Vermont

How To Write a Story….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Any writer knows a story can be told a myriad of ways. Today, visiting a school that once hovered near the brink of disintegration, I realized that school’s story could once have been told in numbers that reflected too much poverty, too little resources and not enough skills: too little – and too little again, and again, and maddeningly again – all the way around.

Instead, this is now a story of growing gardens and colorful classes – and thriving children. Who decides when a story needs to be rewritten? For a school? Or for yourself?

I remember Mary Oliver’s line posing the question about what to do with your one wild and precious life. Create at least one or two fine things, I thought. Leave one or two marks for better, and not for worse.

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried across the sky by beautiful clouds.

– Ojibway proverb

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Hardwick, Vermont

Spring Fever

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Since the time change, my ten-year-old daughter cannot sleep. At 10:30 last night, she peered from her bunk bed, cheshire cat-like in the dim room, insisting she couldn’t sleep because she was excited. But I don’t know what I’m excited about!

I reached up and held her slim, warm fingers. It’s spring fever, I told her.

But I don’t have a fever….

All day long, as much as possible, she’s outside, poking a stick in running streams, painting her fort beneath the pine trees, biking up and down with road with her friend. The two of them run into the kitchen, breathlessly excited about spying on her father and his friend in the sugarhouse. Their stories spill out about biking through icy puddles and finding turkey tracks along the road. Beneath our boots, more of the earth reappears in its muddy glory every day, shaking off winter. Spring!

….And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed in Summer”
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Molly S. Photo/Woodbury, Vermont

Martenitsa, or Bulgarian Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Years ago, I worked with a Bulgarian family who, every March, made little yarn dolls of red and white wool. Red for the heat of summer, white for winter. We were all friends at that workplace, and everyone wore those little gifts of martenitsa dolls until they frayed. Then, our Bulgarian friends insisted, spring was here.

Spring may come quicker in Bulgaria than it does in Vermont.

With snow falling today, the little girl left her forest fort alone, reading library books by the wood stove and eating popcorn.

Another way, perhaps, to think of martenitsa is as a great leveler: even winter’s savage teeth will yield to the persistence of spring.

But not yet… not quite yet… Vermont’s version of martenitsa is maple sugaring. Fire, sap, sugar: all eventually overtaken by budding.

The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.

– Helen & Scott Nearing, The Good Life

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Woodbury, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

 

A Starlit Night

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, my daughters and I walked the neighbor’s child home in the dark. We had been outside for a while, playing a variation of tag with flashlights and laughter, resulting in the older daughter slipping on ice and lying elbows-down in mud. With the flashlights off, we walked along the muddy road beneath the starlight. The night was balmy for mid-March, suffused with the scent of thawing earth: a rich odor so pervasive it was a constant companion. The moon, a white curve, shone a pure, yellow-white light.

On the way home, we saw our house through the bare hardwoods, the strings of little lights the girls nailed along the eaves twinkling. We passed just one house along our road where a single light shone; they must have been gone. It was just the girls and the star-and-moonlight and the mud and I. The peepers are not stirring yet, and none of the woodland creatures called. Beneath our boots, the earth shifted, softening, giving up its winter frost. My older daughter said, I could walk forever, on a night like this.

This morning, watching a single robin tugging at our lawn, I thought of my older daughter, and how, before long, this girl will be on her womanly journey, walking different patches of earth – in boots, or sandals, or heels – beneath this same exquisitely beautiful sky. I opened the window and listened for birdsong, relishing the season we’re in.

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

– Issa

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Vermont, Mach 2016

The Sweet Spring Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Signs of spring:

The school busses won’t travel on the backroads due to impassably muddy stretches. The superintendent sends an email: Drop off your kids to meet a bus at the corner barn…

An enormous flock of singing blackbirds in a single maple tree beside the post office.

Steam from the sugarhouse sweetening cold fog; April’s come early, this year.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain…
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night…

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

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Hardwick, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

The Vermont Season of Pre-Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A number of years ago, I conceived an idea that our family’s financial salvation lay in wedding favors. With our maple syrup, colored card stock, a paper cutter, and raffia, I filled tiny bottles with syrup and bow-tied on little cards printed with hopeful things like Julie and Josh, July 8, 2001, Eat, Drink & Be Merry. Or: A sweet beginning. In the long run, my fortune didn’t lie there, but I met interesting people at profoundly pivotal junctures in their lives.

One April, in an intense mud season, a couple unexpectedly drove out to our house. We were deep in the midst of sugaring with a three-year-old. On our back road and driveway – and all around the house where the snowbanks were fiercely melting – lay mud that sucked at our knee-high boots with an audible glop. The winter had been its usual terror, and immense snowbanks mounded all around the house, interspersed by our trodden paths. My gorgeous little girl, with unbrushed hair, walked around shirtless in overalls and mud boots, a yellow plastic sand toy shovel in one hand.

The couple had heard about our wedding favors and had arrived to order in person. He and my husband talked about Ford pickups while I chatted with the woman. She kept looking around, distressed. It’s just so muddy, she kept saying. How do you stand it? Where she cringed from dirt and inconvenience,  I saw sunlight so intensely bright it lay like shining gold coins on the shallow dips of water that spread out all around our house, as though we were a ship on a rippling sea. I knew mud as the world’s thrust from winter to spring, the give from one season to another. My heart lightened with joy at the end of a bitter cold season and the imminence of wildflower season. I knew coltsfoot would shortly bloom.

…Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and
violets.
Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.

– Louise Gluck, from “March”

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