hope

Pre-Thanksgiving

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When my daughter was four, she went through a period when she wanted the same handful of books read aloud each night. One of these books was Peter Spier’s ornately drawn picture book without words about Noah’s ark. The book was a hand-me-down from her cousins, and it was the only Bible story I think we ever read to her. The Old Testament’s grief and struggle doesn’t seem the cheeriest childhood bedtime reading.

But she loved the two-by-two of the animals, the dove with the olive branch, and Noah patting the soil around his vineyard at the end.

Yesterday, I picked up a gardening book at the library and read parts of it aloud to my daughters. The yard at our new-to-us house is fairly flat, blank slate. Envisioning growth, the three of us all agree on this common point: grapes.

Dreaming of a small vineyard, years in the tending: November. Thanksgiving.

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Hope Springs

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Some unexpected events in our thawing patch of Vermont:

  • dinner guests of chatting children eating grilled eggplant and chicken wings, with gusto
  • exquisitely beautiful poems read at the Galaxy Bookshop last night – and adult companionship, too
  • clouds of frog eggs, knots of trillium blossoms, profuse sunshine and clothes drying on the line
  • a rotten tooth mended

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles – not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don’t know.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

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Brattleboro, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

April Showers Bring….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Sometimes all day, days, rain falls, writes poet Janisse Ray.

Waiting for the school bus this morning at the driveway’s bottom, with the robins and redwing blackbirds silent, and not even a solitary crow winging its way through the mist, the children waited under our one umbrella, surrounded by greasy mud.

This is the season of last year’s debris rising from the thawing earth: split garden hose, broken bits of sap lines, sodden paper from who knows what, piles of lumber never put to use, a shattered red plastic shovel from a childhood friendship long worn out.

At breakfast, I told the children, Two days from now, the sun will appear, the green emerge, and we’ll find coltsfoot.

My teenage daughter said, Keep hoping, mom.

I am.

…Let it not be said that in passing through this world
you turned your face and left its wounds unattended.
Instead, let it be said that when your friends
cut open your chest to partake of its courage,
a loon was calling.

– Janisse Ray, “Courage,” in A House of Branches

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Garden, West Woodbury, Vermont