Basho

Autumn Dusk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With no snow, our late autumn Vermont appears like coals burned out, none of our summer’s radiance, our snowy luminosity. This afternoon, not yet four, with the light already leaking away, I lay down in my daughter’s forest lair, dead logs propped up against an enormous white pine. While she wandered away, busily scavenging planks for a footbridge over a culvert with a running stream, I lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

The afternoon was extraordinarily still, with not even a stir of wind, a chatter of chipmunk. I smelled mud, that thick, humusy scent of forest floor opened up. Still waiting, I opened my eyes and, through a part in the branches overhead, saw three crows traveling across the gray, cloudy sky, their wings steadily flapping, quite possibly not at all disturbed by the night falling down and the dearth of glow. And that, perhaps, might be the flight of autumn across our sliver of the world.

A lone crow
sits on a dead branch
this autumn eve

— Basho

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November 2015

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont Public Radio and my teenager and so many questions, questions: what does this mean? Why did this happen? So many questions and I have no answers, merely: think of this bit of information, and that geography matters, history matters, that anger and desire and fury and bitterness matter.

I slid potatoes and squash in the oven and stepped outside for firewood. With the sun going down, the air had abruptly cooled. My younger daughter and the neighbor child were in the darkening woods, laughing. Overhead, the clouds parted over the crescent moon, and then concealed this heavenly beauty. Unseen, geese honked their mournful journey, away.

Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom.

— Basho

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How Things Spiral: the Crabby Woman’s Garden Entry

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Today: by late afternoon, a day of complete frustration. Early at my laptop, I rewrote pages that made no sense, spelled specify wrong, sent an angry email to an innocent person I had to balefully retract, became enraged over a request from a friend I could never fulfill, filled out paperwork that marked a new low in the bureaucratic world for me, screwed up so badly at work I wept….. and that’s merely scratching the surface of this day.

To salvage, I went running before dinner while my daughter biked, and we met up with a neighbor who was strollering her two little kids. I’m very crabby, she immediately told me. Hey, me, too.

Later, we walked through my garden, and she cut handfuls of lemon balm and sage and mint, basil, and a fistful of hydrangeas. Her little boy ate sun golds. My garden, which has withered and died in entire beds this season, rampaged wildly in others, so neglected I’ve despaired–my garden. Yet, snipping these great handfuls for her, a cacophony of sweet scents wafted around us, and I realized what strange and unexpected beauty rose from my patch of earth this year.

After dinner, my daughter biked to her friend’s for trampoline jumping, and his mother phoned and apologized for sending my child home late. They kept laughing, she said. I had just walked into the kitchen with my dusty feet and my skirt full of tomatoes and peppers. One by one, I laid these fruits on the table. Fine, I said. Let them laugh.

This tiny seed
do not belittle:
red pepper.

–– Basho

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Elmore Mountain/Photo by Molly S.

Blossoms v. Trash

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Many years ago, when we took my younger daughter to the ocean for the first time, she had one question. She was barely three, and such a little girl her older sister often carried her. Driving to Maine, we described how long the beach would be. She asked, Will there be sand for everyone?

We assured her there would be plenty of sand.

Again, traveling across Vermont, I realize just how much of this state there is, how much forest, stream, mountain, sky; we are wealthy beyond imagining. Walking along an unfamiliar street in Burlington today, by the cement’s side sprouted a cluster of wild golden flowers, a blossom I had never seen, tiny beauties the size of my smallest fingernail. Later, driving home with VPR, I counseled myself to tally up my blessings. So many people in the world battle over scant resources, and here I am, finding flowers instead of cigarette butts.

The morning glories
bloom, securing the gate
in the old fence

— Basho

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Both Tool and Weapon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.

— Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

From the garden, I gleaned a basket of spinach, cooked it with garlic and tamari, and ate it with my older daughter.

Gleaned:  the irises are blooming.  The asparagus beds I planted two years ago I let go wild, and the plants are taller than me, a veritable forest in three rows.  I found a sliver of white quartz, rain-washed, in the bed of sugar peas.  Ragged robin is smeared through the fields along the highways.  Nubs of apple, no larger than marbles, grow on the apple tree before the kitchen.

This morning, I woke thinking of an NPR story I heard a few years ago, told by a man who taught in a prison.  One of his students, a close-mouthed fellow, once blurted an ax can be “both tool and weapon.”   One of the other prisoners inquired, Is that why you’re in here?  Because of an ax?

Both tool and weapon, tool and weapon.  Quartz can be tool and weapon.  My neighbors’ garden is rife with lily of the valley, a killer poison.  Writing can be tool and weapon.  And ourselves, our own fertile inner lives?  Both tool and weapon, tool and weapon.

What stroke of luck —
hawk spied above
Irago promontory.

          — Basho
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