Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 144

Launching, Laughing (and Learning)

Stronger than espresso, spring roars into Vermont this Sunday afternoon.

Busy, busy, those singing robins building their nests. Busy me, emptying ash buckets and raising mud-soaked pallets from a wood pile burned to cinders back in January.

But it’s the kids who are most fiercely passionate about their work: it’s the opening of the Trampoline Season, requiring a search under the basement stairs for a missing spring, socks with gripping marks dug from a drawer, a stepladder precariously sunk in a snowbank as a launching pad for jumping.

The kids intend to grow six inches taller this year. They have work to do. And they are out there, doing what needs to be done in the realm of childhood. Finally: spring is on board with their plans.

Here’s a few lines from my late-night reading:

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks in a row – spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences – even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

– Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

 

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Vermont Libraries

Yesterday, on my way to a state library conference, I exited I-89 and took a short-cut, trading an urban confluence along the Connecticut River for a winding dirt road.

Library conference? Ho-hum, you’d think. Instead, Vermont’s department of libraries is staffed with witty and super-smart people, full of insight and generosity. The second-in-command I ate lunch with offered to attend my trustee meeting.

Vermont has its large libraries, but the room yesterday was filled with many “library directors” like myself – primarily female – heading up tiny often one-room libraries, doing everything from chatting with kids about graphic novels and puppies to submitting data and vacuuming the carpet.

Zeal is a word I rarely use, but, quirky as librarians often are, they embody the best of democratic principals, ruggedly determined to preserve not only individual liberty and privacy but also the freedom to think, read, write, create.

Couple this with a reading last night of two writers at my library, packed full with appreciative townspeople. Antidote is the word I held in mind last night.

Two inches of fresh snow this morning. Temperatures in the seventies predicted next week…..

I wondered what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the scorn of the South….

Now, how could I find out about this Mencken? There was a huge library near the riverfront, but I knew that Negroes were not allowed to patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds of the city. I had gone into the library several times to get books for the white men on the job. Which of them would now help me to get books? And how could I read them without causing concern to the white men with whom I worked? I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and feelings from them, but I knew that I would create hostility if I went about the business of reading in a clumsy way.

Richard Wright, from Black Boy, 1944

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Dede’s Book

A day of cold rain, when I think of Janisse Ray’s line: Some days, all day, rain falls.  Driving home, I take a detour and follow the river, swollen threateningly along its banks, grabbing at trees still barren with winter.

All through graduate school in Bellingham, Washington, I wrote of flooding rivers, clogged septic tanks, the persistence of moisture.

In Montpelier this afternoon, the lights are already glowing on, and it’s poetry month. Poetry: not of sterilized honey, but nourishing, sweet and yet filled with the debris of dead bees.

At Bear Pond Books, I buy Dede Cummings’ beautiful new book of poetry. Oh Dede. On this April day fattening itself with water, wisely using the sodden gloom, readying for the splendor of blooms, I stand in the aisle, devouring her words. A friend of mine, reading a new book of Mary Oliver’s, said she always found poems she knew were written just for her. Then she said, But maybe many others think that way, too.

Marriage

I am not the cause of your misery

I am peepers in springtime in the dark pond

I am footsteps and shadow approaching on the dark road

I watch for salamanders but none of them are crossing on this dry night.

I measure my steps, and I count my dreams:

I am driven home by drizzle, by children.

A small vase of crocus blossoms

you left on the cutting board this morning

reminds me of what we once had.

– Dede Cummings, To Look Out From

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Primordial Ooze

If there’s one overarching image for springtime in rural Vermont, mud might be it.

With this rain, we’re deep in the season now, rutted roads and marshes of mud surrounding the house, bleeding up through melting snow. Come, come, bring us the woodland trilliums and spring beauties.

Restacking my fallen woodpile in the shed, assessing what remains, I find a hard-used outgrown child’s scooter, the green ball from our croquet set, a valuable cache of birch bark I’d stashed for kindling, and the center row of wood that was mud-covered when I’d stacked it.

The firewood had been delivered on a sunny August afternoon by a young woodcutter who dumped it in piles around the shed. A quarreling neighbor, in a fit of pique, had used his tractor to shove one of my piles into the mud. Now, that neighbor’s moved on. I lifted a piece of wood and banged it against the woodshed, loosening the dried mud.

How’s that for a literary metaphor in one piece of maple? The craziness of human relations, the sullying of sacred hearth, metamorphosis of mud, and that spinning cycle of change and unending Becoming.

Spring is not a season of Hallmark pastels in my world, but tiny treasures of crocuses  and snowdrops, the memory of my teenage daughter as she stepped out on the porch when the young woodman arrived that August afternoon. She was cooking dinner and carried a clove of garlic and a sharp knife. Welcome, she said to woodcutter, with her wide smile. We’re glad to see you.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

– Alan Watts

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And Then This…

Yesterday, in the early frosty morning, my daughter and I stood in her elementary school’s muddy parking lot, with no one around, in a brief pause between kids and adults coming and going. Red-wing blackbirds chorussed in the leafless branches of a maple tree. As long as I live, I can’t imagine ever tiring of that melody.

Even with the frost, the morning already smelled of thawing mud. We could sense the earth and its critters shaking off winter’s slumbers.

Like that: the light of April rushing back in. Spring.

….In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
time was endless….

– Louise Glück, “The Silver Lily”

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Stranger’s Gift

A friend stops by the library on my shift and offers hand-me-downs from her coworker I’ve never met. I lift pastel cotton t-shirts, a linen skirt, an embroidered sleeveless blouse: summer things that whisper to me of sunnier days, bare feet on grass, a season not too far off in Vermont’s snowy April but requiring memory and imagination.

At the paper bag bottom are two handmade sweaters. A knitter myself, I lift the blue one and immediately see this is a pattern I would have loved to knit, in this well-spun wool. The knitter was ordered, with evenly placed buttons and mirror sleeve caps, and practical, too: one cuff has a pattern slip I might have made and not redone.

While my friend keeps talking, I ease my arms into the sweater, and, although I’m so small I’m nearly in the land of the Oompla Loompas, the cardigan fits me perfectly, all the way down to the right length of sleeves, as if this unknown creator was my doppelgänger.

The second, white sweater I merely admire with my fingertips and leave for someone else, whose name I’ll never know.

Don’t touch my plumtree!

Said my friend and saying so…

Broke the branch for me.

– Bashō

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Photo by Gabriela

 

The Pleasures of Parenting

Standing in line at the DMV this afternoon, I recognized a local poet in the waiting room reading The New York Review of Books. As the line was long, I stood watching the poet and his teenage daughter converse about something in the Review. She wore high heeled red leather boots, laces neatly tied around her ankles.

Still waiting in line while my daughters walked around Montpelier in gently-falling snow, I remembered an article my own father had forwarded me about the name of the Buddha’s son: Rahula, which means fetter.

Like most parents I know, my life is intensely fettered, by some unnecessary things perhaps, but bound also by the everydayness of waiting in line for a license renewal, something on the surface overly simplistic and sometimes downright irritating. Yet when my girls walked across the marble floor of that office building, with snowflakes melting in their eyelashes, laughing at some joke between them they had no need to share to with me, I wouldn’t have traded these fetters for the moon.

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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Here In Kid World

My daughter sends me a photo via email with the subject line “Awesomeness.” How cool is that?

Yesterday, home after work, with dinner not yet made, and the house messy with potential buyers expected the next morning, a litany of chores from unwashed breakfast dishes to a fish tank bubbler needing repair, I first opened the box with my laptop battery. A $15 replacement I’ve put off for months.

The heavy lithium battery lay in my hand, and I guiltily wondered what strangers had made this toxic thing.

My daughter held the plastic bubble wrap. “Can I pop this? Please?”

I put her off, wanting to know if I’d ordered the right-sized battery, not paying any attention to my child at all, still thinking of my afternoon with its entanglements of adult problems.

From the plastic, she squeezed a bubble and held it up to the little lights in the house. Look through this, she asked. And then I’m finally smart enough to lay aside my jumbled thoughts and peer through her vision.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

R. L. Stevenson

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Photo by Gabriela

Squishy Season

‘Tis the season of mud in Vermont. I once had a neighbor (now relocated back to an enormous city) who hated mud. Her daughter and my daughter were both little then, with rubber boots and pink raincoats decorated with kitties, and the girls adored splashing in March and April puddles, digging with sticks in the ditches along our roadsides, and baking mud cakes in kitchens they built with fallen branches, on carpeted floors of pine needles. Sweet days.

The girls spent many more hours at my house than at hers, shedding their filthy and soaked clothes on our porch and sprawling before the wood stove to warm up, eating popcorn and drinking honeyed tea and giggling. Sweet days.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, “This is and no mistake.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Burlington, Vermont

One More Reason to Like Vermont

Vermont’s Congressional delegation came to our local high school yesterday, Hazen Union in Hardwick – Bernie Sanders with his mighty vehemence and voice, Leahy with his longevity, and Welch with his even-handed thoughtfulness. Welch joked that Vermont’s delegation could meet in an elevator – and does.

But Bernie was the one who got the packed gymnasium cheering loudest. He began with acknowledging that these are tough times, strange days indeed, but, nonetheless, he said, I woke up feeling pretty good this morning. To his loyal crowd of fellow citizens, this boundless optimism shone: the steadfast belief in goodwill, the persistent faith in a moral universe.

All of us share this world for a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focussed on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the decency of all human beings.

– Barack Obama

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