art

Sacred Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

T. S. Eliot who famously wrote April is the cruelest month did not live in Vermont, where we have much crueler seasons. Like January.

Yesterday, on my way from work to a grant-writing workshop, I returned home and changed from a sundress to jeans and sweater (again), but the robins are under the trees, wrenching out live worms. Daffodils splash.

Take what goodness you can get: I hold this as a mantra of single motherhood, but that’s likely my own solipsism. Vermont spring, while inevitably snowy in places, is a ubiquitous joy.

The workshop was held on the second floor of a gorgeous community art center, where I admired the artwork and the particularly pleasant shade of lavender on the walls. Last year, I was knocked out in the final round of this competitive grant; this year, I partook liberally of their snacks and chocolate, a kind of boon.

In this State 14, my daughter’s rock garden appears.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

— Wendell Berry

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Rapture

/ 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”

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Magic Trick

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Like a great joke, a few more inches of snow arrived on April Fool’s Day. By afternoon, however, the day evolved to a breezy sunniness, brisk but radiant. I walked with writer Natalie Kinsey-Warnock to her car in the Woodbury School’s dirt parking lot. It’s Woodbury — the village built in a swamp — and, for that moment, there’s nowhere I’d rather be. In the treetops, blackbirds sang crazily. Why not? It’s Vermont spring.

Natalie shared stories with the school kids today, and at one point, I couldn’t figure out what she was headed — how did a 1865 steamboat catastrophe in the Mississippi River figure into rural Vermont?

Then, abruptly, like whisking an indigo rabbit from a top hat, the story shimmered. It’s as though Natalie unfurled one of her grandmother’s handstitched quilts, and the connections between the history’s enormity and this woman, and these children and their own place in history, lie visible as much as can anything can be seen in history’s rough beauty, the concealed pieces teasingly beckoning.

I’m the librarian, the hostess of this event, the timekeeper to move this along, make sure the kids have time to grab their coats and catch the school bus, but for these moments I’m merely me, surrounded by these rapt children, loving this particular story.

Oh, the long days of circling to sow and reap,
but, O, those few days on the river each year.

— Leland Kinsey, from “Northern Traverse”

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sometime in late March, collage

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughters and I place bets on when the snow in the garden will completely disappear. The stakes? Yet to be determined….

End of March: either the dusty or snowy or rainy season in Vermont. The back roads are miserable, rutted-mud driving. In this season, I no longer take the narrow dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais, that long slow rise (or fall) above #10 Pond. Instead, I drive along paved Route 100, road of my past years. Over the highways hang clouds of dry road sand and salt, rising like our Vermont-esque version of insect clouds. The roads wind between the mountains and along the rivers — ancient traveling paths I follow on my way to that long-ago sea of Lake Champlain.

I hang the bedsheets to dry on the clothesline, snapping in the breeze, teach my daughter to play euchre. We read in the evenings. I’m awake before dawn, drinking coffee and talking to the cats and wondering if I’m heading down the crazy woman path…. I decide to paint my bedroom blue.

Evenings, the light lingers in the sky now. I show where I intend to plant two oak trees this spring. With a bit of a shock, my 13-year-old realizes she’ll never climb these trees as a child. Why plant them? she asks. I give her the only answer I know: Because.

This morning, I heard a dove cooing.

You that lose nothing
Know nothing.

— W. S. Merwin

10,000 Years of Pollen: Storyline

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

An expert in New England’s ancient forests shares the story of taking a core sample from a pond not far from my library — easily within a few hours’ walk — and extracting 10,000-years-worth of planetary history. 10,000 years of pollen!

I’m standing in the dark in the back, while a few latecomers step in, carrying the cold on their coats, kicking snow from their boots. I’m also coincidentally near the hot tea, which I urge my guests to take.

10,000 years. His chart graphs the fluctuation of trees in this plot of Vermont — the persistence of beech, rise of rock maple. Exquisitely, I think of a larch not far from the library, how cool and welcoming that forest is in the summer, how brilliantly yellow its autumn needles. The extremely large view and the absolute specific.

Afterwards, finally home with my girls who are in an especially good humor, I think of the UVM museum my youngest and I just visited, chockfull of very ancient human artifacts, a variation of pollen — and in particular the arrowheads found along Lake Champlain. Whose hands made these?

Still socked in by winter… no pollen in the wild wind in the conceivable future…

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Specific child, specific 5 degree day, Burlington, February, 2019.

Why Read?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

February — surely the freaking longest month of the year in Vermont.

Unable to endure the unremittingness of winter, I’ve taken over the couch with my laptop and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Unableto tell my friends and library patrons about this book — as then I might be forced to hurry, hurry and read, read, to pass this novel along — I’m sunk down deep in this story. What to love? The book is the American road trip (and I’m a sucker for road trip stories, a veteran of innumerable mishaps along my own blue highway adventures), told by a mother who understands the importance of buying coffee for grownups and cookies for the kids, of unrequited lust, of a marriage bending, of the thrust of creative work, of how all those pieces fit and don’t fit together.

I slept on this couch for over a year after my husband left, unable to sleep in our former bed, the room we built with the balcony and double glass doors, the windows on three sides, the moon rising over my prolific garden. The couch, I discovered, was enormously comfortable, and the (former) marriage bed a possible remnant from the Middle Ages.

I purchased this book with library funds, with actual property tax dollars from the taxpayers in Woodbury, many of whom I know. When I’m finished with the novel, I’ll pass it along, happy to hand it over to my reading friends. But in the meantime, I spy many February days on the calendar remaining. I’m in no particular rush to finish. The brighter and warmer days of spring are most likely an illusion — and I’m hoping for a breathtaking ending to this novel…..

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden…

― William Carlos Williams

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