg