hope

Green

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last evening, while playing 50 States trivia as a hard rain fell, I told my daughters I could sense the earth greening up around us. When the sun comes up this morning, I’m hoping for some slivers of this truth.

Yesterday afternoon, my younger daughter and I stopped by the (closed) library where I work. We wandered around the playground, the sodden sandbox with a few abandoned spoons and bowls and toy trucks, and walked around a pair of blue socks some child had forgotten. The flower beds were strewn with last summer’s dead stalks.

We walked into the woods where the spring streams ran high. The forest was fragrant with mud; no coronavirus fear here.

The spring rain.
Talking and passing
The straw rain‐cape and umbrella.

— Buson

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Easter Sweets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

We leave a plate of tiny cupcakes for our friends on their porch steps. They step out to talk over the garden fence. Purple crocuses bloom beneath their picture window.

Standing there, I remember when my older daughter was two — all those times when she cried, leaving this house, and I strong-armed her into a carseat. Last week, she spent the better part of two days of a nursing home shift sitting with a woman who was dying. The woman had been born in Germany, before the Nazi party rolled tanks into Poland and began World War II.

And so our days continue. Spring into more spring, summer nothing but a promise ahead.

On a run yesterday morning, my daughters stopped to talk to an older man at his mailbox. He told my daughters the few inches of wet spring snow was a poor man’s fertilizer. When they return, they find me writing at the kitchen table, curious to know if I’ve ever heard that phrase before.

Indeed, I say. He’s right.

In the city fields
Contemplating cherry-trees…
Strangers are like friends

— Issa

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What’s Possible

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter mishears that Vermont’s governor extended the Stay Home, Stay Safe order to May 31, so when I read the order is actually May 15, the extension doesn’t look so bad. In the middle of March, that date would have appeared impossible.

What’s impossible and what’s not has changed enormously in the past few weeks.

In our little world, we walk and we talk. We walk alone. We walk together. The world as we know it might possibly be crumbling around us — 30% unemployment in our state that a month ago had the second lowest in the nation, a Main Street shuttered closed, people I’ve known for years suddenly foreign in masks — but the possible continues.

Every morning — snow or not — birdsong strengthens.

My daughters and I walk out to the ruins of the town pest house, built a hundred years ago in fear of smallpox. There, geese honk clamorously on the lake. From a white pine, two large birds swoop out from the highest branches. My youngest says simply, “Eagles.”

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Famous”

 

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Does the Moon Shine More Brilliantly?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Here’s Saturday afternoon in the palm of my hand.

Here’s what I also discovered that night, as I poured a quart of water to douse our campfire for the night: the half-full moon shone brilliantly — astoundingly bright — as if a full moon over a fresh snowfall.

Am I crazy? Or has the lack of emissions already brightened this celestial beauty? I stood there, for the longest time, wondering.

Isn’t this what we’re all doing these days? Simply wondering….

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Photo by Molly S.

This Moment

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

April 1. 19 years ago we had a such a large snowstorm that we had to carry our 2-year-old daughter outside. The snow was too deep for her to walk until we had shoveled paths from doors to driveway to woodpile.

Not so, this year. Only patches of snow remain. No longer needing winter boots, I walk behind my thawing garden and through the cemetery, where last year’s faded plastic flowers push up through remains of ice, behind the abandoned playground and empty school. The town is closed up, too, the food co-op staff barricaded behind locked doors — phone in your orders — no one lingers in the post office, the sidewalks are empty.

April will bring chattering peepers, spring ephemerals, the tiny blue squill around our house. Like those long, long winters, this isolation will pass, too, inevitably. Who knows what lies on the other side — what May 1 will bring — but greenery is certain.

Tender shoots of garden peas.

Flocks of migrating songbirds in warming skies.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.

— Robert Frost

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Gifts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A friend leaves a dozen eggs and a stick on our back porch. She instructs my daughter to put that stick in water.

Doubtfully, my daughter sets the unassuming brown branch in a glass of water on our kitchen table. Really? she asks me.

I tell her it’s a twig from a Daphne bush she’s walked by countless times. When it blooms in that water, you’ll be amazed. I promise her this.

Here’s Adrienne Rich’s poetry for the soul, forwarded from my father.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

 

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