gardening

The Very Unexpected Experience

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Garden antics update by Gabriela Stanciu. Perhaps this could also be titled, One Thing I Did on My Summer Vacation.

So how this all started was my mom had a giant woodchuck in her garden, and we were trying to trap it. My Grandfather said do you have any skunks around here, and my mom said no I haven’t seen any up here and I have lived up here for 17 years. So we put a banana in the trap for bait. The first couple nights we didn’t catch it. On the third night we put a melon rind in the trap. The next morning me and my mom go out to see if anything was in the trap and something was but it wasn’t a woodchuck. Guess what it was–a skunk!!!!!!!!!!!  So I ran up to get my dad. He said he would be right down from his cabin so I ran back down. My mom called our friend who knows a lot about animals and he said to put a blanket over the cage and then let it out so you don’t get sprayed. Me and my grandfather were looking at Youtube to see what to do. We were going crazy because we didn’t want to get sprayed and also we didn’t want to catch a skunk. We wanted to catch a woodchuck. So then my dad came down. He got a long pole, unlatched the doors, and then opened them up. It took the skunk a little while before it went out, but it finally did, and we put the cage in a different spot.

Augueries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
He who respects the Infants faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death…

–– William Blake

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Ice and Woodchucks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The little girl, her grandfather, and I baited a borrowed trap for the woodchuck yesterday afternoon. This morning, I lay awake for a little, wondering if the woodchuck had tripped the trap, and what I would do with the animal if I had possession. When the bright-eyed little girl awoke, we ran up through the buckwheat and looked. The trap was still empty, the unpeeled banana beginning to rot.

Will the trap be empty tomorrow, or slammed shut with a furry and weighty creature within? I dread the thought of a crazed and wild animal thrashing in that narrow cage, but I’m also consumed with a curiosity, a sheer wonderment to meet this foe as near to me as possible, to see the sheen of its dark eyes, its lustrous pelt, its razor glinting teeth. For weeks now, this woodchuck has stalked my garden, devoured my chard in one meal, ransacked my tomatoes, tore off in a run whenever my steps approached. All around the edges of my world this creature has been at once elusive and visible.

To meet your nemesis face-to-face, not in combat, but to simply see, gaze upon the other’s face–what an experience that would be. Will a woodchuck be hunkered angrily in that cage tomorrow? Or a raccoon? An odoriferous skunk? Or perhaps merely the wind, whistling through, over decaying fruit.

I’m more and more aware that, as the ice recedes, this world we live in becomes more unlivable for humans. People need glaciers, just as glaciers now need us. Sudden crevasses in our lives can leave us helpless and alone, but we are never isolated for long. What makes up a glacier, I remember, is millions and millions of little snowflakes, reaching out to one another, grasping hands.

–– M Jackson, While Glaciers Slept

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Writing Your Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

By this time of year in Vermont, much of what will come to fruition has been sowed and thrives. You’ve either had a crop of blueberries or not. The strawberries have long since gone by, only the verdant green remaining. Carrots, kale, squash, all should be well on their way.

What’s gone is gone. My chard, devoured by the woodchuck, will not grace my kitchen table this year. This digs at the question of poetry. I could turn my gaze and blind myself to how my garden lies at this time, weedy and gnawed in places, the peppers sweet and savory, the green ripening on the ear, the cucumbers proliferate. A metaphor for raising a child, acknowledging where wiser tending could have happened – or not. The elements of rain and cold and disease will thrust in.

But writing, perhaps, is a different endeavor than life. You get a rough draft; with diligence, you can rewrite and rework, burnishing your words. Easier, less risky, less dear.

Isn’t this all a matter of hunger, of desire in one raw form or another, a great maw of longing for satiation? The woodchuck to fill his belly. The carrots to thicken. A writer’s desire to reflect and hold the world’s mysterious complexity and beauty. A child’s yearning for growth and expansion.

A mountain can be a great teacher–not only because it manifests that cosmology of sincerity and restless hunger with such immediacy and drama, but also because it stands apart, at once elusive and magisterial…. (Walking up Hunger Mountain) reminds me yet again that things in and of themselves remain beyond us, even after… the most concise and penetrating poem.

–– David Hinton, HUNGER MOUNTAIN

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Wild cucumbers.

My Woodchuck Companion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The air was cool this morning when I reached over and turned on the light. It was a little after four, and with the windows and screen door wide open the room had cooled overnight from the day’s heat. I woke thinking of the woodchuck I’d seen in my garden the day before, a long flashing swatch of him running alongside my onion bed. Earlier that day, from the balcony, I’d seen the woodchuck on the huge rock pile across the small field. The animal lay on his variation of a rock balcony–my neighbor across the buckwheat–preening itself. I could see the lushness of its pelt, brown and russet and red, before it turned, amazingly quick despite its size, and disappeared down the rock pile.

The creature’s been in my hoop house, eating tomatoes, these luscious beauties on my forty or so plants finally ripening after a late planting and a summer of rain. As I lay there, I imagined this impressively large animal gnawing away at my fruit, strewing the paths with partially chewed golden and red tomatoes, its head swiveling around, a little jumpy for the sound of my footfalls, its dark eyes shining in the early light.

While I lay there, the Dutch novel I’d been reading, The Twin, got mixed up in my thinking of the woodchuck, so I was riding along the dykes and looking through a window on a Dutch dairy farm. In and out of this spell loomed the wild creature with its glistening white teeth and shaggy pelt–the fur that, on some fearful level, I longed to touch. In the end, I picked up my book and read for a while before getting up to work.

My tomatoes? Or the woodchuck’s tomatoes? A year ago, the fierce gardener in me would have risen up in rake-welding fury. Now, I’m thinking to pick what I can, and perhaps not so bitterly begrudge this rampaging feast. Likely, the woodchuck wishes I would pull up stakes and head out for new territory. As I wish for him.

There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

–– Maxine Kumin “Woodchucks”

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Garlic

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A neighbor stopped by for mint. In the gloaming, we walked through my garden and I offered what I had for her to begin her own garden. Dig this up anytime, take some of this. Then I bent down and pulled some garlic, the new skins white as the moon where my fingers rubbed the dirt loose. A half dozen heads I handed her, this good crop, my soil sprinkling over our fingers.

I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”

– Saint-Exupéry

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

A Small Handful of Soil

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Last fall, I dug potatoes in the school’s garden with the kids on one of those crystalline autumn days rampart with sun and the darkening emerald of summer’s end. One boy reached down and scooped up a handful of soil. With his finger, he stirred through, unearthing a centipede, glacial pebbles, a shard of white quartz. Around us lay the garden opened up for harvest, the stalks torn free from the rows of potatoes, the tomato and cucumber beds emptied of their frost-killed vines. In this sizable sprawl of black earth, this child stared intently into a single handful of dirt.

Today, weeding, I thought of this child again. With what joy he would see what lay in this garden. When I finished what I could do, I stood back and looked over my small measure of order, the vegetable rows surrounded by tiny tiaras of crown vetch. I thought again of this child-sized handful of soil, the dirt now masked under July layers of stalk and vine and straw and leaf. And yet, it’s the soil we always return to, the mother of our sustenance, the ever-changing constant.

But cultivation’s hold is always tenuous. The sense of order and safety it imparts will change if you turn your back on it: the brush grows in, the night comes on, old fears crowd you. It’s a skittering truth….

– Jane Brox

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.