Vermont

Prayer for A Little More Kindness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest kids shared their work and ended singing a country western song together. I’m no particular fan of country western, but listening to these small kids sing, I realized this song was really a hymn, a prayer for children to retain their sweet and noble natures.

The share had begun with stories the children had written, envisioning their grownup lives, but the song took the children’s stories to a different dimension, mixing qualities of the heart with their written projects. Maybe some of these kids will never remember this song, but my guess is more than a few someday, in the midst of their own unexpected (and hopefully marvelous) adult lives, will remember singing in their kindergarten classroom with real fondness. 

Am I still kind? Humble? Do I yet have the better part of who I am? Then again, maybe this song is really an adult prayer.

…When it’s hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Always stay humble and kind
Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you…

– Tim McGraw, “Humble and Kind”

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Photo by Molly S.

Commune Scene

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Green, green, green! Last night, reading about Vermont’s commune scene in the 1970s, I had to laugh about hippies coming to Vermont in the glory of summer, and then finding winter a different reality altogether. In a Vermont spring, every day, the black earth yields violet, buttery gold, emerald green.

Working in the garden in the late afternoon, I can fully imagine the hippie joy at this green paradise. Come the snowy season, though, and the idealism must have quickly faded. Having written a book about Vermont and youthful idealism, having given my own blood to this black and sometimes cold earth, on a day like today, Vermont is well worth enduring the stay. Today, I can pass on the Huck Finn advice.

(The back-to-the-landers of the 1970s) were acting, in part, on a characteristically American assumption that if things get bad where we are – too hectic, too dangerous, too messy – we can simply decamp to a new frontier and start again, that all we need to begin a new venture or even create a new society is a new piece of land.

– Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

 

Weeding

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I’ve barely begun planting the garden, wilderness has taken hold of this ground. This afternoon, with my weeding tool and hands, I dug in hard. The younger daughter came to see if asparagus tips had emerged, then wandered away. On this Saturday afternoon, I listened to the frogs rocking  out in the hidden woodland pond.

Maybe this reclamation via weeding should be a battle. But it’s not. Surrounded by woods, the wilderness spreads into my garden through an infinity of ways, in a weed I can’t name, a wildflower I’ve never seen. Every year, my obscure patch of this earth surges with life – the geese winging overhead, the peepers’ chorus, ten thousand variations of green that shift and mutate daily. Not so long ago, I planted a garden with my baby cooing sweetly, laid on her back on a blanket spread beneath an apple tree, her bare toes stretching out toward the sun. This earth is so much larger then me and mine, and that knowledge is as steady as the tool in my hand, a knowledge to take comfort in.

When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.

– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

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my garden/Woodbury, Vermont

 

 

 

This Old House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

For years, I’ve been buying my daughters creemees in the summer and admiring a small, terribly neglected house across the road. With an exterior of stained glass windows and ornate eaves, I imagine the inside has extraordinary woodwork. Surrounded by too many power lines, lived in by a series of renters, the house appears unkempt and ill-loved, the modern world grown up around it.

As a writer, I’ve looked at innumerable houses, and this little house seems hard-pressed for a good future, too near the road as it is, too near a river that floods, too not wanted… and yet, I’d love to walk through these rooms. I’d love to know who once lived here. With that riverbed soil, I imagine someone tended a burgeoning garden.

The grammar of shape is innately understood. Unlike speech, it is visible in plants and animals everywhere. The intuitive design process gives access to that knowledge. You do not work at design, you play at it.

– Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing

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Hardwick, Vermont

Old Receipts & Agriculture

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Unraveling a long trail of receipts today, I realized how poorly that paper trail tells our story. How can an equipment receipt for nine thousand dollars illustrate what those nine thousand dollars really cost our family? How many gallons of syrup I poured, steaming, from a three-gallon stainless steel pail into a giant barrel? With a baby on my back, I was always steeled to keep those tiny fingers from the golden flow of scalding maple syrup. How many of my fellow female sugarmakers, sweaty and beleaguered, have labored in sugarhouses, filled with curling smoke and steam, little ones on their backs?

How can any living, creative endeavor at all be measured in those figures?

This + this = that?

Certainly, our children cannot. A puzzle piece, neither more, nor less.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

– Matthew 6:21

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Photo by Gabriela

Stormy Spring Fever

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not only the children have spring fever; I’m afflicted, too. In this rainy afternoon, the children are outside, equipped with boots and splashed bright cheeks.

In the woods, the rain lessens. Green trout lily leaves sprinkle the forest floor profusely now, although the coltsfoots’ golden blossoms are folded up, napping away the deluge. In the cold, damp earth, my freezing fingers tugged free a few of my garlic sprouts, their pale white roots clinging deeply in the soil, winding around rouge pebbles. I chopped their savory greens and tender shoots for a salad, a taste of liquid chlorophyll, I imagine.

This is the season of secrets unearthing – last fall’s decaying fungus belly-white, frog eggs fattening near the pond’s stippled surface, the children too big for last year’s summer clothes.

We need the tonic of wildness…. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Woodbury, Vermont