lilacs

Lilac Season.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

My daughters each go their own way today in search of waterfalls with friends. It’s a perfect day for waterfalls, the temperature hot, the air drenched with sultriness. I remain behind in my garden’s dirt, moving Jonny Jump-Ups and sowing seeds. The world is alive around me with pollinators and earthworms and the chorus of nesting songbirds. It’s lilac season, here just for a few moments. I remind myself to breathe in, breathe in, while this sweet season lasts.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms”

Sweetness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Rain.

This May has been exceptionally beautiful, with a profusion of blossoms and warmth. Living in a village now, we reap the benefits of lingering outdoors in the evenings, with no black flies gnawing our bare skin.

In this vaccinated world, a headiness rears, too. My daughters are suddenly gone, this way and that, one grown up, the other nearly so.

In the evening, I sit on the covered back porch, breathing in the scents of lilacs and rain.

The drama of spring unfolds around all of us, blessedly so, this year.

In the Garden…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Walking early this morning in the garden, the dew chilly over my bare feet, the thrush sings. The lilacs are opening, blossom by blossom, the deepest violet still closed tightly, not yet ready to reveal.

This is good news I remind myself. I look back at my house where our cat sits in my daughter’s bedroom window. She’s sleeping yet, a whole day of sunlight and apple blossoms yet to come.

May. Spring in Vermont. The air this morning is sweet.