#vermontspring

A $5 Rainbow-Bright Kickball

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My cheerful kids returned yesterday with a bright pink blow-up beach ball they found on a back road. The older daughter, driving, had pulled over, so the 12-year-old and her friend ran back along the ice-rutted road for the garish pink ball. At home, they mended the gash with silver duct tape.

Vermont’s March palette lies heavy on variations of white — the pureness of fresh snow, the near-gray of thawed ice refrozen with dirt particles — dark green pine, the black of gravel roads where the town crew has strewn sand, the crimson patches on redwing blackbirds.

Full of spring energy with the lengthy daylight after dinner, the girls and I walked around the neighborhood. The younger splashed through a puddle and noted she stepped over the moon’s reflection. I bought the girls a $5 kickball, striped in rainbow colors. Deep into twilight, so cold we kept blowing on our bare hands, the girls and I played four-square, that brilliantly-colored ball bouncing through the thickening dusk.

And then the girls took the ball inside and played in her bedroom, confusing the cats.

Here’s the artwork from the newest issue of Taproot, with an essay I wrote about our house. The artist’s creation is a remarkable likeness, both in architecture and emotion, although the blossom season hasn’t yet returned…..

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This Woman, My Daughter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

From seemingly out of nowhere, my youngest daughter asks me if Jesus really brought dead people back to life. I pause — there’s been no recent death in our family — before I say that might be possible.

What are miracles, anyway?

My daughters are two of the billions of people who have walked the planet. This morning, I woke thinking of my older daughter, 19 now, and the conversation she and I and my friend had last night, over dinner and knitting and the cats who played with the feathery toys my friend brought. My daughter is grown up now. Always headstrong, she’s plowed into passion and passion’s heartbreak.

The cliché for mothers is to mourn the loss of the tender, little years; this young woman and I share a whole remembered world together — just she and I — like the afternoon in her stroller when she was two and I pushed her through a thousand tedious errands in Montpelier, while she held three buttons in the shape of balloons — pink, yellow, blue — in her tiny fist. I had promised to sew those on her favorite dress. Her younger sister wore that same dress, with those same three balloon buttons.

Or the afternoon in a thunderstorm when she was four, wearing her favorite friend’s t-shirt with a frog on the front, she leaned over the porch and pulled out the neck of the t-shirt so a river of water from the roof poured down her face and body. Laughing: full of radiant joy.

Billions and billions. Over and over. There’s nothing simple about any of this. Not childhood, not growing up, not making a woman or a man’s life. And yet, here we are.

…. it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

— Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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And More Snow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We fell asleep last night with the running of little cat paws from bedroom to bedroom and beneath the silence of falling snow. The cats this morning are sleepy, purring and hungry, and the snow falls yet. Where the grass beneath the mock orange had reappeared last weekend, fresh white has smoothed that over again. One year, eight inches of snow bent down my pea shoots. The peas survived. We ate them in June.

When my daughters were two, three, even five or six, I would have despaired: not more of snowsuit weather, tussling over winter boots, soggy mittens, the creeping pace walking from woodpile to back door with armfuls of wood and a small-legged toddler.

In the way of life ever-changing, here’s a morning spread with white beauty, soundless with falling snow, temporal as anything else.

How long the winter has lasted — like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair.
In the fields the grasses are matted
and gray, making me think of June, when hay
and vetch burgeon in the heat, and warm rain
swells the globed buds of the peony…

— Jane Kenyon

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Where I Am

 

Mud Season in All Its Holy Glory

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter texts me at work: My car is stuck in the mud.

Snap, I think. I continue what I’m doing, thinking my girl can likely solve whatever she’s gotten into now. It’s the last day of February, 2018, a day so warm I’ve propped open the library door. The lilies are pushing up around the school, and I step outside with a patron to watch a woolly bear inching its way across the walk.

My daughter, laughing, calls me and tells me she could no longer drive her little Toyota on a muddy road. I just stopped! In her nice Danskos, she stayed in her car, surrounded by glistening mud. The town road crew, working nearby, asked if she was going to move, and she explained her predicament. The road commissioner had her slip over to the passenger seat. He floored her car, drove it free, and suggested she might want to stay off that stretch of road.

Ah, spring.

….I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely….

— Galway Kinnell

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Reprieve

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sunstruck afternoon in February — I opened the windows and aired out the house. The kids jumped off the back deck, ate potato chips, planned building projects we needed to start right away.

A trustee signed off on an email to me, Happy sap run. These are the intimations of sugaring season, the beginning of the thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. When we first began sugaring, twenty years ago, I believe the thaw would come in a rush and stay. Not so. Thaw and more thaw, studded with bursts of hard cold, slowly melts the frost down deep.

(I had) a revelation the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays

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Not By Light Alone

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Darn near every moment these May Vermont days, the greenery deepens, fattening mightily, rushing headlong in the chlorophyll world as if making up for winter’s lengthy dormancy.

Walking in the dusky, gently falling rain last night? How could we not love this? All that growth – leaf, blossom, peepers, owls – chorusing around us.

Likely the most unresolvable argument of my life was about darkness, with a person who insisted I not embrace the darkness, not press it near my heart. Every one of my days for nearly the past 19 years has been filled with growing babies and children, teenagers now, with beeswax crayons and playhouses made from sheets, and an endless round of apple slices; at the same time, I’ve also lived through the planting, harvest, and demise of many gardens. Every year, I pass the unknown day of my death and the days of the deaths of everyone I love, and I know, even as the thrust of spring is so mightily powerful and unstoppable, all this will change, too. Our world holds both courage and cowardice, generosity and betrayal.

I’d rather know that, too, than not.

Thanks to State 14 for picking up a blog entry of mine. What a pleasure to be included with their fine writers and photographers.

Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.

Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.

They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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