Revision in Yarn

October 12, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I learned to knit from my daughter when she was an 8-year-0ld Waldorf student, and I really wanted to knit. Then a friend taught me more, and I read books, stopped in at the local yarn store for free advice, and turned hand-knit sweaters and hats inside out to discover the wherefores of how they were put together.

The pattern of this most recent sweater is a skeleton – a skeleton minus a few bones. When I arrived at joining the sleeves, the pattern was curiously empty. By experience and guesswork, I’ve put this sweater together in a semi-decent fashion. But I did take apart that first sleeve a half dozen times.

Unlike life, that’s the beauty of knitting: take it apart, again, again, and again. I suppose that’s not entirely true. All those revisions made this creation; I intend to wear it happily, with only myself in the true knowing.

One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to the deep craziness of life itself—as when in Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

West Woodbury, Vermont, Wednesday

Kafka’s Dad

October 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont may have a lot of sub-par weather (not now – these days have been about as perfect as possible), but at least we have no cockroaches. Early mornings, when a mouse occasionally shows its whiskers as I’m making coffee, still deep enough in the night to be in the nocturnal realm, I think of Gregor Samsa’s scuttling.

Telling my daughters this story, they both say, What? They’re truly mystified. He wrote about a giant cockroach? It’s a little hard to explain this one, and perhaps even harder to explain my decided affection for this strange story.

This morning, reading Kafka’s long letter to his father, I think, Poor Kafka.

You have a particularly beautiful, very rare way of quietly, contentedly approvingly smiling, a way of smiling that can make the person for whom it is meant entirely happy…. Yet in the long run even such friendly impressions brought about nothing but an increased sense of guilt, making the world still more incomprehensible to me.

It’s the incomprehensible word that catches at me in this painful letter. Poor Kafka. No wonder the cockroach vision.

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A Glimpse of Redemption

October 9, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Standing in a parking lot in Stowe, trying to negotiate the sale of farm equipment on the phone while my daughters buy doughnuts in a bakery, a woman pulls up beside me in a flashy red car and calls out my name.

I don’t immediately recognize this woman although I’ve known her for years, known her so well she was present shortly after both my daughters’ births. She’s beautiful today, this friend of mine, her skin glossy, her smile magnificent. She’s had a harder life than most of my friends, and as we talk, I marvel at how her life has turned – as she wonders, too. My happiness was so long in coming, she says, without a trace of bitterness.

As we’re just about to part, she tells me about visiting a person we both know well who had caused her suffering, years and years of suffering. We all believed his death was imminent then, and she had given him her forgiveness. She says she doesn’t know how to explain this, but when she forgave him, a great weight – like a stone she says – fell from her.

As we laugh and talk, I realize she’s in love. In a bit, she gets back in her candy red car and disappears into traffic again, but her charm has spread to me, whooshing away some of my daily dust with her radiance.

….Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

From Joy Harjo’s “Remember”

Photo by Molly S.

While The Season Lasts…

October 7, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.

Autumn is quintessential childhood.

This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.

– Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

Look at This

October 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving my 11-year-old to school this morning, I remarked on the stunning foliage, and she answered in her even-keeled way, I kind of hate to say this, but the leaves are a little boring. What if we were along the Pacific Ocean, driving on a cliff, and looking out at the sea? Now, that would be really interesting.

Oh, my daughter, my daughter. Isn’t that the way of the world? I asked if she wondered if the kids on the Pacific coast might want to see Vermont’s gold and crimson leaves?

My daughter thought about that for a good while. Finally, long past the time I thought she might have lost interest, she offered, Maybe.

….O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow….

– Robert Frost, “October” fullsizerender

Birds of Prey, And Us Non-Birds

October 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night at our little local library, a high school student told his story of visiting a falconer. The falcons, he said, have one primal force: to eat. He described feathered creatures who will sit for hours, waiting for a mouse to appear – almost sure prey at a hole – rather than using calories to fly randomly and seek the unknown.

The world of training these regal birds, the teenager relayed, centers on one primary object: a morsel of London broil on a leather gauntlet. That is so not the human way. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer days, single-minded patience and determination dictated human action, but it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine when the human terrain of desire – for food beyond sustenance, sweet, salty, and spicy; for silk and myriad dyed colors for fashion; for adulation on a small and great scale; for the comfort of coupling in bed, complicated or not – hasn’t constantly jumbled up civilization.

Aggravating, infuriating at times, this world I inhabit, and yet this morning, waking in the dark with a child murmuring in her sleep near me, what a wondrous world, too. Not far from my desk, a mouse scurries in and out of its tiny hole, busy with its own rodent variation of London broil. More generous this rainy morning, I think, Go about, little one.