nature

Turtle Emergence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Driving home from a soccer game in Barre — I must always be writing about driving, driving, as maybe that’s when my mind wanders most, maybe thinks the best — we’re tired, or I’m tired at least, and my daughter must be starved. It’s raining, and the way is wooded and green.

Stopping at my library, on the way home, it’s wood turtle day. The hard-backed creatures have laid their eggs and are edging their way back to the wetlands. I see a six almost immediately in the grass. Looking down at the kids’ soccer field, the turtles are on the move, their ancient dance alive on this hot and now rainy summer evening.

My daughter stands silently, rapt.

Some late night reading….

(Aldous Huxley after an LSD trip wrote he saw)… ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.’ The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: ‘The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.’

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

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Interlude of Laughing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Camping on the shore of Lake Champlain this weekend with three enthusiastic 13-year-old girls, we did summer staying-on-an-island things — we biked and we swam for hours (and I mean hours). We walked on the breakwater at sunset. The loons woke us with their crazy calling at night. I read; the girls explored.

And we talked and talked and talked. The girls, giggling, spied on a father camping nearby. He told his two tiny boys, who wore only orange crocs, that Whining and dessert are counter to each other.

Someday, I told the girls, they might hear themselves saying something equally inane as a parent.

The island’s grass, always so lush and cool, had withered brown with lack of rain. The last morning there, rain began just after dawn. I lay in the tent, listening to the welcome patter, and then, just as I believed rain might be settling in for a day, it abruptly ceased, as if shut off.

In the unrelieved humidity, we packed slowly.

A glossy bit of summer in the land of childhood.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

— Flannery O’Connor

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Burton Island, Vermont

 

Purple Sky

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With a friend, my 11-old-year daughter recently began running – with an interest beyond beloved companionship and the ice cream at the trail’s end. Lacing up her shoes, I see a keenness in her, a love of knowing her body is capable of carrying her a distance.

In last evening’s sultriness, the girls witnessed heat lightening. The sky was purple, my daughter told me excitedly, and the air must have been alive with electricity. I could imagine these two pony-tailed girls running on Morrisville’s rail trail, their eyes wide, determining their route to safety.

These girls have never lived where the sky isn’t omnipresent; inherently, they know to watch the weather. They’ve never lived where the sky is obscured by smog, wires, buildings. Doubtless, they were frightened, but also in awe of nature’s magnificence, power, and certainly her beauty. And that’s one lucky thing.

Purple, my daughter reiterated. Amazing.

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

– Hunter S. Thompson

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Stormy Spring Fever

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Not only the children have spring fever; I’m afflicted, too. In this rainy afternoon, the children are outside, equipped with boots and splashed bright cheeks.

In the woods, the rain lessens. Green trout lily leaves sprinkle the forest floor profusely now, although the coltsfoots’ golden blossoms are folded up, napping away the deluge. In the cold, damp earth, my freezing fingers tugged free a few of my garlic sprouts, their pale white roots clinging deeply in the soil, winding around rouge pebbles. I chopped their savory greens and tender shoots for a salad, a taste of liquid chlorophyll, I imagine.

This is the season of secrets unearthing – last fall’s decaying fungus belly-white, frog eggs fattening near the pond’s stippled surface, the children too big for last year’s summer clothes.

We need the tonic of wildness…. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Woodbury, Vermont

Reflections

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Long after sunset last night, my daughters and I went walking, in that thick rural dark broken only by the lights of the single house across the road, the lights of our kitchen behind us, and overhead all those stars. The little girl, fearful of the dark, walked between her sister and me. Those glimmering, oh-so-bright stars twinkled in the treetops, still bare and leafless at this time of year.

Earlier that day, the younger girl had dug quartz pebbles from the roadside mud, washed them clean in a puddle, and gave them to me to put in my pockets for safekeeping. My diamonds, she called them.

Shiny bits of stars, bright bits of stone.

As we walked back to our house, guided by the compass of our kitchen light, the older daughter told us she parted her curtains every night and slept every night with a windowful of stars over her bed.

I asked my daughters to imagine our world without stars, with only darkness, none of the constellations cartwheeling across the sky, no dipper pouring luck over our roof, no Orion standing sentry through those bitter winter nights, no Milky Way – that mesmerizing arc of the eternally and ever-beautiful mysteriously ineffable. What kind of world would this be without the lights of the great heavens that have endured, before and after, any human stirrings on this green and blue planet?

My daughter, age 17, pondered this as we stood with our faces tipped upward. Then she said, That would suck.

Indeed, daughter.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

– Vincent Van Gogh

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Montpelier, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

 

 

Rust

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

 

With so little snow and a great deal of sun, we spent some time walking through the neighbors’ fields today. When they bought the property, they dragged out all the abandoned farm machinery, the wheels and gears, and lumped it together on an old cement slab. The collection had been in the weeds for God knows how long, and doubtless it’ll remain clustered together, gradually rusting, accumulating leaves and the odd fallen stick, for a stretch of unknown eternity, too.

Unlike Robert Frost’s birch fences that rotted in three foggy mornings and one rainy day, machinery, having changed the landscape in such profound ways, slowly returns to the earth fleck by fallen fleck. This machinery has done all the hard moving it’s going to do.

I can’t but think there’s some odd comfort in even the mightiness of steel and internal combustion going the way of all things: that all the driving power of industrialism will yield to entropy, that the earth in her slow and patient way will fold back around the fortresses of men, and eventually have her way.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

— Alan Watts

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