Early June

June 6, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

June is the time to remember why it’s good to live in Vermont. These little bits — fresh greens from the garden, twilights hazy with lilac blossoms, a breeze through the open windows at night, swimming in water so cold your elbows hurt.

Happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

— Jane Kenyon

15

May 31, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Fifteen years ago, I walked in the garden in the early morning, on the day I birthed my second daughter.

Those were the years when “peak oil” was the looming fear. Now, the country is burning up, broken in so many ways, with a madman ensconced in the White House.

Last night, while the grownups sat around the campfire talking about COVID and rioting, I watched my daughter and her friends walk through the cemetery, so happy to be together but spread out — “distance, please,” I called — wandering through the lilac-scented evening — these lovely, witty girls — talking and talking, as they jostled, each finding their place.

Here’s a few lines from Anne Sexton’s anti-Vietnam War poem, a love letter to her daughter, “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman.”

What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.

Sun and Sunday

May 4, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A Sunday of skipping the news, opening the house windows, hanging out the laundry. A brilliantly sunny day — when I put my shovel into the garden, pull weeds, and empty buckets of manure.

All afternoon, we’re in the sunlight, the grass around the garden emerald. On the other side of my garden fence, families walk in the cemetery — teens with parents, little kids running ahead, and dogs on leashes. The neighbors’ three-year-old chases last fall’s dead leaves, blowing in the merest breeze.

The girls make garlic knots for dinner, and we eat them with carrot sticks, talking, talking.

I know there’s a lesson here — about slowing down, staying home, putting your hands in the earth — a lesson that would have been much harder had the day sleeted. Sleet, too, is possible in Vermont’s May. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the day’s rejuvenation, this bright spot to carry us along.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

— Ted Kooser

Wildlife

April 19, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

How many weeks are we into the Stay Home order? Thursday, I let my daughter cut my hair in the kitchen. Delighted, she made her first snip in the back and said, Whoops.

What does it matter, anyway? It’s just hair.

In the evenings, we walk up a nearby dirt road, seeking the sunset. Hardly anyone is out — a few passing pickups, often with a driver wearing a mask. Nearly every night, we see deer in the hayfields that are greening, bit by bit.

Today, kayaking, we saw a bald eagle in a white pine. We paused, watching as the eagle dove over the shallow end, flashing its enormous wingspan above a family of swimming ducks, then swept back into the tree.

One thing I’ll remember most about this time — and perhaps most fondly — are the endless walks. No complaints, because why bother? This is where we are now.

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

― Jane Hirshfield

Green

April 14, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last evening, while playing 50 States trivia as a hard rain fell, I told my daughters I could sense the earth greening up around us. When the sun comes up this morning, I’m hoping for some slivers of this truth.

Yesterday afternoon, my younger daughter and I stopped by the (closed) library where I work. We wandered around the playground, the sodden sandbox with a few abandoned spoons and bowls and toy trucks, and walked around a pair of blue socks some child had forgotten. The flower beds were strewn with last summer’s dead stalks.

We walked into the woods where the spring streams ran high. The forest was fragrant with mud; no coronavirus fear here.

The spring rain.
Talking and passing
The straw rain‐cape and umbrella.

— Buson

Easter Sweets

April 12, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

We leave a plate of tiny cupcakes for our friends on their porch steps. They step out to talk over the garden fence. Purple crocuses bloom beneath their picture window.

Standing there, I remember when my older daughter was two — all those times when she cried, leaving this house, and I strong-armed her into a carseat. Last week, she spent the better part of two days of a nursing home shift sitting with a woman who was dying. The woman had been born in Germany, before the Nazi party rolled tanks into Poland and began World War II.

And so our days continue. Spring into more spring, summer nothing but a promise ahead.

On a run yesterday morning, my daughters stopped to talk to an older man at his mailbox. He told my daughters the few inches of wet spring snow was a poor man’s fertilizer. When they return, they find me writing at the kitchen table, curious to know if I’ve ever heard that phrase before.

Indeed, I say. He’s right.