Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Away Game

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Leaves drift through the air wherever I go these days, in autumn’s near-constant breeze, whooshing out of sight.

At a high school soccer game beneath lights, bundled in boots and hats, we watch the boys cheer for the girls. In the second half, the boys brush off an impending fight with a rival team. For just a moment, we wonder, Which way will this go? Overhead, Vs of geese call loudly, heading out of here, south. The scent of frying hamburgers tantalizes.

The high school’s the most run-down I’ve seen in Vermont, the field patchy, dwarfed by an enormous research facility for adult work, gleaming in the setting sun. Somehow, we have the sense the adults’ cafeteria serves up finer fare than subsidized school lunch. My daughter’s high school is one of the state’s scrappier — no secret there — but much more moves beneath the sailing soccer balls.

All the long drive home, the river swallowed up in the dark, we talk and talk and talk, passing the time and the miles, our two headlights illuminating the first traces of snow.

Home through the woods,
through the chill rain.

The last leaves down
and sodden on the ground.

The end of autumn...

—David Budbill

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Neither Wolf Nor Dog

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter looked up from her geometry homework and asked why I was laughing. I shared with her a few lines about soup and dogs from my library book — a book one of my blog readers and commenters had recommended —Kent Nerburn’s Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an American Elder.

I’m lucky enough to scavenge time to read — and I read fairly quickly — but this particular book I wasn’t in any particular rush to finish. So much of our world is talk, talk and words, words. This book is filled with silence, too. Sometimes in life, too, you’re fortunate to read a book at precisely the time in your life you need to meet that book.

Many thanks for the recommendation. I’m dropping this book in the library return box this morning, passing it along to another friend.

Everything happens for a reason. You’re here for a reason. It’s time you stopped worrying about some damn truck and got figuring out what that reason is.

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Little Cabbages

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While spectating my daughter’s soccer game, I surreptitiously watch a little boy dig a small hole in the frost-killed grass. He’s met a new friend, I surmise, another younger sibling, and the two of them make homes for a handful of plastic dinosaurs — nests the boys call them.

On their knees, they’re completely entranced. When the game’s over, they wander away, each to their own family.

In our garden, it’s Brussels sprout season now. Beneath the black edges, the tiny vegetables are perfectly green, tender as spring.

My favourite vegetable, without a doubt,
Is the humble, but holy, Brussels sprout.

— Angela Wybrow

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In Praise of Pie

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

When I came home from work, my daughter was cutting up apples on the kitchen table while her cat lay beside her on a chair, gnawing a leaf of chard from the garden. How many pies have we baked and eaten together?

Really, there’s one predominant theme in our family life — I could list reading and work, hiking, friends and so on — but eating ties us together. Haphazard as our lives may seem at times, each of us doing a slew of things, when we’re together, we cook together; we eat together.

My daughter dug into the bag of cookie cutters and stamped out a heart from the scrap dough. She pressed the heart on the center of the pie and took fork tines to the pie’s edges, crimping them prettily.

There are
other things you can do in Vermont. So goes the
rumor: like observe how the clouds thin
deceptively before blizzard, let go of yr
natural hostility & don’t accuse anyone of
running a junkyard; he’s only making
his ends meet.

— Barbara Moraff

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Long Trail, Johnson, Vermont

 

Find

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My running route leads me into the woods behind the town’s community gardens, through a path flanked by frost-nipped goldenrod. A hundred years ago, the town’s granite industry spread over that field. Just before I cross a wooden bridge into the forest, I always pause at a historic sign marking where an industrial building once stood.

Really? I think. Only dog walkers and I, an occasional kid fishing, wander along there now.

My route follows the former railroad bed, its tracks ripped up for scrap metal in WWII. Yesterday, just over the bridge, I see the rain and erosion have revealed a chunk of granite, about the size of a library book, the number 12 marked on it.

Whose hands printed that? And with what indelible ink? I tried to pry the rock up and carry it away. The rock was determined to remain — for a while longer, at least.

An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.

— Anna Swir

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Scarlet and Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On my way to pick up my daughter from soccer practice, I leave early and take a walk behind the community gardens, where the wildness of Woodbury Mountain meets the edge of town.

All day, rain has drenched us, and the scent of broken leaf and dogshit and the hummusy, earthy fragrance of wet soil mixes. There’s no one here, in the woods where I’m sheltered somewhat from the downpour, walking among the giant pieces of granite — debris from the town’s former claim-to-fame industry — among the brushy goldenrod, asters, and burdock.

The thing about Vermont foliage — every year — is that I expect the season to be done, finished, dulled to gray, over, and suddenly the red appears. Silently, stunning, often brought out in its finest with a cold rain.

Every year, it’s the same nostalgic sensation — I’m a third-grader again, walking home from school, scuffling through knee-high piles of leaves, happy to be free from the classroom and play outside all afternoon. Every year, the season change is tinged with sadness at the passing of time, and yet, silently, fiercely, beautiful.

In a handful of seasons,
water and cold and dirt

get under the paint and it falls
from our houses like old bark.

— Kerrin McCadden

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