#amreading

Ah…. Water

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Now deep in the muggy green of summer, the woods are splendid with fern, but the garden is parched, thirsty for rain. Fearful of my well, I’m reluctant to water, and what’s the point of watering if it’s not done well and thoroughly? What’s the point of anything, if not done deeply and truly?

Now is the time for lakes, preferably spring-sourced, cool and clear, all the way to the sandy bottom. The children’s irritability washes away with swimming. As the evening cools, I step out on the bedroom balcony to admire the night sky. The constellations appear like tiny minnows in a lake, poised just for a moment, suspended in the firmament.

So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try to drag us back into the water, pulling down our improvements wile they’re at it… You know the story of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove, olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must have been the most comforting of all to ancient humans.

– Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like A Professor

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Greensboro, Vermont

Vegetable Queen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Back in my maple syrup selling Friday afternoons at the Hardwick Farmers Market, I spent a lot of slow afternoons talking with the farmer whose booth was beside mine. One afternoon, I confessed the potato was not my favorite food.

The farmer was horrified. The potato, he informed me, is the queen of the vegetable kingdom.

I would have placed garlic on that throne, but he was adamant civilizations had hinged on this humble food. Touché, I finally acknowledged. He’s right. Garlic is savory, but the potato is substance. The truth is, my potato ignorance was extreme. My farmer friend introduced me to blue potatoes, to Purple Majesties, Russian bananas, and his prized fingerlings. While my infant daughter gnawed at my knuckles, he told me how to cook these beauties, too. A main component of my garden is now this queen, her star-shaped lavender and white blossoms opening wide, staple of ancient worlds, blight notwithstanding.

“Appetite”

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly of jewelweed
in memory of my father…

my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

– Maxine Kumin

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Summertime Chaos

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Every June, I have the same vision that summer signifies a smoother sailing, a leveling out of our family life. Every July, I realize how mistaken is that cliche. By July, the garden is both flourishing and struggling. The house, emptied out on sunny days, fills up again on during these all-day rains, and a shifting clutter of books, clothes, pens, gum wrappers – and just about everything else – invades every room. Somehow, the windows are all smeared disgracefully.

Chaos is part of our life, I remind myself, not a temporary phase of life-with-children, but an integral physical force in the universe. Most of all, it’s not personal to me. Nonetheless, the creative force in me rises up. Possibly someday I’ll have that inner peace where I accept the crumbles of mud on the kitchen floor. Until then, chaos and I will keep dancing our waltz. This afternoon, I think we’re evenly partnered.

That’s how I see us… against the backdrop of Nature, life, the universe, which shows so little fairness in the distribution of reward and punishment and hurts some so much more than others, but hurts us all in some way and makes us angry, sad and weary, and sometimes surprised and overjoyed by evidence of an intelligence beyond our own that’s guiding us along our way, requiring consciousness of us and rewarding perseverance with happiness and malingering with suffering, and sometimes rendering the jewel into mud, taking consciousness away from those no less deserving than ourselves….

– David Payne, Barefoot to Avalon

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garlic, West Woodbury, Vermont

 

Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my teenage daughter recently spied a rattlesnake, we talked about the antidote to snakebite. Antidote: literally, a dose of a substance that’s given against a poison or illness. Antidote is an aggressive word, a noun rearing up on its hind legs and surging forward, or fiercely worming its belly-slinking way beneath razor-sharp lines of barbed wire.

Or perhaps a rose stem slid into a rifle barrel.

A child’s toothy smile after tears.

Or what I suggested to my daughter this rainy Saturday: pick up a brush, raid the paint cans in the basement, and color your walls anew. Step One on your way to solving the rest of your life.

“Warbler”

This year we have two gorgeous
yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.
The other day I stuck my head in the bush.
The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,
about the size of a honeybee. We stared at
each other, startled by our existence.
In a month or so, when they reach the size
of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

– Jim Harrison

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Childhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, these two 11-year-old girls have been weaving their lives together, spinning stories, jumping on the trampoline, creating bracelets from colored rubber bands, hatching a plan with their fathers to go paddle-boarding tomorrow – these two girls who have known each other since before their own memories began to hold shape. Long past the age of teething and cloth diapers and still not yet at the age of first love and heartbreak, they’re at an age of real appreciation for each other, an easy comfort with their bodies and laughter.

In the adult world that seems to be spinning into madness, I’m struck again by the brevity of childhood – and its singular importance. Soak it up, I think, looking up from my desk as the girls wander in. Eat watermelon, filch peonies from an empty vacation house’s garden, lie on the grass and giggle. Soak up the season of childhood. 

Let it linger, children.

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars….

(the adults) soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”

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primroses, July, Vermont

 

Our Garden of Early Delights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season’s
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

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Woodbury, Vermont