Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Good Weight of Firewood.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The wood man delivers me green firewood, wood I plan to burn next year, God willing. He brings bees, too, or maybe the creatures simply appear magically from my gardens or trees, hovering on this sweet-smelling-of-sap pile. The day’s flawlessly sunny, and we stand beside the wood and butterfly bush my daughter bought me, talking. His truck is 40 years old, older than him, and he yarns on from there, telling me about his sugarbush and the taps he leases and how much syrup he made last year and the year before. A former sugar maker myself, we talk the talk about reverse osmosis and arches and how he nearly but not quite burned his front pans last year. We talk ropy sap. We talk how long it takes to fill a 40 gallon drum.

I write him a check for a week’s worth of my wages. He heads out, still laughing, leaning out his window, telling me his wife expects him home for lunch.

When he’s gone, I lift a piece of maple, heft its weight, breathe in its smell. This wood man’s given me good weight.

Round Earth.

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Autumn reminds me the earth is a globe. The days shorten; dusk draws in earlier. The shadows hold a chill.

This year, purple asters spread prolifically — along roadsides, in the woods, in seemingly random sprigs around my house. The flowers flank the two pears in my front yard that someone planted years ago. One tree mightily growing, the other a persistent dwarf.

Autumn is the season of so it goes. What passed for summer this year is finished, the harvest wrapping up. In its own way, perhaps, the most poetic of all season.

Someone goes by wearing a hood
in his own darkness
not seeing the harvest moon

— Buson

The Swedish Word for Joy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The dental hygienist tells me about fishing trips to Lake Ontario, sailing far out into the lake where the land was no longer visible. Like the ocean she tells me. You can’t do that in Vermont.

With her gloved thumb, she presses on my lower jaw, my source of infection and misery and a veritable hemorrhage of money. The December before the pandemic, an oral surgeon took a scalpel to my gum and cut. A few days later, my brother and his girlfriend arrived for the holidays. He grilled on the back porch and drank beer while I leaned against the clapboards. In the kitchen, my daughters and his girlfriend cooked and baked.

On his phone, we studied footage of China, closed up and quarantined, back in the days when we couldn’t envision our own streets and highways closed up, the border closed between Vermont and my brother’s house in New Hampshire.

In a world of enormous possibilities, that bone infection is currently on the down low. The hygienist tells me I wouldn’t believe the things she’s seen — fishing, and in the dentist’s office. On my way out, she cheerily reminds me about floss.

Here’s a 100-story of mine published this morning about happiness.

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” 

— Rebecca Solnit

Facts Yet Matter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As one of the things I do to keep my household of daughter and me and two cats churning along, I spend an inordinate amount of time on minutes for a complicated development review board hearing. The writing poses the interesting questions of what to include, what to delete, clarity of the whole, simplicity of sentence. Beneath this, the minutes are a miniature of a town and the push-pull around building and change, of past and present and future, of how multiple stories of people intersect.

A deep appeal for me, writing these minutes, is that the facts matter. I arrange numbers and percentages, how these describe boards and a proposed building beneath a stand of cedars.

What I don’t include is that beyond the cedars the bank drops steeply into the water. The water is particularly clean. I’ve been swimming at the public beach for years, and I know how you can swim far out and look down at the sandy bottom. Flecks of mica glitter in the sunlight. The facts of my own story include an especially warm October day many years ago when a friend and I ventured far out into the lake. We swam among the first of the fallen red leaves. The day was so warm and the water so still.

And a line from Nikita Gill that sums up my tenor of thinking these days….

“We have all taken turns being Red Riding Hood and we have all been the wolf.” 

— Nikita Gill

In Very Vermont Fashion….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

… I stopped by an art opening in a former brick stagecoach inn. In the Vermont way, the art was eclectic and superlative, the cheese local, the diminutive cupcakes homebaked, and the company excellent. My friend is the easy kind of person who doesn’t mind stepping forward with a plate of olives in her hand and introducing herself to a former library volunteer of mine whose name I can’t quite place….

Across the dirt road is an old barn where a stone labyrinth was placed a few years back. While my friend and I were talking, we watched two strangers do an excuse me, no, excuse me, sorting out who was going to enter the labyrinth first.

Small pleasures, friends, against the inevitable chaos of life.

A Story in Here…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I visit a woman whose family bought a house on a peninsula in a glacial lake. She invites me in — a stunning place of wood and glass and French doors — nothing polished, all preserved as if it’s still World War I. There’s an enormous stone fireplace. She tells me that, after a hurricane in the 1930s, the original owner (who lived elsewhere, New York or Pennsylvania) never returned after he heard that all the trees on the peninsula were destroyed, save for eight. He sold the house to this woman’s family. Great pine trees tower over the lawn and hydrangeas.

She says to me, Imagine the view of the lake in the thirties, when the trees were all gone? That must have been stunning, too.

I drive home in a sudden windstorm. I’m passing a stand of poplars, their leaves crinkled and finished with summer. The wind blows leaves through my open car windows, over a bucket of apples, on my library books, into the lap of my skirt. Ahead of me, two cars are pulled over, blinkers flashing. A branch smashed the windshield of one car. Two young woman stand in the road, the wind circling, twigs snapping, rain beginning in earnest. One woman raises her arms in a giant Y.

There’s a story (or two) in here for sure….