mortality

Not By Light Alone

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Darn near every moment these May Vermont days, the greenery deepens, fattening mightily, rushing headlong in the chlorophyll world as if making up for winter’s lengthy dormancy.

Walking in the dusky, gently falling rain last night? How could we not love this? All that growth – leaf, blossom, peepers, owls – chorusing around us.

Likely the most unresolvable argument of my life was about darkness, with a person who insisted I not embrace the darkness, not press it near my heart. Every one of my days for nearly the past 19 years has been filled with growing babies and children, teenagers now, with beeswax crayons and playhouses made from sheets, and an endless round of apple slices; at the same time, I’ve also lived through the planting, harvest, and demise of many gardens. Every year, I pass the unknown day of my death and the days of the deaths of everyone I love, and I know, even as the thrust of spring is so mightily powerful and unstoppable, all this will change, too. Our world holds both courage and cowardice, generosity and betrayal.

I’d rather know that, too, than not.

Thanks to State 14 for picking up a blog entry of mine. What a pleasure to be included with their fine writers and photographers.

Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.

Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.

They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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A Mouse Passing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This will likely reveal the sad state of housekeeping around here, but the other morning I found a dead mouse in the living room. The little creature must have folded itself against the chimney in the night and passed along into the next realm for small rodents, leaving behind a gray and a very long-tailed body. I swept it into the dustpan and laid it outside beneath a maple tree. Still early in the morning, the grass was cool beneath my bare feet, and the children were sleeping, wreathed in their world of dreams.

Ill, injured, or simply old? I don’t know. The leaves flipped up their undersides, preparing for rain. I knew the little body wouldn’t remain there long. These shells of creatures never do, scavenged up by some other animal, turned into someone else.

Oddly, as I walked back into the house and picked up my laptop on the couch again, I thought of an Issa haiku I first read when I was a teenager, more resonant, stronger, than ever. Ah, little mouse…

Don’t kill that fly!
Look–it’s wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.

– Kobayashi Issa

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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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Reasons to Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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Happy April is Poetry Month

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night I heard Leland Kinsey read from his new book of poems, Galvanized, at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick. Leaving home on a weeknight is always a pain, with homework rearing up, dinner dishes, and – although it’s only ten minutes – the ten minutes in the car to drive. I’m always glad when I get to the bookstore, though. The company is familiar and jovial; the books are terrific.

I’ve been to many, many readings at this Hardwick bookstore, but this reading was particularly fine. I’d brought my knitting, but I left it in my lap, untouched. A couple in the back had come with their baby, and the little one’s babbles wove beneath Leland’s voice. Leland hails from a lengthy line of Vermont farmers, and his poetry is strewn with glacial erratics, swallows, ponds  – with a keen awareness of mortality, of hard physical work, of human frailty, and love. Perhaps what I admire most about his poetry is that constant thread of beauty, winding all through his words like that baby’s murmur.

Galvanized is a collection of poems suffused with life, penetrating into the deepest recesses of our lives, a book of laughter and tears and beauty, the matter of our everyday lives. Isn’t that what poetry is all about?

…. The same uncle said recently about a blue suit,
“I bought it to be laid out in;
now I’m wearing it to the wakes of others.
Life takes so long.”

Wear.

From “Deer Camp,” Leland Kinsey, in Galvanized

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Barre, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

 

The Civility of Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

 

Like anywhere else, Vermont has its share of injustices, but also a steady practicality. People generally lend a hand in need, to friend or stranger.

This afternoon, the girls and I took a teenage friend on a steep walk. Why? she inquired.

Because it’s fun, I answered.

On a day like today, full of sunlight, the grass beginning to green even in March, with no bugs and no ice, what a joy to be human, and not a machine.

We are born with some things in our veins…

Virginia Reeves, Work Like Any Other

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Montpelier, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.