beauty

Same, Same

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The weeds lining the pathway beginning my evening walk are shoulder-high now, wet last night after the afternoon and evening downpour. We chatter this year about ticks, ticks, and Lyme disease, and at soccer games, the parents wonder when did we become afraid to sit on the grass?

Nonetheless, I push through the wet grass while the kids are home, playing Yahtzee or laughing about something or someone, possibly me. Midsummer, gloriously hot, weedy, chaotic. When I dig out the Japanese beetles burrowed into the pink roses, the flowers yield their heavenly fragrance. That’s summer in Vermont — both hungry pest and the ineffable delicacy of roses.

There are other birds too, visitors we hear only
in the summertime, but it’s the screened door slamming
that is the definition of summer for me.

— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”

IMG_4323

Photo by Molly S.

 

Little Bits of Beauty

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Taking out the trash from the library today, I stopped by the crabapple tree planted at the back school entrance no one uses anymore. My goodness! An utter profusion of beauty by the stinking compost!

On this warm day, in sleepy, quiet Woodbury, the first and second graders walked over for their final visit to the library this school year. I read only one book to them — Jim LaMarche’s The Raft — and remembered the summer I was 10, and my family camped for weeks in the west. I brought the book I discovered with great glee in my father’s very grownup shelves of Hume and Kant and Heidegger. What else but Huckleberry Finn, still one of my most favorite novels.

The children listened quietly this afternoon, checked out their books, and I walked back to the school with a girl who wouldn’t return next year, her arm around my waist.

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened…

IMG_5763

2,000 Miles, a Handful of Hours

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

What a strange, odd thing to travel 2,000 miles over the earth’s curve, all in the piece of one day. We began in that incredibly quiet hour between 1 and 2 a..m., standing in my parents’ kitchen, drinking coffee with the tenor of silliness that early hour deserves.

For a just a moment we stood outside in the New Mexico rural dark, under the unsurpassable beauty of the constellations and the Milky Way’s arch, and then our contemporary travels began by Subaru, by shuttle, by sandals running through an airport, by plane and by Toyota, and finally home to bare feet in the garden, where I ate tart radishes.

Modern miracles, all of this locomotion. But at the journey’s end was the greater wonder: our rows of lilacs — lavender and deep violet, pearly double-blossoms — all in bloom, ineffably scented — breathe in, breathe in — humming with pollinators, quietly going about their business.

You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,
You are the smell of all Summers…
From Amy Lowell’s Lilacs

IMG_5676.jpg

The Black Line Within a Tulip

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While the big fad out there is to number things and experiences — the 10 best things to do with your whining toddler — and important stuff like that, one of my minor goals for the summer is to just soak up experiences as a kind of antidote to the ravages of last winter. By that, I mean the subzero days and nights of blowing snow.

In our house, we’re not going to count the days of summer, either. Why put a number on that?

Saturday morning, the younger sister sees the first of the red tulips we planted last fall has opened. She runs back in the house and demands her sister come out, and look down, into the flower. With the day ahead of us, come hell or high water, we stand there, the three of us, for a long moment, gazing down.

IMG_5453.jpg

Broken Down Stuff

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Vermont Public Radio is filled with cheery news. Worst Super Bowl. Lousiest State of the Union Address.

More locally, the Honda buried at the neighbors has fully emerged. Where the headlights should be are two gaping holes, the lights themselves on top of the car.

My 20-year-old sets her gas cap on top of her car and drives off in a rush. When she discovers this, I send her to the auto parts store, where she suspects the guys behind the counter are laughing at her. Why not? I ask. I laughed at you. Give me a little mirth, girl. She laughs, too, delighted the cap is nine dollars. What a deal I got, she says.

I resist pointing out that a better deal would have been not losing it. I’ve gotten a nine-dollar laugh out of this one.

It’s February. This is the time of year when things get worse in Vermont, but also better. I’ve lived here a long time, and generally I like living in Vermont. I actually like it very much, despite the things in Vermont that aren’t cool but are hardly endemic to Vermont—isolation and intergenerational poverty and the increasing bent in American life to see the world in narrowed vision.

This is the time of year when  cabin fever begins to creep in with a kind of communal silliness. We are all together in this. Even folks who foray out to Florida or California, winter is long, and then longer, and then even longer.

February marks the time of both weeping and giggling. The light floods back, more every day, crazy-making. Spring may be far off, but the scent is in the air.

IMG_4560.jpg

Broken Down, Back on the Road

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before dawn, a crescent moon greets me silently through my kitchen window, hanging low in the sky, with glittering Venus and Jupiter. I stand there for a moment, imprinting that soundless beauty in my mind, like a talisman I might carry through the day. I leave in the dark, listening to VPR and watching the car’s thermometer dip down, down, as I drive up through the Woodbury Gulf. 14 below zero.

Not all that much later, I’m out of my car in Waterbury, pouring coolant into my overheating car, the water pump shot. It’s so cold the air is misty. I limp along into Waterbury, where I cluster with the other folks in the waiting room, drinking terrible K-cup coffee.

I’m nosy—I completely own up to this—as I “overlook” the woman’s laptop beside me as she books a hotel room in Charlotte. She wears enviably warm and stylish black leather boots. Beside me, I realize a man is somewhat surreptitiously scrutinizing my notebook, but I’m darned sure he can’t read my bad handwriting. Heck, I can hardly read it, and I’m the author. His phone rings, and I actually wonder if he’s speaking Greek. So much for my knowledge of other languages.

It’s that kind of day. By 11:30am, I’m back on the Interstate again—traffic is oddly light at that time—but the day seems basically shot. How much has already happened, and how much more lies ahead.

There’s the moon and those heavenly bodies, though. How much paler the day would have been, without those beauties.

img_4553

While I’m at work, the kids send me a photo of their cat’s displeasure with their afternoon snack.