homesteading

Car, Deer, Collision: Tuesday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Driving to work, listening intently to an NPR piece about the capture of Saddam Hussain, I hit a young deer. As these things often go, in a kind of slow motion I see the deer leap the guard rail and then stumble.

Braking, I pull over on the graveled shoulder, and the tailgating pickup behind me roars by, in some godawful hurry. While the traffic continues to rush by, I stand there in my sandals, a breeze blowing my thin sundress above my knees. I haven’t brushed my just-washed hair yet, either, so I’m pulling long hair from my eyes and mouth as I walk back along the road. But the deer is gone — whether off to die in the lush and flanking forest or free, maybe even okay, I don’t know.

Gently, rain begins to fall, just a few drops on my face and hands, maybe a harbinger of an all-day soaking rain, or maybe that’s all, simply these few drops on the roadside, while I’m wondering what’s happening in that forest.

If we are lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin.

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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Notes from kids beneath the library backdrop….

Left the Shoes on the Back Porch…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day of brilliant sunshine, rain moves in during the night. My daughters’ cats, in the screened windows, wake me with their hungry mewing, against the background chorus of steady rainfall and birdsong.

Arriving home from work, I see my daughters have been swimming that afternoon, their hair in damp lanks around their shoulders.

As if in an instant, summer has unrolled in Vermont — verdant and colorful — while simultaneously the woods darken mysteriously with foliage.

90 days, poet David Budbill wrote. Frost-freeze — maybe — for 90 days in Vermont. Hallelujah.

Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.

— Buson

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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

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How Does Your Garden Grow?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.

My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.

What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?

Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.

Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.

— Basho

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Birthing Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

14 years ago I walked down to our sugarhouse in the early morning and leaned against the doors, a piece of me longing to remain there, static, still, until eternity. We never locked anything in those days. I was there to simply close the doors with an eyehook as we expected to be gone for a few days.

Unlike my first pregnancy, I knew at a certain point in my second pregnancy that this child would be born by caesarian. While I was leaning against the rough boards of those doors, my husband and 6-year-old daughter were breakfasting on oatmeal in the kitchen.

I was utterly unprepared to become a mother again. I hadn’t even begun to imagine names for this child — girl or boy, that morning we still didn’t know. But all pregnancies end, one way or another, as everything does in this world. On this 14thanniversary of my second birthing day, I’m always reminded of being on that extremely ancient and utterly contemporary world journey of motherhood, of bringing babes into this world, tending them, raising them, all the while gradually letting go. An infinity of mothers have passed through this earthly realm, and yet, what sacred largesse.

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Brief Water Interlude

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the rain, the girls pushed the kayaks into the water. The wind blew up, and I sat on the shore, my plan to lie on the grass and read foiled. Later, I went down to the end of the pond and sat at the edge while the rain washed through and sunlight sprinkled the water. The inky black head of a loon surfaced.

The girls paddled over to me, laughing. A heron cut across the cloudy sky. The peepers chorused busily. A boy appeared with his fishing pole.

This cold May: every day, a little more green, a bit more Technicolor, antidote to That Winter…

…here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines.

— Ryōkan

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