Mary Oliver

Birds, Black and White

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When you drive down our dirt road hill, the woods give way suddenly to open farm fields along the river valley bottom where, before the rivers were polluted, must have made for amazing swimming. We never swim in the river, but the immense fields and the arching sky are beautiful, and all my many journeys along the brambly edge have yielded treasures – wildflowers I’d never seen or small running streams from the steep hillsides.

This afternoon, crows pecked  at the corn stubble. Something like white cloths fluttered in the light snow, and I realized those graceful swoops of white were seagulls. I’d never seen seagulls there.

If you’d been looking for an omen – and I had, indeed – that mixture of the black birds, with their beaks working where the open ground lay barren and brown, coupled with the downy white of seagulls who tilted upward in the breeze and drifting snow would have sufficed. It was just me and the birds, and the birds would have gone on quite happily without me, serene in a mysterious drama all their own.

…. you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

– Mary Oliver

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Hardwick, Vermont, snowing

 

And Then This…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, the heavily overcast sky hung low, sullen with the threat of snow. The day lay cold and gray. In this dismal time of year, even the most valiant of Vermont admirers must wonder what holds us to this piece of earth.

In the night, emerging from the school’s basement library after a lengthy school board meeting, one of us marveled it did snow, after all. In the school’s sharp floodlights, the snow sparkled, and I remembered in a flash that the saving grace of winter is its beauty. Even in the darkness, I saw how the snow promised a brightening of the next day.

In Hardwick, I met my daughters, the town nearly closed up for the evening. The younger girl, giddy with staying out late, scooped up a handful of the wet white stuff and kept giggling, What is this? before she answered herself: Christmas coming. She pressed her face near the snow, dreaming.

It is January, and there are crows
like black flowers on the snow…

– Mary Oliver,”Crows”

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Photo by Molly S.

 

One Life Instruction, via Mary Oliver

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last summer, we were eating dinner with friends who have young children, and two couples compared notes about their toddlers drinking dirty bath water. I laughed and assured them, yes, someday their kids would brush their own teeth. The real challenge, I claimed, was when the teenagers take off in the Toyota.

As I often am, I was wrong. What about when a child decides to disappear into a remote mountain wilderness? Or head down her own path of parenthood?

In my forties, now, I’ve reached the point where life is no longer that amorphous, endlessly murky terrain, but indeed life stretches out, far more winding than I ever would have imagined when I was twenty. Perhaps it’s the decade of my life, but now separations, cancers, loss and loss again, is no longer uncommon – which perhaps is why good news is so much sweeter. Every one of these babies born well, a new house, a book published, a journey completed in good humor.

Or this: my girls with their long legs sprawled on the couch, laughing about silly things, nothing more, just silliness. Long life is made of little tiny moments: soak up the sweeter ones.

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

– Mary Oliver

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The Footprint of Where You Live

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a Vermont town which has very little pavement. Route 14 heads north-south right through the village’s tiny center. In the village, a small amount of pavement fronts the post office, volunteer fire station, and the currently-closed general store. The elementary school has a square in the dooryard, none in the playground or dirt parking lot. Our town is wood, field, and a great deal of water in lakes, ponds, running streams.

The schoolkids took a field trip to Barre, and I met them in the morning, standing beside their one school bus, in a sunny but cold morning, eating apples on cracked asphalt. I laughed.

If you’re a kid, does it matter that your school garden’s footprint is larger than your pavement’s print? Does it matter as adult that you have both winter boots and mud boots? That your horizon is framed by trees and not rooftops?

I tend to think, whether we notice or not, where the soles of our feet walk matters.

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

– Mary Oliver

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Burlington, Vermont

How To Write a Story….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Any writer knows a story can be told a myriad of ways. Today, visiting a school that once hovered near the brink of disintegration, I realized that school’s story could once have been told in numbers that reflected too much poverty, too little resources and not enough skills: too little – and too little again, and again, and maddeningly again – all the way around.

Instead, this is now a story of growing gardens and colorful classes – and thriving children. Who decides when a story needs to be rewritten? For a school? Or for yourself?

I remember Mary Oliver’s line posing the question about what to do with your one wild and precious life. Create at least one or two fine things, I thought. Leave one or two marks for better, and not for worse.

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried across the sky by beautiful clouds.

– Ojibway proverb

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Hardwick, Vermont

January Thaw & Rural Safety

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I carried out the stove ashes this morning, the air was balmy, almost sweet, redolent with that peculiar scent of woodsmoke hanging low, with traces of mud and the wetness of tree bark. The ten-year-old girls played in the hoop house, climbing up the metal arches, while I restocked where the woodpile had fallen down into slushy puddles.

Later, the rain began to fall in earnest, and the little girls and I drank tea and talked about the river ice breaking up. We remembered snowshoeing on a pond last winter, and someone who had broken through the top crust, soaking his boot. He spread himself out on the ice, to even his weight.

In the cold of winter, we often skate on deep lakes with enormous pleasure. I reiterated how to skate with safety – how to love Vermont’s frozen waters with the bend of the sky overhead.

As we talked on and on this rainy, chatty day, I ended up telling my daughter and her friend about a visit I had made to Detroit when I was their age. My father bought food at a restaurant where money and food revolved through a bullet-proof revolving door. My siblings and I didn’t understand this at all; my father said, “We’re in Detroit, now, kids.”

Rule 1 if you break through the ice: don’t panic.

Crows

It is January, and there are crows
like black flowers on the snow.
While I watch they rise and float toward the frozen pond,
they have seen
Some streak of death on the dark ice.
They gather around it and consume everything, the strings
and the red music of that nameless body. Then they shout,
one hungry, blunt voice echoing another….

– Mary Oliver

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