#Unstitchedbook

Appetite.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Before it’s warm enough, I open the open to our glassed in porch. This porch (nor its upstairs counterpart) isn’t heated. In Vermont’s long winters, we simply close the door and leave the space be. I think of this as a standard New England practice. I store empty canning jars, summer flip-flops, things like old blankets I don’t really want any longer, but nor do I want to cast away.

All day long, doves and cardinals, juncos and chickadees and sparrows, dip and fly around our house. The crocuses struggle upward. I should be cleaning our house, I think, taking a broom to the cobwebby corners before the spring sets in mightily and I’m in the garden as much as possible, happy as I could ever be, the warming soil between my toes.

Now, snow falls intermittently. The robins dig into the earth hungrily.

Consider the tulip,

how it rises every spring

out of the same soil,

which is, of course,

not at all the same soil,

but new.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rivers’ Roar.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment
Caspian Lake, Greensboro, Vermont

The rivers are running again. I pause on a Sunday morning run, on a large bridge state money funded for the rail trail project. The river roars in spring lust. People can — and do — drown in April. This season is as fierce as winter.

The countdown has begun, the green steadily eroding the brown.

A year ago, my family was quarantined with my daughter’s positive Covid test. Yet unvaccinated, I lay awake at night, wondering why I hadn’t yet written a will, why I hadn’t added my oldest to my skimpy bank account. During the day, I painted the inside of our porch windows a brilliant blue and listened to Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd.

When the jury verdict was read, our quarantine had ended. My youngest and I were sitting my car, listening to the radio, waiting for her soccer practice to begin on a cold evening. A V of geese flew over the wet field.

Years fly by. Sure. But that year doesn’t seem like yesterday. It was one full year. While my daughter played soccer, I walked among the cedars along the river, watching the remaining pieces of ice dislodge and wash into water.

…. In other news, grateful for two lovely review of Unstitched in Montpelier’s The Bridge by Tom McKone and for Tyler Orion Glauz-Todrank’s review in Lucky Cloud Books.

Green and Brown.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
Greensboro Grange, Vermont

A flock of singing red-winged blackbirds kept me company yesterday on my short walk from the village along the frozen lake. Summers, sprawling houses fill with people from other places, more urban areas, but in this nether zone of late winter/early spring — the mud realm — it’s just me and the rain and the birds.

Of all the seasons in Vermont, this odd one seems the most miraculous to me. Out of dull brown, last year’s frost-killed season, tiny nubs of green appear. So much promise. Every year, this surprises me.

 

Some springs, apples bloom too soon.

The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick

to trust that the frost has finished…

You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.

You could say, Some years, there are apples.

~ “Gather” by Rose McLarney

Mixing Memory and Desire.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Note the wood smoke from our chimney….

Note this photo was taken yesterday afternoon, when I walked outside and nearly froze the soles of my feet. Note snow surrounded our house this morning….

Note that spring comes hard, hard, in Vermont. Jumping the starting block a few days, I keep thinking of T.S. Eliot’s lines:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

dull roots with spring rain.”

The first time I read these lines was in high school, digging into the poetry stacks in the school library, mesmerized by lines like Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky….

Later, later, spring will bloom in all its tender-petal beauty. But for now…. T.S. Eliot knows the score in Vermont.

Somewhere in March.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments
Hardwick, Vermont

Mud season is fierce this year. The school busses cease running on some roads. Families share photos of kids waist deep in mud ruts. Time, more than all the gravel in the state, is more likely to true up the roads than anything else.

Mud season is the odd shoulder season in Vermont. The skiing winds down. There’s no good biking. The tourists are all in sunnier southern locations, and Vermonters muddle along.

All day long, the prettiest and lightest snow falls — nothing serious, nothing much at all — just a scattering of the purest white and enough of a chill that the wood stove is welcoming when I come in with cold cheeks and armfuls of wood. I put a quiche in the oven and head out for a walk. The snow has (mostly) melted here now, and so my paths through the fields and woods have opened up again. Behind the elementary school, the turkey vultures circle over my head. They’ve just returned from their winter sojourn, to their long-time nest in a stand of white pines. I know what they want; there’s no secret here.

I hurry down the hill and along Main Street. A woman stands outside the laundromat, hands in overall pockets, staring up at the drifting snow. She raises one hand to me. I do the same, round the corner, and head home.

Dirty Mud Puddle.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

The old yellow house where my daughter attended preschool and, one afternoon, gave me a purple pansy she had potted herself. In the scheme of our lives, such a tiny sweet thing.

In the face of such hard news overseas, this splash of sky reflected in a dirty mud puddle is all I can offer. Be well, friends. Savor sweetness, where you stumble upon it.