gardening

Sun and Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A Sunday of skipping the news, opening the house windows, hanging out the laundry. A brilliantly sunny day — when I put my shovel into the garden, pull weeds, and empty buckets of manure.

All afternoon, we’re in the sunlight, the grass around the garden emerald. On the other side of my garden fence, families walk in the cemetery — teens with parents, little kids running ahead, and dogs on leashes. The neighbors’ three-year-old chases last fall’s dead leaves, blowing in the merest breeze.

The girls make garlic knots for dinner, and we eat them with carrot sticks, talking, talking.

I know there’s a lesson here — about slowing down, staying home, putting your hands in the earth — a lesson that would have been much harder had the day sleeted. Sleet, too, is possible in Vermont’s May. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the day’s rejuvenation, this bright spot to carry us along.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

— Ted Kooser

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Marvelous May

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Vermont May is a fairytale world — brilliant spring flowers, black manure, green grass — and, this year, the strange lurking demon of coronavirus.

I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, and yet every year, spring never ceases to amaze me with its beauty. Birdsong, a forest floor sprinkled with pink and white spring beauties, gold daffodils. The lilacs are budding — again, this year, we will have lilacs, their fragrance sweetly scented around our house.

The neighbors with their three little boys are home, always home, blowing bubbles to us. I sow pea seeds, pull leaves from the rose beds. Afterward, my arms are covered with scratches as though I have fought a lion. The woodchucks multiply around us. I check my garden fence.

And yet, we seem stuck in some weird pause. Strangely, instead of texting my brother about summer hiking or Maine plans, we text back and forth about trailheads closed, unemployment, printing money.

Day by day, we text. Seed by seed, I sow my garden.

O the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

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Home — where we are

Squill

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We’re into the third calendar month of the Stay Home order — I know this only by the date and time in the upper corner of my laptop — pretty much my compass to the exterior world these days. That — and an ongoing scrawl in a notebook that lists chores I cross off one by one to keep my paycheck coming. The paycheck I’m immensely grateful for.

These days, the old demons arise  — what am doing with my life? How have I failed my children? Is it normal my youngest wants to go anywhere else (yes, resoundingly, I know that is).

At the end of a rainy afternoon, as the weather parts, my daughters insist I trek through the raspberry and blackberry brambles behind our house. On the other side of the brambles, they show me an apple tree surrounded by emerald grass, and tiny blue squill sprinkled everywhere. They caution me not to step on the flowers.

This is Vermont spring — wet and muddy, largely brown, studded with small radiant flowers. Everyday, the green insistently pushes forward, brighter and stronger. That’s where we are.

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu

Little Cabbages

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While spectating my daughter’s soccer game, I surreptitiously watch a little boy dig a small hole in the frost-killed grass. He’s met a new friend, I surmise, another younger sibling, and the two of them make homes for a handful of plastic dinosaurs — nests the boys call them.

On their knees, they’re completely entranced. When the game’s over, they wander away, each to their own family.

In our garden, it’s Brussels sprout season now. Beneath the black edges, the tiny vegetables are perfectly green, tender as spring.

My favourite vegetable, without a doubt,
Is the humble, but holy, Brussels sprout.

— Angela Wybrow

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End of September

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To counteract this seasonal shift from summer to autumn’s short days, I take the cleaver to gardenstuff — a carrot, a leek, an onion, garlic, parsley — and stew them with lentils and salt. Lentils, once the bane of our household (not lentils, again?). The younger daughter, still in her sweaty soccer practice shirt, eats hungrily.

Her older sister takes a knife to apples, listens to Stephen Colbert, rolls out dough. Pie, at least: it’s autumn.

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Miniature Mandibles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m reading outside with my bare feet on the firepit stones when I feel something like my cat’s tongue on my toe. I’m reading intently, in the few remaining minutes before my daughter returns from soccer practice and my attention will abruptly shift into chat about school and peers and the righteous outrage I suddenly see emerging in this teen. How had I forgotten that one of the most interesting aspects of adolescence is an emerging moral sense of the world? What’s wrong? Who’s right? (And, please, as a parent, could I just remain low and out of the light?)

I’m reading, of all things, Wendell Berry, when I realize a grasshopper is nibbling my toe. It’s the very end of August, the sunflowers are opening, the basil is prolific, the beans have spread into a sculpture in the middle of my garden. I close the book and let the grasshopper gnaw.

We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound.

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

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