travel

Auditory Postcard from Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night, hot from bike riding with my daughter and watering transplants in the garden, I madly put the screens in the upstairs windows. We slept with the glass opened all night, and this early morning is cool and lovely, a symphony of songbirds serenading my children in their dreams.

When I was a teenager, my cousin from New York City visited us in the summer and remarked every morning that the birds woke him with their singing. Turbo birds, he called them. These mornings, I sometimes remember the three enormous sugar maples that graced my childhood lawn, prime songbird habitat. As a child, I thought it amusing that someone would comment on songbirds. Really? You might as well comment on drinking water.

Like anywhere, Vermont has drawbacks: I’ve seen mercury at 42 below zero fahrenheight, the public libraries are too tiny, rural living can be darn lonely, and my ears are swollen with bug bites. But here’s just one ineffable joy: birdsong.

“A Minor Bird”

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Robert Frost

FullSizeRender

West Woodbury, May evening

 

Tree Collecting

/ 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.

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

– Issa

FullSizeRender.jpg

Photo by Molly S.

The Earth Curves, of course

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After a day of downtown Portland’s busy scene – art and wharf and walking, and my brother crashed a bachelorette party while my daughters ate gelato, and my older daughter bought the younger a miniature ship in a bottle – we drove over a drawbridge in search of the wide open ocean.

At the beach, we left our shoes by the car and spread out, one daughter gathering shells and sea glass, the other carrying her camera. Away from the city’s hurdy-gurdy, the ocean  – sky, sand, stone, gull, the steady and infinitely changing waves – churned, at once noisy and calming, a place we had never been and yet was familiar, expansively glorious.

We leapt over enormous chunks of pink granite to an old lighthouse while the sun tugged the daylight over the horizon. Afterwards, all of us laughing while I drove through the dark, I told the children we would stop in Pierre, South Dakota, for gas. With our three drivers, we’d switch off until we hit the north California coast. Even when we returned to my brother’s New Hampshire house, late, the little girl tired and nearly asleep, we were still laughing, the world wide-open and full of possibilities, as if my little car with its two bright headlights could trek all around the the globe and ferry us back to home.

…where we choose to be–we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer

IMG_3134

Cape Elizabeth, Maine/Photo by Molly S.

 

 

 

Now, Stop & Admire the Scenery, for a Change

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Yesterday, my daughters and I drove from Vermont and crossed over the White Mountains,  in a route I love and have travelled for years. This time, though, with a daughter’s friend, we stopped at a place in the mountains I’ve always rushed by, at fifty or sixty miles per hour. The point is near enough to the end (or, backtracking, to the beginning) of the trip that I’ve never wanted to pause.

In a meadow along the Sacco River, with enormous granite mountains steeply rising on either side, the area was exquisitely beautiful. The river flowed clear, clumps of bluets bloomed in the emerald grass, and the mountains held us like a pair of immense hands. In the bitter depths of winter, hail, snow, fiercely unrelenting winds pummel these slopes, but  this spring May afternoon, I remembered my childhood infatuation with Johanna Spyri’s little orphan Heidi.

As a mother, years later, when I read the book to my first daughter, I was appalled I had missed the heavy-handed Christian urging in this novel; this book was radically different from the book I had read over and over as a ten or eleven-year-old child. But was the book really different? What sang to me in the story was an orphaned child who loved her grandfather, a bed of fresh hay, the shimmering constellations, toasted cheese sandwiches and mountain meadows of wildflowers. Through her life’s circumstances, she experiences loneliness, cruelty, abject misery, and yet love of the mountains draws her beyond her own particular unhappiness: love of beauty and the inherent goodness in people is the staff of her strength.

Sanctimonious? Need not be.

 

But she had to go to bed first, and all night she slept soundly on her bed of hay, dreaming of nothing but of shining mountains with red roses all over them, among which happy little Snowflake went leaping in and out.

– Johanna Spyri, Heidi

 

IMG_1234

White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire

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”

FullSizeRender

 

Daughters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my usual, take-your-kids-to-work-with-you way, the girls came, too, when I read at Vermont’s Norwich Bookstore, in the first real sunny day of spring.

Afterward, my daughters and I walked around Dartmouth College, where the enormous green was filled with students and flying frisbees. The young women wore strappy dresses; the daffodils spread their buttery petals; we ate homemade cherry gelato. All was budding and new in the world. Driving back along Vermont’s sparsely travelled interstate, we passed fields turning toward emerald from the dull brown they’ve held for weeks. The rivers and lakes had thawed, and flocks of birds darted in quick waves.

All the way home, needing no map, we laughed and told stories.

…You are born a woman
for the sheer glory of it,
little redhead, beautiful screamer.
You are no second sex,
but the first of the first;
& when the moon’s phases
fill out the cycle
of your life,
you will crow
for the joy
of being a woman,
telling the pallid moon
to go drown herself
in the blue ocean,
& glorying, glorying, glorying
in the rosy wonder
of your sunshining wondrous
self.

– Erica Jong

FullSizeRender.jpg

Hanover, New Hampshire