Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 162

Vegetable Queen

Back in my maple syrup selling Friday afternoons at the Hardwick Farmers Market, I spent a lot of slow afternoons talking with the farmer whose booth was beside mine. One afternoon, I confessed the potato was not my favorite food.

The farmer was horrified. The potato, he informed me, is the queen of the vegetable kingdom.

I would have placed garlic on that throne, but he was adamant civilizations had hinged on this humble food. Touché, I finally acknowledged. He’s right. Garlic is savory, but the potato is substance. The truth is, my potato ignorance was extreme. My farmer friend introduced me to blue potatoes, to Purple Majesties, Russian bananas, and his prized fingerlings. While my infant daughter gnawed at my knuckles, he told me how to cook these beauties, too. A main component of my garden is now this queen, her star-shaped lavender and white blossoms opening wide, staple of ancient worlds, blight notwithstanding.

“Appetite”

I eat these

wild red raspberries

still warm from the sun

and smelling faintly of jewelweed

in memory of my father…

my father

with the sigh of a man

who has seen all and been redeemed

said time after time

as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this.

– Maxine Kumin

 

Summertime Chaos

Every June, I have the same vision that summer signifies a smoother sailing, a leveling out of our family life. Every July, I realize how mistaken is that cliche. By July, the garden is both flourishing and struggling. The house, emptied out on sunny days, fills up again on during these all-day rains, and a shifting clutter of books, clothes, pens, gum wrappers – and just about everything else – invades every room. Somehow, the windows are all smeared disgracefully.

Chaos is part of our life, I remind myself, not a temporary phase of life-with-children, but an integral physical force in the universe. Most of all, it’s not personal to me. Nonetheless, the creative force in me rises up. Possibly someday I’ll have that inner peace where I accept the crumbles of mud on the kitchen floor. Until then, chaos and I will keep dancing our waltz. This afternoon, I think we’re evenly partnered.

That’s how I see us… against the backdrop of Nature, life, the universe, which shows so little fairness in the distribution of reward and punishment and hurts some so much more than others, but hurts us all in some way and makes us angry, sad and weary, and sometimes surprised and overjoyed by evidence of an intelligence beyond our own that’s guiding us along our way, requiring consciousness of us and rewarding perseverance with happiness and malingering with suffering, and sometimes rendering the jewel into mud, taking consciousness away from those no less deserving than ourselves….

– David Payne, Barefoot to Avalon

garlic, West Woodbury, Vermont

 

Antidote

When my teenage daughter recently spied a rattlesnake, we talked about the antidote to snakebite. Antidote: literally, a dose of a substance that’s given against a poison or illness. Antidote is an aggressive word, a noun rearing up on its hind legs and surging forward, or fiercely worming its belly-slinking way beneath razor-sharp lines of barbed wire.

Or perhaps a rose stem slid into a rifle barrel.

A child’s toothy smile after tears.

Or what I suggested to my daughter this rainy Saturday: pick up a brush, raid the paint cans in the basement, and color your walls anew. Step One on your way to solving the rest of your life.

“Warbler”

This year we have two gorgeous

yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.

The other day I stuck my head in the bush.

The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,

about the size of a honeybee. We stared at

each other, startled by our existence.

In a month or so, when they reach the size

of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

– Jim Harrison

 

Childhood

All afternoon, these two 11-year-old girls have been weaving their lives together, spinning stories, jumping on the trampoline, creating bracelets from colored rubber bands, hatching a plan with their fathers to go paddle-boarding tomorrow – these two girls who have known each other since before their own memories began to hold shape. Long past the age of teething and cloth diapers and still not yet at the age of first love and heartbreak, they’re at an age of real appreciation for each other, an easy comfort with their bodies and laughter.

In the adult world that seems to be spinning into madness, I’m struck again by the brevity of childhood – and its singular importance. Soak it up, I think, looking up from my desk as the girls wander in. Eat watermelon, filch peonies from an empty vacation house’s garden, lie on the grass and giggle. Soak up the season of childhood. 

Let it linger, children.

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out

Through the blinds and the windows and bars;

And high overhead and all moving about,

There were thousands of millions of stars….

(the adults) soon had me packed into bed;

But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,

And the stars going round in my head.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”

primroses, July, Vermont

 

Our Garden of Early Delights

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….

The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding

three clutches of phoebes, two of robins

and I am shelling the first of the season’s

peas as a merciful summer rain

falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

Woodbury, Vermont

 

The Tall and the Short of It

Running through the Atlanta airport – far larger than the Vermont village we live in – my 17-year-old daughter is the sharp one among us, pointing her younger sister and I through the crowds to the T concourse, up an escalator and a second one, laughing as we rush for our plane, breathlessly relaying how she ran in high heels last winter, alone, for the final flight into Burlington before a snowstorm.

In an underground train, the younger sister reads aloud, “Hold on when the train starts,” and then immediately asks, “Hold on to what?” Surrounded by people, the younger girl and I look up. We are both under five feet, and I stretch my hand up hopelessly for the overhead strap.

As the train lurches forward, we both clutch her older sister (a girl who is, as Raymond Carver wrote, a long tall drink of water), and everyone around us laughs out loud.

With a delayed flight, we currently remain in Atlanta, waiting with chipper Vermonters we don’t know but are beginning to, exchanging weather, geography, and history stories – beneath a stunning double rainbow.

Here’s a few lines from Thomas Christopher Greene‘s novel If I Forget You I’m reading:

She climbs into the yellow cab that is first in the line of yellow cabs. Henry is running now. He is at the window. She looks up at him – those eyes, unchanged, the pale blue of sea glass – and he stretches his hand toward the closed window and the cab lurches out into traffic, merging quickly, a damn sea of yellow cabs, and he tries to keep his eyes on the one that carries her, until he is no longer sure which one it is and a phalanx of them moves up Broadway and out of sight.

 

Atlanta airport, GA

More Than the Whole

This afternoon, my daughters baked a raspberry tart, gathering like any craftswomen the pieces of their creation: oats, sugar, butter, fruit. Thinking over the book I’m writing, like any writer I gather my pieces – characters in their tangible and intangible complexities (a green and gold wool vest, a port wine birthmark, the memory of driving rashly along a rainy street), story, and language – shaping this creation.

But a book is greater than the sum of its pages and cover, and I kept thinking of Akenfield, a nonfiction book about a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, told primarily in the villagers’ own voices. The village, too, of course, is more than the sum of its people: nurse, blacksmith, head mistress, gravedigger, odd-job man.

Now that the tart is half-eaten, made in merriment by two sisters, I see that sweet delight is more than the sum of its parts, too.

… I am willing to forgo a lot of the things other people now take for granted in order to keep Akenfield, by which I mean the deep country. The power of wonder is here…. It is man’s rightful place to live in Nature and to be a part of it. He has to recognize the evidence of his relationship to the great natural pattern in such things as flowers, crops, water, stones, wild creatures. Where he destroys such evidence… he gradually destroys a part of himself.

From the village poet in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield

Galisteo, New Mexico

Night

When we were girls, my sister and I shared innumerable books. In elementary school we began with library books (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself), and by high school we were onto James Joyce and Tom Wolfe – most recently Anthony Doerr. It’s a habit that’s spanned throughout our entire lives.

One slender book has always remained in my consciousness. Even now, I remember reading this book for the first time with my sister, the two of us horrified, by happenstance of geography and time blessedly never stepping even near the peripheral edges of the profoundest human suffering. The book is Night. 

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

– Elie Wiesel

September 30, 1928-July 2, 2016

Santa Fe, New Mexico

 

Thorny Land

My teenage daughter fears snakes. Walking in the arroyo yesterday, this Vermont girl quizzes her grandmother about the possibility of encountering a rattlesnake. Never seen one, she’s assured. Moments later, a rattler slithers near her feet, and she screams.

She glares back at me, as if I’ve magically created what she considers a devilish creature. Between us lie spiny cholla cactus, red sand, thumbnail-sized wildflowers I don’t recognize at all. We are no longer in the lush land of the Green Mountains.

Searchingly, she peers into a cluster of tumbleweed and then back at me.

Gone, I say. She waits a moment longer and then offers, You can go first now.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

– Georgia O’Keeffe

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Thirst

Out of my Vermont landscape, traveling, I’m surprised to see, again, how profoundly landscape – like the desert’s grit-filled wind – shapes perception. I gauge my world through water’s motion: Have the spring beauties spread their tiny petals? Whose garden has been dealt a killing frost? Is travel impractical because of muddy roads? When will the overcast skies break?

The New Mexican desert revolves around the exquisite geometry of light, shadow, wind, the near-absence of water: the same life-driving axis of knowledge, turning in an opposite direction.

This is the yin and yang of the earth, an energetic feedback. What happens below relates directly to what is happening on the surface and in the atmosphere and vice versa. Tectonics does not end at the ground beneath your feet. It is a dynamic system from the earth’s interior all the way into the sky and back.

Craig Childs, Apocalyptic Planet

 

Santa Fe, New Mexico