photography

What the Heck is Figurative Language, Anyway?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On my drive to work, I wind through a spidery maze of dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais before I hit the paved County Road and sail into Montpelier. The drive, while long, is exquisitely lovely, changing from fall’s florescence to this winter’s sparkling white. Just after I hit the main road, I always glance at a red farmhouse to my right where whoever lives there has stacked firewood in a round pile, fanning out from a center. I always look to see if they’ve started to burn that wood yet.

So far, not yet. I’m guessing there’s a stash behind the rambling farmhouse, and those folks haven’t wanted to dig into this craftily-stacked wood.

Yesterday, driving on slushy and messy roads, a crow flew before my windshield right at that house, flying so near I could see its shiny eye, orange drape of tongue, a white chunk of breakfast in its mouth.

I once garnered those things as a sign of something, but yesterday it occurred to me that maybe the crow was merely hungry, flying in a hurry back home to eat.

Sign enough?

Surely.

I kept driving into the accumulating snowfall.

….Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles

but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.

So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.

Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy….

Sherman Alexie, “Crow Testament”

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Where We Are Now

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Falling snow is the main feature of these days, so marvelously beautiful no one complains. Usually by this time of winter, grousing is general, but we’ve had so little snow this year –almost none the winter before – and this snow is exquisitely lacy.

Tomorrow morning, with a long drive ahead of me, I might be crabbing a different song, but now, tonight, stepping out into the warm, snow-suffused twilight after work, it’s all good. Pile up; shroud this world in loveliness.

Secret truths… are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets… if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your deepest, most private truth.

Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons

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Woodbury, Vermont

Empty Rooms

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I haven’t bought a house in twenty years, and I’ve never sold one. In my teens and twenties, I lived in all kinds of places, from a tipi to a trailer to a string of apartments, but my daughters have lived in this rural house their whole lives.

House hunting in Vermont’s February means walking through empty houses with the heat off and the windows frosted: an exercise in imagination. The younger daughter sizes up where she would put her bike and trampoline, how her bunk bed might fit in a room. I crouch down and study plumbing, pick at linoleum with my car keys to see what wood lies beneath. Like approaching a piece of writing, I gnaw over mechanics – plumbing, roof, how to heat, affordability – but I’m also listening to the house. Does it sing to us beneath the layers of other people’s living? Where will the moonlight shine in? Can these rooms fill with our living?

My older daughter argues. Later, I realize she outdid me at what I was doing: she and her camera sought out beauty.

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.

Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

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window frost in Hardwick/photo by Molly S.

Coltsfoot Dreams

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

February 4 always marks the return of light to me, and, from my windows, the skies are clear today. February 4, 18 years ago, was my first day as a mother. My baby had been born in the deep of night, shortly before midnight, and the 4th was filled with radiance.

What’s 18 years over the span of millennia? Not even a heartbeat, perhaps, but for us, these years have been mightily full. Her younger sister and friends made tissue paper flowers and decorated the house with balloons and streamers, for this young woman who spent much of her childhood drawing or photographing blossoms.

It seemed fitting, then, that she returned from her birthday dinner with an exquisite bouquet from her boyfriend. The mistakes I’ve made as a parent could fill six novels. Yet here’s my tall beautiful daughter, her hands full of flowers, stepping into a world we’re offering her rife with political chaos, shot through with what should be acknowledged as unbridled vice, on a planet severely ailing.

And yet: flowers. The 11-year-olds and I stayed up late last night in front of the wood stove. Perhaps for no other reason than to delay bedtime, they began knitting with me. Kids and flowers: wily and beautiful.

February means spring isn’t that far in the offing, and spring means coltsfoot, those tiny gold blossoms thrusting up through the hardest and ugliest of roadsides, claiming their territory.

Our life here on earth:
to what shall we compare it?
Is it not like a rowboat
departing at daybreak,
leaving no trace of us in its wake?

― Takaha Shugyo, translated by Michael R. Burch

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Stillness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Repeatedly, I’ve said that Vermont winter has two saving graces: its exquisite beauty and skiing.

On my way home from work today, I stopped briefly at #10 Pond in Calais, where it was just me and a black crow and two pairs of footprints with a sled trail.

Winter, perhaps, is equally about economy, and economy is poetry.

There are certain times where it does not matter if you hear the word yes or the word no in answer to your question, whether you turn left or right, you will reach your destination.

Not many but some.

Joy Williams, “89” in Ninety-Nine Stories of God

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#10 Pond

The Earth Curves, of course

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After a day of downtown Portland’s busy scene – art and wharf and walking, and my brother crashed a bachelorette party while my daughters ate gelato, and my older daughter bought the younger a miniature ship in a bottle – we drove over a drawbridge in search of the wide open ocean.

At the beach, we left our shoes by the car and spread out, one daughter gathering shells and sea glass, the other carrying her camera. Away from the city’s hurdy-gurdy, the ocean  – sky, sand, stone, gull, the steady and infinitely changing waves – churned, at once noisy and calming, a place we had never been and yet was familiar, expansively glorious.

We leapt over enormous chunks of pink granite to an old lighthouse while the sun tugged the daylight over the horizon. Afterwards, all of us laughing while I drove through the dark, I told the children we would stop in Pierre, South Dakota, for gas. With our three drivers, we’d switch off until we hit the north California coast. Even when we returned to my brother’s New Hampshire house, late, the little girl tired and nearly asleep, we were still laughing, the world wide-open and full of possibilities, as if my little car with its two bright headlights could trek all around the the globe and ferry us back to home.

…where we choose to be–we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer

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Cape Elizabeth, Maine/Photo by Molly S.