#wildflowers

Stealing Flowers Gone Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Bear Pond Books in Montpelier reopened yesterday, nearly two months after the July flood, beloved bookstore in Vermont’s capital city. “The flood” sounds Biblical, and I’ll note that the Old Testament has never been known as a Hallmark read.

Last fall, I often parked my car behind the town garage so I could run on the rail-trail. On a heap of gravelly slag, a variety of yellow asters blossomed. At the fall’s end, shortly before frost, I brought a bucket and shovel and dug up a clump of stalks. I buried that clump in my garden. The leaves emerged this spring. By then, I had forgotten that re-homing of the yellow aster. Now, the green buds are on the verge of opening.

There’s a submerged theme between the three things in this post that I imagine only I can see— the bookstore and the flood, my stolen flowers, Mary Ruefle’s lines about clouds: the unstoppable force of our planet, immense, immense. Meanwhile, our toiling: the bookstore folks carrying out mud bucket by bucket, me with my shovel and a small handful of what might appears to be merely weeds.

Mary Ruefle:

All that summer there were so many clouds we

didn’t know what to do with them. They overflowed the

sky – they were on our streets, in our homes, in our draw-

ers, and in our cabinets. They were in our cars and on our

buses, I even saw them in taxis. No one had ever seen so

many clouds, to the extent that, as often happens with a

glut, no one could remember a time without them…

From My Private Property

Experiencing the Unprecedented.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In the night, lightning again.

Restless, I stand outside, the few lights of the village scattered like electric breadcrumbs. Long past midnight, a lone semi grinds along Route 14. Otherwise, no one.

July, balmy, sweet with the scent of the neighbors’ newly cut lawn. Again, I’ll reiterate how I’m lucky to have bought a house on a hill, that the Vermont’s floods haven’t so much as cut a channel through my garden.

And yet here’s the thing: I’ve spent years of my life wandering the unevenness of riverbanks, beginning with the mighty Nooksack when I lived in Washington. I’ve spent hours now wandering the silty Lamoille banks, its edges and bridges and trees crammed with tangled branches and uprooted trees, with every imaginable broken bit of junk: kids’ toys and potty seats, tarpapered walls, tires, pipes and plastic bags and slews of clothing. Two cars, one flipped upside down, hammered by boulders, not easily identified as a car.

There’s nothing for me to gain or find here, save for the chance conversations with strangers and acquaintances who appear driven in the same way I am, wading through muddy weeds and beneath fallen trees, insects devouring my ankles. This is the edge territory, where dismal human activity bleeds into the roar of nature. I scramble up the bank and take the long way back to the pavement so I can pass through a thicket of blooming cup flowers, green stalks and golden blossoms taking in my body.

In the New Yorker:

We keep experiencing things that are unprecedented, worse than anything anyone can remember, even as we’re told that they will become common. 

Wildflowers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last summer, my neighbors put a Black Lives Matter sign in their front yard. The sign was stolen. They purchased another. The second sign was stolen. The patten repeated. Our neighbors brought the sign in at night. They placed the sign between our two houses. They kept at it.

Earlier this summer, I noticed a sign had appeared on their lawn again, above a tarp spread out near the sidewalk. I didn’t note much of that. It’s a way I don’t usually walk in the non-snowy months. I nearly always cut through the cemetery or take a different side street.

But last night, walking home in a faint rain, I saw they had planted a row of wildflowers where that tarp had been. The flowers are about knee-high, festooned with delicate blooms. Their sign remains.

Hardwick, Vermont