Buson

The Edge of the World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November light in Vermont is eerily dim, the daylight rapidly leaking away, and even what full sunlight we have is thin and scant. My older daughter complains, I don’t like this, to which I reply that no one does. Sometimes I wonder if an unspoken mainstay of my parenting might more concisely be: deal with it.

Yesterday, the girls and I took a short, unfamiliar hike in the White Mountains, switchbacking up an abandoned road. Below us, pine trees and mountains rose out of a sea of mist, and we never saw the valley floor. The girls were enchanted by this Lord of the Rings world. As we climbed higher, the view spread further, as if we peered down into an endless ocean with sacred islands rising majestically from its billows.

At the top, we found a blasted site where someone had once intended to build a house, and – likely through lack of money – abandoned that project and wandered off elsewhere. Fox prints tracked through the house now. The younger daughter remarked that the school bus wouldn’t come. She’d have to ski to school, she noted with real delight.

Stay honest whatever happens
says the bamboo bent under snow
over my window

– Buson

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Mt. Washington Valley, NH

 

While The Season Lasts…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.

Autumn is quintessential childhood.

This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.

– Buson

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Woodbury, Vermont

Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, visiting an elementary school with my daughter, I asked the teacher about the school’s philosophy. He told me every child has been brought into the world for some particular, unknown destiny, and so the whole child needs to be educated to fulfill that destiny.

Destiny and children? When my first daughter was a baby, even then I believed a rich inner life was invaluable. I’m not the kind of mother who bought stocks or purchased a life insurance policy.

Today, I drove through New Hampshire. In the backseat, my younger child worked mightily at her inner life by reading Harry Potter. My nephew, at 11, leaned forward between the front seats, and we passed the time by talking about being present. We are here, he said, and even when we’re up there, ahead, we’re still here. If you think about it, we’re always only here. Only my father enjoys this trend of conversation, so we talked about him, too.

In the mirror, I looked at my daughter with her sun-streaked hair, her tiny blue earrings, so immersed in this book, the first book she’s carried all day, the first I’ve seen her enraptured in pages, deep in the world of imagination.

That’s something, my nephew said, this always hereness. I like it.

A summer river being crossed
how pleasing
with sandals in my hands!

– Buson

Bee on elecampane by Molly S.

Bee pursing its destiny on elecampane by Molly S.

The Dark

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early this morning, not long after dawn, robins swooped by my kitchen window, flying busily with their beakfuls of twisted straw, tangled weeds, a red streamer from my daughter’s birthday.  Bending over the sink, I peered up through the window where these robins are resuccitating the nest beneath the bedroom’s balcony.  What possessed these creatures to appear again?  The girls and I have been banging in and out of that back door for weeks, even moving a refrigerator with great effort and noise.

I’m certain these birds appeared just this morning; I would have noticed them earlier.  It pleases me to think of this robin couple scouting out this thrice-used, well-mudded nest, choosing it while I slept, dreaming or not, just a few feet away.  Will eggs be laid and hatched?  Will the fledglings live?  None of this has come to pass yet.  But the night has borne us this robin family.

In the same way, the seeds in my garden are using the soil’s cover and night to germinate and sprout.  Too often, we fear the dark, with our easy reliance on electric light.  A real joy to rural living is the starlit nights and the nocturnal animal world.  I often step out on the balcony with my younger daughter before she goes to bed.  Listen, we say, what’s happening now?  These late spring, early summer nights are such a pleasure. With the windows open, the nightsounds flow through the screens.  Last night, a moth found its way through a broken screen and lay on my wrist while I read, so delicate it was hardly a presence, and yet its beige wings slowly folded and unfolded, before it rose and took flight.

The short night;
the peony opened
during that time.

–  Buson

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photo of spring beauty by Molly S.