A Random Guest & A Snippet of Her Story

November 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Yesterday, a woman came into my library with old photos and book donations. She arrived at a quiet time, and we sat and talked, our conversation winding around to her grandmother — a midwife who studied via a correspondence course while raising a brood of children.

In those days, the quarries in Woodbury were running at their peak, shipping marble and granite via rail all over the country. The midwife was called to the quarries’ terrible accidents — where men’s flesh and bones were mangled and crushed by stone.

Thin November sunlight flooded the library. I was in no particular rush to return to my work. A sugarmaker with her husband, she was glad of the pause from her work in the woods, too. She mentioned that now, as an adult, she has so many questions she’d like to ask her grandmother — what made you want to be a midwife? what did you see? She remembers her grandfather coming in from the morning milking and eating her grandmother’s maple cream by the spoonful.

Here’s a line from Elliot Ackerman’s novel Waiting for Eden, regarding training for overseas deployment:

Communication, we were told, would be our only defense against the stresses of isolation and confinement.

When In Doubt, Do Handwork

November 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 19-year-old, pondering what to do with her life, buys fat skeins of yarn and begins knitting a blanket. The metaphor of comfort consoles me, too.

I just read David Grann’s The White Darkness, about Henry Worsley, descendant of Frank Worsley, of the Shackleton Endurance expedition. It’s hard to imagine a more manly man than Henry Worsley, who ultimately perished from complications of his solo South Pole trek. Yet Worsley sewed to calm his nerves. He was skilled at needlepoint. He volunteered to teach tatting — yes, tatting — to London prison inmates. How cool is that?

Shackleton… sought recruits with the qualities that he deemed essential for polar exploration: “First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.”

State 14 ran the first of my monthly Postcards From Hardwick. Check out terrific Vermont voices here.

#10 Pond

Vocab Lesson

October 30, 2018November 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I’m reading The New York Times on the couch when I look over at my middle school daughter on the couch who’s reading. She’s in her athletic pants, her hair carefully up in a bun like her friends, her face still tawny from a summer mostly outside. When she’s finished with her chapter, she tosses the library book on the couch, and I ask if she knows what the word anti-Semitic means.

She doesn’t.

The word is so terrible, I’m not sure what to say. In our house, we sometimes joke about language. This week, the girls have been tossing voluminous around playfully, like a half-deflated, helium-filled balloon.

I glance into the dining room I’ve spent all weekend painting a color described as lemon custard, my motivation simply love of color and warmth.

And then I look back at my daughter who’s waiting, patiently, on the couch.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly… Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Happy Arkhipov Day

October 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Two mothers relax on the floor of my library with their babies when my dad sends me an email reminding me that October 27 is Arkhipov Day. Not yet a year old, the babies haven’t begun to walk. Their smiles rise so radiantly joyous you instinctively smile back. Sleet drills against the library windows.

On October 27, 1962, Vasili Arkhipov refused to agree with his fellow Soviet submarine officers and fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the USS Randolph, preventing the nuclear holocaust that would have World War III.

The mothers check out children’s books, bundle up their babies again, and head out into the sleet that’s turned to wet snowflakes: everyday Vermont.

World War III was averted not by decisions in the White House or in the Kremlin, but in the sweltering control room of a Soviet submarine. Vasili Arkhipov saved the world. We should celebrate his obedience to humankind, not to the Nation-State, on October 27, Arkhipov Day, a proposed international holiday by students of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

— George Stanciu. For more about Vasili Arkhipov and my dad, read here.

The Promise

October 25, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Beautiful news!

Via email, I’m offered a division of a giant “butter yellow” peony. Oh, in this gray-upon-gray end of October, such a radiant promise of tender blossoms.

A piece of the Bartzella will be coming our way. Roots and dried stalks = creamy petals.

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers…

From Mary Oliver’s “Peonies”

Okay, not a peony….

Digging Deeply, Vermont Cold Soil

October 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Returning home in the dark, much later in the night than we usually do, my 19-year-old grabs her camera and insists on walking through the dark. She wants a picture of the little white lights she sees from her window at night — where, she’s not exactly sure.

All afternoon, we’ve been in and out of the house and barn in the thin autumn sunlight, shoveling compost and carrying buckets of potatoes and beets. The 13-year-old and I played soccer in bare feet on the cool grass. The 19-year-old baked a cake. Her younger sister gave her curious cat a bath in the kitchen sink.

Like many people I know, my life is jammed with scrawled lists, with dates on the calendar, with attention given to work and money and house and cars — with gardening, with worrying about kids, seeing friends, making sure my desk has a pile of library books. Much of this is pleasant and joy-giving, and some of it — particularly the middle-of-the-night angst of what the hell am I doing with my mortal life — just erodes your soul.

As an antidote, simply this.

In the late afternoon, I snap off kale leaves. Overhead, geese honk — eight birds, followed by five more — calling, arranging themselves in flight, flying so low I hear the whoosh of their wings, as they press on their journey, south and away.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

— Barbara Kingsolver

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