September 1

September 1, 2016September 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Every September, Stowe, Vermont, hosts The British Invasion, when a bunch of folks fly over the Pond and spent some early foliage time motoring around in their nifty little cars. A few years back, a particularly chatty group appeared in our sugarhouse for a hike into our woods.

Afterwards, the leader began some good-natured ribbing about the general dearth of American knowledge of history, and asked when World War II began, apparently expecting Pearl Harbor to be our answer. When I offered September 1, 1939, he was appeased enough to open wide his wallet and buy some syrup.

On this September 1, 2016, our family made dinner together while talking about the girls’ first week at school. Our kitchen filled with garden sun gold tomatoes, arugula, and garlic, the table strewn with school papers and Lake Champlain shells from our last camping trip.

September is summer fading, the emerald hills fading to light gold, the air sweeter with a crispness creeping in. The real autumn isn’t far off now. Before long, I’ll be digging into our carefully stacked wood pile, and Sunday afternoons the house will be suffused with the scent of baking apple pies.

This September 1, my house doors are open to cricket song. The sun has been warm all afternoon, but as evening ambles in, the shadows are beginning to chill. This would be a fine weekend for hiking.

Sparrow singing –
its tiny mouth
open

– Yosa Buson

County Road, East Montpelier, VT

How You Know Yourself

August 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Watching the Olympic swimmers, my daughters wondered what went through the swimmers’ heads while they spent endless hours practicing their watery strokes. Intense concentration, or sometimes a grocery list?

I imagine that must be way they know the world, I answered. My older daughter at 17 uses photography as her own personal lens of knowledge. From a very young age, I knew the world through fiction, with an insatiable desire to read. An essay of mine about writing just appeared in Green Mountains Review, chock-full with the sun and the moon, wood stove ashes on the floor, a toddler and her tricycle. It’s my own particular story, my own grain of sand reflecting this bit of the universe.

And so I think of Michael Phelps and his teammates, male and female, their arms mightily stroking through the water, breathing in their knowledge of the world, sublimely sacred at times, no doubt profound to the bone at others.

When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

FullSizeRender

Adversity, the Inner Life, and Childrearing

August 24, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nowhere in the miasma of contemporary parenting lit have I ever read my dad’s adage from when I was a child: Adversity builds character. Enough, my siblings and I used to moan; we have enough character. In the same vein, in his poetry collection Galvanized, Leland Kinsey writes about growing up on a farm in northern Vermont. While his own boy had a gentler and easier childhood, his son lacked knowing his labor was essential to the family.

Entirely unintentionally, I gave my older daughter that same sense of urgency. Pressed up against the relentlessness of agriculture, this child was in the sugarhouse from infancy, when her rosy baby cheeks shined up with a sugary patina from sap condensation.

Does anyone, ever, have enough character? Not persona, not a two-dimensional image, but a depth and richness of character? When I first became a mother, I knew I wanted my children to have what I called a rich inner life. Doubtlessly, literature and Mozart nourish that inner life, but working any variation of a farm does, too. I’m reminded of this as my daughter heads off to her first college course today, a photography class. At 17, she’s of the age now where she’s beginning to tell her own story, and while I often feel I have little enough to offer this girl as she enters her own womanhood, I’m quite sure at least a rich inner life is a deep well she’ll be able to drawn upon.

The whitewashed walls were smeared with blood
the day the bull rampaged inside the barn
after escaping from its pen.
My father gave my brother and me
each a stout stick to block exits
and hoped we didn’t have to use them….

From Leland Kinsey’s “Surviving Bulls”

Faux wood, Artwork, Stowe, Vermont

Farmers Market Females

August 21, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On a bike ride today, my daughters and I stopped by the Stowe Farmers Market, where I was known for years as the Root Beer Float Woman. I also peddled one heck of a lot of maple syrup there. I vended there for 14 years, beginning when I was pregnant for the first time and ending when that daughter was 13. That girl pretty much grew up summers in the market, and I spent awful lot of Sundays serving up homemade ice cream with a baby either on my back or nearby, underfoot.

Today, we were merely visitors, buying sausage and cookies. I stopped to talk with a woman whose own children are long past the toddler years. I knew she and her husband had bought a farm, worked themselves as hard as humanly possible, and ended up downsizing, downsizing, downsizing, overburdened by debt, and eventually selling the greater chunk of the farm. I remembered the day they signed on that farm. I served on the board then, and we drank champagne in celebration.

Lying on the grass, later today, with my teenage daughter, staring up at Stowe’s pristine church steeple, I told my daughter that story – and more, many more. As I did, I realized just how hard so many of these farm women I knew worked. Over and over, I came up with names of women who were savvy and creative, and believed in the saving virtue of hard work with their hands.

Like everyone, all of these women have met hard times, but I would consider none of these females failures, each meeting her fate with some kind of rugged grace. It’s been a handful of years since I sold a drop of sweet stuff – maple or ice cream – at the farmers market, yet it’s also a place I still think of as home.

Only 8 percent of the country’s farms produce 72 percent of the national harvest. This is where the subsidies go. Agribusiness is concentrating so quickly that in the near future our global retail food system may be controlled by five or six firms – in America perhaps it will be WalMart…. So why fight it? Why not? And that’s what the farm women of Vermont and America are involved in…. In the face of agribusiness intent on controlling the global food supply, you could call these women working activists.

– Peter Miller, Vermont Farm Women, 2002

Stowe, Vermont

Moon Rise

August 20, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Camping these past few days on a island in Lake Champlain, the kids and I were biking back from the south end in the dusk when a crimson full moon appeared over the horizon, startlingly beautiful.

A 100 years ago, this mile-long island was farmed by tenant labor, sending out vegetables, dairy, wool. Now, those once-upon-a-time farm fields run rampart with goldenrod and stinging nettles. Sumac trees branch over paths for enchanting tunnels. The mighty lake, like so much of our world now, is polluted, but even so, the beauty of water and sky, singing cricket and chorusing frog, blue heron and turtle, is mesmerizing.

The next night, the children and I canoed into the dusk, and then walked out on a rocky jetty as dark filtered in. We perched there, watching the moon rise over the horizon. I’ve been reading Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing, a book about his two years in Vermont solitude, and I kept thinking of his line near the end: you are human. Not solitary, not a discrete entity, but part of the moving, changing landscape, in all its infinite beauty.

I wanted to see through all surfaces and to see through myself, but I wasn’t a transparent thing. I was bone, sinew, skin. If I lost depth perception when it came to life, if I removed every line so there was no difference between near and far, I’d never survive – maybe as a ghost or as a cipher but not as a human being.

Burton Island, Vermont

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

August 17, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little over four years ago, my 7-yr-old and 13-yr-old daughters and I spent all day in Newport, VT’s county courthouse; their father was on trial with five others for criminal trespassing. The six defendants – self-named the Lowell Six – had been arrested in a dispute over constructing 21 enormous wind towers. Green Mountain Power claimed they had rights to the property. The Lowell Six claimed the property belonged to the Nelson family. The case’s details I wrote about in VTDigger.

The top floor of that beautifully built old courthouse had enormous windows with a view of Lake Memphramagog. Birds came and went about their avian business, all day. While the jury was out, the sun edged down.

In the end, the Lowell Six were found guilty. Five of them served some variation of community service for a crime none of them believed they had committed; the sixth was arrested for contempt of court and spent a weekend in jail, three years later. Green Mountain Power’s 21 wind towers were built, constructed out of sheer material greed and cloaked in a smokescreen of green energy.

Like everyone else, I inherently believe in MLK’s arc of justice bending around. Yet, after all this, I see, instead, the complexity (and perhaps the length) of what justice might mean. Where is the bend of justice in this case? I don’t see it yet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking.