#vermontliving

Ode to the Miraculous Melon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

And then there’s this: at the very end of Vermont’s summer months — August 27th, a day of jumbled work and bruised adult egos, a day of existential pondering, after a moonlit night when I consider my very genuine failings as a parent to my oldest child, a day of humidity that ends with my daughters sitting on the bank of the pond while I swim with my friend, in all that cool water, its glassine surface broken in circular ripples with biting fish, and I long to keep swimming, swimming, we drive the 30 seconds home with a garden-grown cantaloupe cradled in my hands.

The melon had already split at its oblong end, vaguely skull- and exposed-brain-esque. As I carry the melon into the kitchen, the girls eye it skeptically. Already, that cracked end is clustered with fruit flies — where did they come from? — and I brush them away quickly with my hand and open the melon with a cleaver. The orange flesh bleeds juice.

With the cleaver, I slice off irregular squares, and then I’m eating it — famished not for the fruit, not for the sugar, not for the sticky liquid — but for the sheer miracle of a hard-shelled seed turned into such sweetness from soil and rain and sunlight, for all that this summer has been — both amazing beauty and clustering flies and ugliness of split rinds and quickly — hush, wait, yes — how just momentarily — we’ll all disintegrate back into that dust.

But not yet. Not this evening, with its creamy, rising nearly-full moon, two girls and two cats, a handful of chickens, and the crickets all night long, their songs still soldiering solidly.

IMG_3092

 

Morning Notes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

An August Sunday list with the daughter:

  • put up dill pickles
  • can peaches
  • write questions for tomorrow’s interview
  • pick blackberries
  • pluck Japanese beetles from the bean vines and feed this salad to the hens
  • bake a tart in the pan found yesterday in a free pile
  • wander somewhere unknown

The screened door slamming tells me it is summer…

— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”

IMG_2923.jpg

Postcard from Vermont, July

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

An elderly woman and I stand in the library’s open door, sheltered by the overhang, watching rain move in, great billows of fine drops rushing across the field.

Summer people visit the library on these steamy afternoons, in a their winding-down, relaxed, vacationing way. We’re different here, one man tells me. I like how we are in Vermont. 

Boys with their faces painted a greasy blue-and-black circle around the library and school, hiding in the woods and behind the greenhouse, in an elaborate game. Two best-friend girls stroll in, return books, ask for fish crackers, and request more books. When I leave that afternoon, the girls are still there, lying on the slide’s top platform, staring at the cloud-heavy sky, talking.

All afternoon, bits and pieces of people’s lives knock into mine: a woman applying for a job online, a saleswoman over the phone, a couple who needs a letter written.

Later, when I’m alone again, gathering strewn puppets and closing windows, I realize my phone has a message. Someone dialed my number without realizing it, and I stand in the doorway again, in the sweet post-rain scent, listening to that odd audio window of others’ conversation. A gangly-legged heron flies overhead, then disappears over the trees. I erase that unintended recording and lock up for the day.

When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
‘We were always,’ he
said glancing down, ‘a
fool two years ago.

— Donald Hall

IMG_2847.jpg

Evening Pause

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last night, just before dusk, I walked around gathering  the croquet mallets and put them in the barn, before the predicted rain today. My daughter came out to fold towels thrown over the railings, and we listened to geese fly overhead.

That morning, I woke remembering the fall she was a year-and-a-half, and I was frantically mailing maple syrup — as if mail-ordering maple would be a cash cow, although a very small one.

To that younger mother of myself, I think, Slow down. Decades of evenings lie ahead.

I finally take my own advice to myself. I don’t weed a patch of the garden where I’d been heading. I listen to my daughter, and then she heads out into the gloaming, on a solitary walk.

…Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.
From Marge Piercy’s “More Than Enough”

IMG_2173.jpg

Three Quarters Through the Night

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

It’s a bird-eat-bird world the young woman with a hawk on her arm tells the kids in my library. The kids ask question after question, from Why is the bird’s head bobbing up and down to Why is that little screech owl in such a big box?

That bird-eat-bird world is a hungry world.

Returning home, my older daughter rolls out pizza dough. The chickens have been squawking at a woodchuck running behind the barn. I eye my newly-planted garden. The younger daughter appears with six eggs in her basket. Overhead, the turkey vultures glide in spirals.

This morning, in the early dark, rain falls. I stand on the porch in the dark, listening, too early yet for even the songbirds to have risen. The darkness smells of wet earth. I think of my bean plant seedlings, their first leaves unfurling, stretching out further, drinking in this June rain.

Green, how much I want you green.

— Lorca

IMG_2139.jpg

My Thieving Ways

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We sleep to peepers’ songs with the windows open, waking in the cool mornings.

The days are so long and light-filled that we’re out late, sometimes with gardening projects, sometimes kicking a soccer ball or just wandering around.

Behind the high school, I discover clumps of bluets about the size of a fist, the tiny light blue flowers with their golden-yolk hearts. With my daughters, I return with an old spoon and a yogurt container. The soil there is harder than I expected. My daughters drift off to the school’s hoop house, in search of a shovel. I turn the spoon around and jam its handle into the earth, prying out spindly roots. I cup them in my palm — three spoonfuls worth of beauty.

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

—Basho

IMG_1996.jpg