Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Gifts, Flowers, Vegetables

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I’m in a meeting negotiating options to spend a gift to my library when I leave the table to check my laptop for a program’s fees in my email.

I see my daughter, off from work that afternoon, has sent me a photo. That’s all: a photo. She’s somewhere in Vermont, where I’m not particularly sure, driving around in her little blue Toyota she’s named Sammy.

The trustees have spread around the center table in our one-room library. An elderly woman reads in one corner, while her husband works at his laptop in an opposite corner. Two children play on the floor.

When the couple leaves, I walk them out, and the children and I pick cucumbers and zucchini from the garden around the sandbox. The plants are wildly producing. The husband and wife are both 90. They’re headed back to Massachusetts for the winter. We look each other in the eyes and say, Have a good winter. See you next summer.

This is a way of saying that our deepest spiritual, religious, and psychological problems are extremely simple. Just go out and look at the sky. Get to know where you are. Heaven is there for all to see.

— Alan Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

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Photo by Molly S.

 

August First

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August 1st dawns quietly — the songbirds winding down, the dew slipping in silently overnight — save for the cats who mew in hunger.

Yet another summer day, a small kind of miracle that will disappear, a day promising to be packed with work and obligations, with laundry hung on the line, and a very long list on a scrap of paper beside me.

But it’s August. Just a few blocks from where I sometimes work in Burlington is a fine bakery named after an even finer poem by Hayden Carruth.

August First

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done…..

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Hardwick Reservoir, Vermont

 

End of July, Postcard From Hardwick, VT

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Until she was 18, my older daughter lived on a dead-end dirt road, surrounded by mixed hardwood forest, dense conifers along the house’s northern boundary. Walk ten minutes from our house now — all right, maybe six minutes — and we’re deep in the woods again. Every evening, hermit thrush sing behind our house.

While July is stunningly beautiful across Vermont, I see how quickly July varies from home to home. Where do the pollinators flock? Just a few miles from our former house, we see cardinals. Here, the water is nearby, and the mornings are misty.

Yet another boon to Vermont summer — walk just a little in sandals and the wildness surrounds you.

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,” said my mother. “Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

— Cheryl Strayed, Wild

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Site of former pest house, Hardwick, VT

Last Sunday in this July

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early Sunday morning, the cat wakes me by biting my toes. Get up! Get up!

Camping on a lake, my younger daughter wrote us news of the loons calling crazily all night long. I think of her listening to those ghostly, ineffably beautiful songs, how years from now she’ll hear loons calling and think of sleeping on that lake shore.

At an art opening recently, a friend and I heard the artist speak. The artist said sometimes you see life more clearly, with precision, and other times through a mist or fog.

This morning, fog has already melted from garden. On my list of clear-thinking things to do — bake a pie with my 19-year-old. Swim.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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We’re All Authors

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Yesterday, while my 19-year-old fried beef for dinner yesterday, I kept handing her vegetables to chop — onions and garlic I just pulled, some leek thinnings, a few leaves of kale.

She chopped and stirred and talked. She gives me the story of her life, daily. Tempestuous and brave and loyal by nature, her life is chock-full. When I was that age, I drove an old VW bug I bought for $200 with waitressing cash. A boyfriend taught me to adjust the valves. I was shy, so terribly shy. When I tell my younger daughter just how shy I was, she doesn’t believe me. Last summer, a woman hollered out her car window at me for jaywalking in downtown Hardwick, I walked over to her, and — while she was marooned in construction traffic — I offered her an earful about driving too fast and why I jaywalk. Understandably, my daughter was mortified. Good lord, woman of that car, if you ever read this, I apologize.

Stories change. All our stories change, through grief and sadness, but through wonderfully fantastic things, too. I see my tall, lovely young-woman daughter pondering this — where do I want to steer my life? Interspersed with vegetable washing, I’m glad to be the listener, offering an occasional Socratic, What do you think you should do?

Anyone who listens to Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugars podcast might want to check out Almond’s new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to our Country? 

Almond writes:

I’ve placed my faith in stories because I believe them to be the basic unit of human consciousness. The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

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Postcard from Vermont, July

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

An elderly woman and I stand in the library’s open door, sheltered by the overhang, watching rain move in, great billows of fine drops rushing across the field.

Summer people visit the library on these steamy afternoons, in a their winding-down, relaxed, vacationing way. We’re different here, one man tells me. I like how we are in Vermont. 

Boys with their faces painted a greasy blue-and-black circle around the library and school, hiding in the woods and behind the greenhouse, in an elaborate game. Two best-friend girls stroll in, return books, ask for fish crackers, and request more books. When I leave that afternoon, the girls are still there, lying on the slide’s top platform, staring at the cloud-heavy sky, talking.

All afternoon, bits and pieces of people’s lives knock into mine: a woman applying for a job online, a saleswoman over the phone, a couple who needs a letter written.

Later, when I’m alone again, gathering strewn puppets and closing windows, I realize my phone has a message. Someone dialed my number without realizing it, and I stand in the doorway again, in the sweet post-rain scent, listening to that odd audio window of others’ conversation. A gangly-legged heron flies overhead, then disappears over the trees. I erase that unintended recording and lock up for the day.

When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
‘We were always,’ he
said glancing down, ‘a
fool two years ago.

— Donald Hall

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