wildflowers

Gold Smudge

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My work these days reflects the weather’s dreariness — grant-writing — work I implicitly believe I should feel jazzed and excited about — and maybe I will, maybe I’ll get there, but grants so often feel like closed doors, of no room at the inn and all.

To counteract that — and the terrible string of cancer deaths from a Waldorf school where my daughter was once a student — I’m holing up reading novels. Despite the rain, my daughters and I are in the woods every day. Even on late days when I’m at work, they send me photos. One daughter is just out of childhood, the other has but a handful of years left. Observing them, I wonder what of my parenting will stick with them.

The younger daughter and I found our first unopened trillium yesterday. The older daughter asked the blossom’s color. The younger asked if it mattered. Yes, her sister answered.

Everywhere, yellow smears of blossoming forsythia.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Natsume Soseki

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Croquet before the green….

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

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Old Receipts & Agriculture

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Unraveling a long trail of receipts today, I realized how poorly that paper trail tells our story. How can an equipment receipt for nine thousand dollars illustrate what those nine thousand dollars really cost our family? How many gallons of syrup I poured, steaming, from a three-gallon stainless steel pail into a giant barrel? With a baby on my back, I was always steeled to keep those tiny fingers from the golden flow of scalding maple syrup. How many of my fellow female sugarmakers, sweaty and beleaguered, have labored in sugarhouses, filled with curling smoke and steam, little ones on their backs?

How can any living, creative endeavor at all be measured in those figures?

This + this = that?

Certainly, our children cannot. A puzzle piece, neither more, nor less.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

– Matthew 6:21

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Photo by Gabriela

Love Better

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

What makes a life? A friend of mine told me she once took stock of her life, tallying.

How to measure a life? By a house, bank accounts, grandchildren at the Thanksgiving dinner table? Or perhaps none of this. When I look at my sprawl of past and present, the one thing I think is: love better. The best and most fulfilling things I have done have been freely given. Perhaps this is why to love as a parent (while unbelievably difficult at times) is so fulfilling; any morsels of childish love passed back are pure gravy, savory sweetness.

I’ve never known love as greeting card, prettied up with pastel hearts. Love is as indomitable a force as a woman’s contractions in labor, bearing down to bring a new being into this world, or slender coltsfoot blossoms cracking apart winter’s ice. Love better: surely that would mean widening your heart in unexpected ways.

Today, in this April brown and beige world, I saw a cardinal fly into a thicket, a rare bright bird this far north. I went looking for the hidden little feathered creature. I knew it harbored in those tangled branches, its tiny heart hammering away fiercely in this cold.

And now, I have my own household of teenage girls to attend to, with their own laughing and open hearts……

Locking Yourself Out,
Then Trying to Get Back In

You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of a life, okay….

I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I’d done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.

– Raymond Carver

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April in Vermont

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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Blossoms v. Trash

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Many years ago, when we took my younger daughter to the ocean for the first time, she had one question. She was barely three, and such a little girl her older sister often carried her. Driving to Maine, we described how long the beach would be. She asked, Will there be sand for everyone?

We assured her there would be plenty of sand.

Again, traveling across Vermont, I realize just how much of this state there is, how much forest, stream, mountain, sky; we are wealthy beyond imagining. Walking along an unfamiliar street in Burlington today, by the cement’s side sprouted a cluster of wild golden flowers, a blossom I had never seen, tiny beauties the size of my smallest fingernail. Later, driving home with VPR, I counseled myself to tally up my blessings. So many people in the world battle over scant resources, and here I am, finding flowers instead of cigarette butts.

The morning glories
bloom, securing the gate
in the old fence

— Basho

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