Vermont

The Garden’s Geometry

/ 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

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Auditory Postcard from Vermont

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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

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West Woodbury, May evening

 

Gravy, Today

/ 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”

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Tree Collecting

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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

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Photo by Molly S.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my weekly commute to Burlington, some mornings I hit traffic, and some mornings I don’t. Today, waiting in a long line, I listened to Garrison Keillor read poetry.

“Despair” by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror….

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained…..

Sitting alone in my little Toyota, I laughed out loud.

It’s the fragrant apple blossom season in Vermont. Dandelions are rampantly blooming. My teenager daughter texts me at work of her misery, the stark unfairness of the world. Of course, I text back, but go for a run. The ten-year-old skips on our evening walk. I’m just so happy, and I don’t know why.

How many decades has it taken me to relearn what I knew when I was ten? And to laugh about it? The black flies are out and biting fiercely, but the sparrows are singing mightily.

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Unwinding the Rope of Writing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Not long ago, I was at the county courthouse in Barre, Vermont, waiting for the final hearing of my divorce. That courthouse contains the ebb of human life, chock-full of misery and grief, and every time I’ve entered that immense building I’ve witnessed adult women and men crying. I stood alone in a large room whose windows looked into a courtyard where trees were in bloom, and the sunlight shone bright and full of promise. What I was thinking about was a terrible illness in a family member, and how mortality’s knife lies in all of us. Dormant or not, at any moment that knife might turn and slash fatally.

Standing there, I vowed not to let my particular cup of sorrow raise so high that I couldn’t see beyond the vessel of my own brew. Lose a husband, a family life, an occupation, beloved friends: but lose my soul to bitterness, too?

Thoreau’s desire to live as fully as possible, to suck out life’s marrow, to know it as fully as possible is yet my own, despite the bile I naively never expected. Deep in the unlit realms of faith, I know writing is a rope out of that courthouse’s sludge, that art – and making art, like living a human life – holds the potential to burn our hearts in its kiln and emerge with deeper compassion. The sun rose and set on that day in my life, as it’s risen and set for centuries. Even when I was in the windowless courtroom, working through legal litany, I knew the sun would shine in the courtyard when I emerged.

If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

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Crawford Notch, New Hampshire