Library Afternoon Snapshot

November 20, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A woman stops in my library — new to town and looking for basic info about an internet connection and where to buy food. She’s getting the lay of this corner of Vermont’s territory. Early afternoon, the school kids are paired up around the library, working on projects — some seriously, some intently goofing off.

It’s drab November, and the woman stays for a long while, using the library’s internet connection. Her friend calls the library and arranges to meet in the parking lot, exchanging a microwave. School morphs into after school by then, and the kids merge back into the library. A parent takes three crying girls aside and demands the drama to cease. A little boy chats with the woman in the library who pauses in her work and answers his questions. The kids pull out their newest craze — the chess sets.

Through all this, I keep introducing the woman to anyone who comes in the door.

When I leave at 5 p.m., darkness folds around the library. The woman has left with an armful of books; the children have all gone home. A few adults are picking up yet.

I turn down the heat in this library — a kind of living room lined with books. Then I head home myself.

The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy. Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to head off on my own.

— Susan Orlean, The Library Book

Rules for Novelists — Rules for Living

November 16, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Vermont, we’ve skipped from the Ides of November to the middle of January — just like that — and none of us have even eaten any Thanksgiving turkey.

The 13-year-old, on her second snow day this week, calculates how long into June the school year already stretches. She’s up early anyway, curled on the couch with her cats and her library book, immersed in an imaginary fictive world. I leave her be. The snow shoveling can wait.

Here’s rules 1 and 10 from Jonathan Franzen’s “Ten Rules for the Novelist.” I’m darn sure I nail the relentless rule at least.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator…. You have to love before you can be relentless.

— Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth

Our November Rose

November 14, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

So long, arrivederci, to green grass.

Snow day for the school kids. My 13-year-old cut up paint swatches from the hardware store — a variety of rose and crimson and pink peony — and I had taped last week on the living room walls. We’re not a pink-oriented family, the three of us females, but somehow pink seemed just what that room — and maybe what the three of us — needed.

Bog Trip

November 10, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

No school for 13-year-old, day off for 19-year-old, no snow yet, and November’s scant light: I fold up my laptop and, impromptu, declare we’ll visit Chickering Bog.

We follow a path through the woods, our boots brushing through fallen maple and ash and cherry leaves, then through a stand of tamarack where the dirt path is scattered with tiny gold needles. On the easy walk, the girls chattered, moving quickly against the damp, the three of them in their black down jackets and myself in turquoise. We’re not far from the world from houses and cars, yet the forest folds around us. I’ve been walking in various New England forests since I was a child, and although this particular path isn’t familiar, the woods are — filled with both that allure of what’s around that next bend or behind that glacial erratic? and, simply, the woods’ loveliness.

The path leads up to what’s more properly a fen. The boardwalk takes us near the middle where the girls find cranberry-red carnivorous pitcher plants. Beneath our boots lies the thousands-of-years-old mysteries of peat. And over our heads, all that sky.

A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the Beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Calais, Vermont

Wild and Tame Creatures

November 6, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On his favorite perch on the dining room windowsill, my daughter’s cat suddenly stiffens his back and presses his nose near the November-cool glass. Beside him, I’m typing, and I rub his back. He mews an inquiry, looking at me.

Through the window, I see eight wild turkeys, nosing through my young asparagus bed, planted just last spring. The turkey nearest us steps toward the window, raising its long odd legs. The cat and the bird stare at each other, the turkey’s head tipped slightly to one side, so its eye gazes at this little furry tiger cat.

The bird’s bigger than you, I murmur.

For the longest time, these two creatures stare at each other. Then the turkey goosesteps on its way, and the cat, true to his nature, curls up on the table beside my laptop and takes a nap.

Midterm elections, 2018.

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.

— Suffragette Alice Paul

Why Love Cats

November 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughters’ cat and I are listening to Chris Hedges lecture about the collapse of the American Empire — extremely serious and unfunny — when the cat falls off the hutch and splashes into my pan of lemon-yellow paint.

The cat probably yowled; I certainly shouted. The creature scrambled through the dining room to living room, through my study, into the kitchen, where my daughter grabbed the paint-soaked cat. While she cleaned paint from the cat in the basement, I washed wet paint from our floors on my hands and knees.

We’ve lived in this house not much more than a year. While I love the maple floors, I generally don’t spend much time mopping.

While Hedges kept talking, I realized some of the narrow boards were birdseye maple. Through the closed basement door, I heard my daughter murmuring, comforting her beloved cat.

Whoever laid the floors in this house passed from this life decades ago. I thought of these slender, hard boards in a carpenter’s hand, his sight appraising the grain.

The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire…. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.

— Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

The Larch Season, November, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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