Yin Yang, or Giving Rise To Complements

June 9, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a simple thing which took me a ridiculously long time to learn: that famous yin yang symbol isn’t particularly about a dot of white in a tear of black or vice versa. Instead, the black and white are all smeared together.

As an American woman, for years I perceived the world as opposites: you’re in the house or out, it’s light or dark, we’re dead or alive. Through gardening, I began to perceive growth demands decay, and then I carried that notion to writing: creation depends on destruction. The universe is intricately braided with myriad shades of being, color, sound….. There is no one single thing separate and opposed to the whole other rest of the world.

So when my daughter comes with me on a drizzly and rainy afternoon in the woods behind our house, I’m grateful this the childhood world she knows, the place she is rightfully at home in.

….These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders….

– Tao Te Ching

Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont

Onamonapia

June 8, 2016June 8, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, my 11-year-old daughter walked around the house saying 0namonapia, over and over, desperately trying to drive her sister nuts, by repeating this beautiful word, richly rolling off her tongue.

Years ago I used to nurse this child at the farmers market where my then-husband and I sold maple syrup. One afternoon, I nursed my baby on the grass behind our tent, leaning up against a pole. A couple sat down somewhat near me, in the shade beneath a poplar tree. Eating, they casually spoke in a slavic language I didn’t recognize. I generally knew they were talking about the day, but I couldn’t really piece together much more than that.

My baby fell sleep, and I pulled a blanket over her soft little limbs, then leaned my head back against the pole and closed my eyes. While the couple kept eating and talking, I listened to their words, this beautiful language I couldn’t precisely understand, but I knew the language tied them together.

Surely, 0namonapia relays much more than cluck or moo. This is a word whose meaning can stretch to entire languages: an audible beauty that makes us human.

The Bells

Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!

– Edgar Allen Poe

sweater weather in June Vermont

Go For It, Kiddos!

June 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not only the season of popsicles and swimming, summer for 11-year-olds is truly Trampoline Season. About a month before my daughter’s birthday, I inquired at a local on-line forum if anyone had a trampoline no longer in use. Almost immediately, a grandfather at my daughter’s school located a trampoline in a nearby town. And then, as back-up, a few more, too.

The gift was an utter surprise to my daughter, and brought her such joy it made me happy, too.

Up above the garden, behind the burgeoning forest of asparagus and weeds, elecampane already massing into its giant summer growth, comes the squeak squeak of trampoline springs, the children launching themselves off our buggy bit of Vermont into their kid version of the wild blue yonder.

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
and before the street begins,
and there the grass grows soft and white,
and there the sun burns crimson bright…

… the children, they mark, and the children, they know,
the place where the sidewalk ends.

– Shel Silverstein, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”

West Woodbury, Vermont

The Garden’s Geometry

May 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As a new mother, I was surprised by the weight of children; even babies, carried all day long, are heavy, and nursing in the nighttime, my arms often drooped with exhaustion. While my daughters are long since beyond the babes-in-arms stage, all afternoon yesterday I carried buckets of mulch and compost, bent with my hoe and scythe, and tugged my garden back from wilderness into domesticity: for a brief bit of time.

Step away, and the raspberry canes will run their way back. Creeping buttercup – or creeping crowfoot – proliferates knottily.

May is the season of optimism. I’ve planted melons for my watermelon-loving daughter, and promised to water well. The vertical territory of my beds lies low yet; visit in a few months and – like growing children – the vines will be lushly magnificent, the peppers spread out and holding hands, the bachelor buttons in bloom. May, like mothering, is the season of patience, too.

I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none.

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

Gravy, Today

May 27, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early this morning before dawn, I woke and heard rain falling. Not much, but enough to satisfy the seedlings I’d planted yesterday. My garden has been dry, almost dusty. For those moments, I lay still, listening, letting the world around me do its work.

Gratitude’s a funny thing. Like empathy, I think it’s taken me decades to know its miraculous depths. Also early this morning, I received an email with a review of my novel in The Emerald City Book Review. I’ve never met the reviewer, yet she read my book in the way I had hoped the novel would be read, even quoting lines from where I consider the book’s heart, something I have never told a soul.

Like most writers, I toil at the bottom of a narrow, stone-lined well. But today: gratitude for someone who took the time to read and write so well about my book, gratitude to this earthly life that I could chisel out this book, and gratitude for this morning’s moments of rest, lying and listening to the sweet spring rain, falling on my garden.

Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving…

Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.

Raymond Carver, “Gravy”

Tree Collecting

May 25, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I stepped outside the Montpelier Library today and stood for a moment with my face turned up to a shower of cherry tree blossom petals steadily raining down.

As a writer, I collect words I particularly love: myriad and succor, litany and exquisite, constellation and pinwheeling. For years now in my travels around Vermont, I’ve noted particular trees of exceptional grace, like Hardwick’s beauty mark of three silver maples on route 15.

Last weekend, stepping out the back door of my brother’s brewery, I nearly walked into an enormous apple tree covered in pearly blossoms and humming bees. What’s this? I asked.

Amazing tree, he answered.