beauty

Brief Interlude

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

At dusk — after eight, as we’re heading, day by day, towards the solstice — I sit in my daughter’s car with the windows unrolled while my girls are in the grocery store, getting just one thing but likely wandering around. The local police chief, off duty, comes out, and he and I talk about the weather and raising kids. For just a few moments, a kind of normalcy descends through that dusk, as I sit there, holding the car keys, my feet dusty from the garden on the dashboard.

The day has been an exquisite, sun-filled day, of work and gardening and dinner on the back porch. Memorial Day Saturday is generally the very busiest day of the year in our town, with a parade and fair and fireworks, but this year, it’s just the two of us in that otherwise empty parking lot, agreeing at the blessedness of this early summer.

The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn.

 

From “Rest” by Richard Jones

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Green

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last evening, while playing 50 States trivia as a hard rain fell, I told my daughters I could sense the earth greening up around us. When the sun comes up this morning, I’m hoping for some slivers of this truth.

Yesterday afternoon, my younger daughter and I stopped by the (closed) library where I work. We wandered around the playground, the sodden sandbox with a few abandoned spoons and bowls and toy trucks, and walked around a pair of blue socks some child had forgotten. The flower beds were strewn with last summer’s dead stalks.

We walked into the woods where the spring streams ran high. The forest was fragrant with mud; no coronavirus fear here.

The spring rain.
Talking and passing
The straw rain‐cape and umbrella.

— Buson

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Does the Moon Shine More Brilliantly?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Here’s Saturday afternoon in the palm of my hand.

Here’s what I also discovered that night, as I poured a quart of water to douse our campfire for the night: the half-full moon shone brilliantly — astoundingly bright — as if a full moon over a fresh snowfall.

Am I crazy? Or has the lack of emissions already brightened this celestial beauty? I stood there, for the longest time, wondering.

Isn’t this what we’re all doing these days? Simply wondering….

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Photo by Molly S.

Home: Wanderlust On Hold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Like I hope everyone else — I hope — we’re holing up for the long haul in our house, figuring out our world day by day, in utter suspension of any “normalizing” of life. What’s normalcy again? Something we’ll never return to — or so I imagine at this point.

In the evenings — some balmy like last night, or others spring-raw and wet — we go for walks. The open-ended time reminds me of being a young mother again. Days and nights with young children had frustrations and challenges, sure, but also the deep pleasures of those endless walks and wanders I took with my daughters, learning the names of wildflowers, splashing through streams.

When I pick up beef for our freezer from a friend’s farm, he stands on his deck while I’m at a distance. In a wind so cold I begin shivering, we talk and talk. He asks about my daughters — he always does — and I tell him how my older daughter had considered moving out this summer, but she’s offered to stay home now, for whatever the long haul might be, pooling our resources.

She’s smart, he says. Now’s the time for unity.

When I leave, driving carefully around his flock of snow-white geese and slowly along the mud-rutted back road, I turn off VPR in my little Toyota. There’s never any returning full circle in this life, never getting back to where you once were. But we’re still here, our little family, sometimes irritable at each other, sometimes joyous and laughing. It’s different world, an American dream utterly broken that my daughters will redefine for themselves.

And for these days, I hope wherever each of you are, you’re settled into your own version of social isolation, with the sky’s beauty around you.

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Hardwick, Vermont

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Dribbles of Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Light returns in a rush in these clear sunny days, where the sun has warmth but the shadows are frigid. My daughter abandons her coat.

The days, once so slow with toddlers, spin along, dawn to evening to the night’s constellations, as if the final years of my youngest’s childhood have accelerated. Living on the edge of this small Vermont valley, the sky stretches out as much as it ever does in Vermont, unlike the endless horizons of the west. Come summer, this world will be dense with leaves and gardens, but for now, we’re living in layers of snow and sky, beginning that push-pull of warmth-cold heading toward spring.

What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten.

― Louise Glück
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Howling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Coyotes howled along the brook by the log yard last night as I walked home in the dark, hurrying in the cold that gnawed my face.

Ten below zero this morning. In the deep cold, smoke curls up from our neighbors’ chimney. My long love affair with Vermont strangely deepens in these days as friends fly out for school break to other places: warm Caribbean waters or hot Florida sands.

Inexorably, the days lengthen on either end, the palest of blue in the mornings, shades of violet and rose in the evenings. At dinner, we think of those tulip and crocus bulbs buried deep in the earth, secreted beneath snow, patient, patient, even as the earth spins its slow way toward March.

I thought that there was only ever a thing and its opposite, and nothing in between. In writing this book I have come to believe in this far less than I did when I started. Unraveling and unlearning this split logic is crucial to justice, I think, and it is crucial to love — loving a person, community, or most of all perhaps, a place, which may turn out to be the same thing.

— Emma Copely Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl

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Photo by Molly S.