Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Vermont Libraries

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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

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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

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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…

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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

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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

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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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