beauty

Reasons to Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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This Old House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

For years, I’ve been buying my daughters creemees in the summer and admiring a small, terribly neglected house across the road. With an exterior of stained glass windows and ornate eaves, I imagine the inside has extraordinary woodwork. Surrounded by too many power lines, lived in by a series of renters, the house appears unkempt and ill-loved, the modern world grown up around it.

As a writer, I’ve looked at innumerable houses, and this little house seems hard-pressed for a good future, too near the road as it is, too near a river that floods, too not wanted… and yet, I’d love to walk through these rooms. I’d love to know who once lived here. With that riverbed soil, I imagine someone tended a burgeoning garden.

The grammar of shape is innately understood. Unlike speech, it is visible in plants and animals everywhere. The intuitive design process gives access to that knowledge. You do not work at design, you play at it.

– Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing

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Hardwick, Vermont

Reflections

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Long after sunset last night, my daughters and I went walking, in that thick rural dark broken only by the lights of the single house across the road, the lights of our kitchen behind us, and overhead all those stars. The little girl, fearful of the dark, walked between her sister and me. Those glimmering, oh-so-bright stars twinkled in the treetops, still bare and leafless at this time of year.

Earlier that day, the younger girl had dug quartz pebbles from the roadside mud, washed them clean in a puddle, and gave them to me to put in my pockets for safekeeping. My diamonds, she called them.

Shiny bits of stars, bright bits of stone.

As we walked back to our house, guided by the compass of our kitchen light, the older daughter told us she parted her curtains every night and slept every night with a windowful of stars over her bed.

I asked my daughters to imagine our world without stars, with only darkness, none of the constellations cartwheeling across the sky, no dipper pouring luck over our roof, no Orion standing sentry through those bitter winter nights, no Milky Way – that mesmerizing arc of the eternally and ever-beautiful mysteriously ineffable. What kind of world would this be without the lights of the great heavens that have endured, before and after, any human stirrings on this green and blue planet?

My daughter, age 17, pondered this as we stood with our faces tipped upward. Then she said, That would suck.

Indeed, daughter.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

– Vincent Van Gogh

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Montpelier, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

 

 

Surprise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On a lark, my daughters and their friend found a lacy fern today, pressed it over a hard-boiled egg, wrapped it in a piece of tights one of the girls had worn to ballet class, and buried the egg in a nest of red cabbage leaves in a pot. I added vinegar and water. When it had boiled and cooled, the older daughter pushed away the soft cabbage leaves.

She held the wrapped egg in her hands for a moment while we guessed what would happen.

The egg was a beautiful shade of blue, the fern hazy enough to be clouds in a summer sky.

Could this be the appeal of egg hunts, beyond the chocolate? A wholly unexpected bit of beauty, sized to fit your hand? At the time of year in Vermont when all is variations of mud, scattershot with slushy snow?

…Nothing is so beautiful as spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush…

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Wolves in the Moonlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the deep of last night, I woke with a south wind rushing over the ridge behind our house. In my sleep, I’d been dreaming of howling wolves in the moonlight, and when I opened the balcony door to stave off the wolves from my household, a strange warmth blew in over the snow. In the moonlight, I saw only the bare sticks of blueberry bushes, the hydrangea with its papery blossoms, long since dead yet stubbornly hanging on. Persistent.

With the wind murmuring like the sea, I lay reading Anthony Doerr’s memoir about living in Rome with his wife and two infant sons. In that ancient city, he watched flocks of starlings rise and dive in enormous flocks, while he held a baby, the little one drinking milk. Afterward, the book closed, I lay thinking of the pigeons I’d studied not long ago, weaving in and out of a slate-shingled church steeple in Montpelier. I’d stood alone on the library steps, admiring the ribbons of flight, and then I simply closed my eyes and listened to the cooing.

Knowingly or not, we all stand there… reading the omens of the birds. The real question, the one that keeps me coming back to this railing, night after night, is Why do they bother to be so beautiful?

Starling, earthling. How little we understand, Nero had a starling that spoke Greek and Latin, Mozart kept a starling in a cage beside his piano.

–– Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

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Photo by Molly S./Lake Elmore, Vermont

River Ice

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Late, yesterday, bringing in firewood, I walked up into the woods just before snow descended with all its might and majesty. Dark was coming in, and I hiked to where I could see the blue ridge of Elmore Mountain in the distance across the valley. Standing perfectly still, I heard nothing, not a single sound, until merely the wisp of my own breath pried open that silence.

The river today is filled with flowing chunks of ice, green like water residing deep in a quarry’s bottom. We woke this morning to icy grapple against the bedroom windows, the wind skulking around the house, like a wild animal, eager to enter. All the wildness of winter returns, the icy realm returned in all its mighty fury – and unspeakable, very earthly beauty.

DUST OF SNOW, by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

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