#VTstrong

Black Soil, White Snow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Day whatever it is of the Stay Home order. On a virtual school board meeting that evening, we began asking each other who’s looking out their windows. I’d been staring out mine for a while, at snow falling briskly. Like December.

My friend emails about the year 1816 “and froze to death.  Wouldn’t that be something?  We could relive that dreadful summer at the same time as reliving the flu pandemic of 1918…”

The next morning, after I shovel snow off the back porch, I have another work call — something in pre-pandemic days that might have been handled by a few emails opens into a conversation about this stranger’s high school senior daughter, and college tuition, and poverty in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

The cat lies sleeping in my feet in sunlight on my kitchen floor. There’s this elongated  sense of time. Why not keep talking?

Much later that evening, my daughters and I take a walk through the woods where the light falls through the bare forest, still without its canopy. On the floor, we discover trilliums, Dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, and — everywhere — spring beauties.

Day whatever. Tuesday or Wednesday — somewhere in there. The peas are up in the garden.

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Opening….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Here’s a strange thing — we had bring-your-own dinner on our lawn last night, around the fire, with two friends — socially distant, with an awful lot of chatting and catch up.

Now, I’m beginning to accept that our world will never return to how I once understood it, even a few months ago. But how, and when, will we begin to understand each other again? Relate to each other? Be with each other? So much uncertainty.

Maybe this is how the world begins to open up again — eating chili on the grass, smoke drifting over the garden, my daughter’s friend bundled in her coat, a hat jammed on her head, laughing.

When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.

― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

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Melting Butter, Hot Rolls

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

By now, we’ve settled into a string of days, weeks, maybe months, of my work folding into my daughter’s life at home. I work; she does whatever passes for virtual high school. I drink coffee. She eats trail mix. She’s borrowed her sister’s camera, taken a few online mini classes, and then heads out.

Among the many, many strange things about this Stay Home order is that the three of us have managed to get along so well, despite my intermittent weeping woods walks. Crabby me — with my endless laptop hours — my teen who fantasizes about driving to the California coast, and her sister, age 21, who relinquished moving out, to stay with us. As a divorced parent, I don’t take getting along as any given. In all the unexpected silver linings in all of this, there’s this interesting turning inward, back to the home, when so much in our culture has pushed us outward, away from home.

Like everything, I know this time won’t last — and there are many things about it I won’t miss — the utter uncertainty of work and money, the isolation from other adults, a public world of masks and frightened eyes. But baking potato rollswith the teen? That I’m happy to do.

Instant coffee, for example, is a well–deserved punishment for being in a hurry to reach the future.

— Alan Watts

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Sun and Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A Sunday of skipping the news, opening the house windows, hanging out the laundry. A brilliantly sunny day — when I put my shovel into the garden, pull weeds, and empty buckets of manure.

All afternoon, we’re in the sunlight, the grass around the garden emerald. On the other side of my garden fence, families walk in the cemetery — teens with parents, little kids running ahead, and dogs on leashes. The neighbors’ three-year-old chases last fall’s dead leaves, blowing in the merest breeze.

The girls make garlic knots for dinner, and we eat them with carrot sticks, talking, talking.

I know there’s a lesson here — about slowing down, staying home, putting your hands in the earth — a lesson that would have been much harder had the day sleeted. Sleet, too, is possible in Vermont’s May. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the day’s rejuvenation, this bright spot to carry us along.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

— Ted Kooser

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Marvelous May

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Vermont May is a fairytale world — brilliant spring flowers, black manure, green grass — and, this year, the strange lurking demon of coronavirus.

I’ve lived in New England for most of my life, and yet every year, spring never ceases to amaze me with its beauty. Birdsong, a forest floor sprinkled with pink and white spring beauties, gold daffodils. The lilacs are budding — again, this year, we will have lilacs, their fragrance sweetly scented around our house.

The neighbors with their three little boys are home, always home, blowing bubbles to us. I sow pea seeds, pull leaves from the rose beds. Afterward, my arms are covered with scratches as though I have fought a lion. The woodchucks multiply around us. I check my garden fence.

And yet, we seem stuck in some weird pause. Strangely, instead of texting my brother about summer hiking or Maine plans, we text back and forth about trailheads closed, unemployment, printing money.

Day by day, we text. Seed by seed, I sow my garden.

O the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!

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Home — where we are

Squill

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We’re into the third calendar month of the Stay Home order — I know this only by the date and time in the upper corner of my laptop — pretty much my compass to the exterior world these days. That — and an ongoing scrawl in a notebook that lists chores I cross off one by one to keep my paycheck coming. The paycheck I’m immensely grateful for.

These days, the old demons arise  — what am doing with my life? How have I failed my children? Is it normal my youngest wants to go anywhere else (yes, resoundingly, I know that is).

At the end of a rainy afternoon, as the weather parts, my daughters insist I trek through the raspberry and blackberry brambles behind our house. On the other side of the brambles, they show me an apple tree surrounded by emerald grass, and tiny blue squill sprinkled everywhere. They caution me not to step on the flowers.

This is Vermont spring — wet and muddy, largely brown, studded with small radiant flowers. Everyday, the green insistently pushes forward, brighter and stronger. That’s where we are.

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu