naturalists

Vinegar & the Lupine Metaphor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter asked me if I knew Christ, dying on the cross, had been given vinegar to drink. Why? she asks, mystified.

Why is it that these profound questions so frequently appear when I am about bled out of energy? Could I not write a veritable book on this subject? Our kitchen holds five vinegars – apple cider, balsamic, white, rice wine, an herb infusion – and we use it for preserving, cooking, cleaning. But soak a spongeful and press it your lips? My daughters are horrified at the image.

I offer what my children consider an unsatisfactory answer: the antidote to drinking sour wine is wild lupines. I remind them of the children’s book they both loved so dearly, Miss Rumphius. Could this be the weekend’s challenge, in a realm beyond folding laundry? Amend that: could this be the existential challenge?

You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

– Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphius

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Frog Chorus

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I hate it when my daughters bicker.

Stop, stop, stop, I demand. Are you listening to yourselves?

They look at me oddly, and insist, This isn’t fighting, mom.

Recently, I’ve been forcing myself to close my eyes and simply listen to the cadence of their voices. Not the words, not even the tone, but only the rhythm and motion of their voices together. They pick at each other; they laugh; their voices dive at each other again.

Late this afternoon, I walked to our woods pond. Before I could even see the water, I heard the cacophony of frogs, so rusty this early in the season I might have mistaken it for a few stray geese. When the frogs heard my footsteps on dried leaves, they vanished under the water. I remained crouched for a good long while before the frog-chatter chorus cranked up again, a tentative bleat here, then another.

Walking back, I challenged myself to think of my daughters as those calling creatures and listen carefully to the song beneath their singing.

Old pond…
a frog jumps in
water’s sound.

– Basho

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Woodbury, Vermont

Inner Lives

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With the kids at school this afternoon, we gathered goldenrod galls. On an old board, I cut the galls open with a knife somewhat too dull for the work. Inside, we discovered the hidden world of the larvae, curled up in its spongy nest. All winter, these miniature creatures have lived in their solitary round homes, steadily growing, with a single shaft of light illuminating their passing days.

50 weeks – 50 weeks! – are needed to create this fly: roughly 350 days. Then, those that survive the winter, those that are lucky enough to be passed over by chickadees or curious children, live for two weeks: perhaps 14 days.

Our children, intently curious, good-humored in a light mist, have a life cycle fortunately (generally) so much different. How many long days and night have gone into my mothering? I wouldn’t begin to count. It’s not a mathematical equation.

Nor was it really mathematics we explored today beneath that rough covering. It was life.

BLUEBIRD

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there…..

– Charles Bukowski

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Photo by Molly S.