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Among Humans…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The High Mowing Organic Seeds catalog arrived in our mailbox today, glossy and gorgeous enough to lay on the table and immediately  fantasize about that field of peppers. Seeds and agriculture, longing for soil and growth: some of the oldest of humanity’s longings.

I slid a pan of enchiladas in the oven. My older daughter, drawing at the table, lifted her head and told me about the conversation in her French class today. The windows over her shoulders are filled with darkness before dinner, at this time of year. Our conversation unspooled, winding along a thread of history, tangled centuries.

Sometimes I think of my own youth as terribly misspent, all those years in philosophy class, all that writing and reading: all that pondering on faith and love and destiny. What did it all come to? But today, listening to my daughter, my hands on that catalog, I thought of my youth as sown with an infinite complexity of minute seeds. I reminded my daughter of Martin Luther King’s line that The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Small mortals that we are, dwarfed beneath the cosmic arc, our vision of the universe is often myopic and clouded, imperfect at best.

My daughter brushed her hair, wrapped a silky scarf around her neck, zipped up her high heels, and left to babysit the neighbors’ babies. That seed catalog in my hand, I kissed her before she left.

Travellers from the great spaces
when you see a girl
twisting in sumptuous hands
the black vastness of her hair
and when moreover
you see
near a dark baker’s
a horse lying near death
by these signs you will know
that you have come among men.

— Jean Follain (1903-1971)

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November 2015

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont Public Radio and my teenager and so many questions, questions: what does this mean? Why did this happen? So many questions and I have no answers, merely: think of this bit of information, and that geography matters, history matters, that anger and desire and fury and bitterness matter.

I slid potatoes and squash in the oven and stepped outside for firewood. With the sun going down, the air had abruptly cooled. My younger daughter and the neighbor child were in the darkening woods, laughing. Overhead, the clouds parted over the crescent moon, and then concealed this heavenly beauty. Unseen, geese honked their mournful journey, away.

Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom.

— Basho

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Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My children and I were never church-going people, although the enormous quantity of churches in Vermont mark our bearings. We’ve spent hours on ecumenical lawns, from the nursing and changing diapers days, to a safe place for toddlers to stretch their legs on the long syrup delivery routes I used to drive. Years ago, I was lost in Addison County, with a starving four-year-old in the backseat. I handed her the Gazetteer and told her to read the map. Hidden behind the upside Gazetteer, she informed me: Mommy, we’re lost. Go backwards.

We weren’t lost today, in our own little town, at the old church with its doors folded up like hands over a face. These old relics are beautiful and enduring, quietly going about their business, present for need, reflecting those admirable yankee qualities.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

— Emily Dickinson

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South Woodbury, Vermont

Laughter…. Levity….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Now that we’ve reached the time of year in Vermont when it’s dark pretty much all the time, in a variation of that Platonic cave, the game season has fully opened in our house. We began this years ago, in an attempt to stave off the mad-as-hatters element of northern winters. After a few rounds of Battleship, the kids relented and played an art history trivial pursuit card game. (Up front, I’d like to acknowledge I stacked the deck against myself, and I lost).

About halfway through, my older daughter read a card with the word bar cue. I asked her to repeat the word, and then I asked if the word had an O in the middle and maybe a Q.

Baroque? I asked.

She admitted it might be baroque, and then asked who he was.

I write this only because she laughed so hard, so truly cheerful about whether this might be bar cue or baroque, or maybe even barbecue. Whatever, she laughed, genuinely nonplussed. This is not her way of knowing the world. But what is her innate gift is a profound sense of balance and color and proportion. She spends hours drawing, her creativity flowing from a well whose depths are pure and lovely, hardly yet tested. How humorously this daughter reminds me that my own hard vision of who this baroque fellow may or may have been could use some not so serious jostling at times…

To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can. To refuse to communicate is a failing; we are biologically and socially predisposed to communication…

— Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

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SHIMMERING LIGHTS

Gabriela is a ten-year-old guest blogger.…

One afternoon me and my mom went to get lights at the store. So we just got some normal ones. Well, that’s what my mom thought. So we got some snowflake ones, too. So we go home do some stuff. The next day my mom goes to work and and leaves me and my sister a list of chores to do. One of the things we have to do is put up the lights. So we plug them in to make sure they work, and I say, “why doesn’t that one work? wait that one just flickered.” My sister said, “I don’t know, let’s put them up to see them a little better.” So we wind them around the beams and plug them in and look at them. Some of them are blinking I say. My sister says, “yeah that really bugs me. Let’s look at the package” so we look at the package and it says shimmering. My sister says, “Mom probably didn’t read the package.” I say, “I have to agree.” So when my mom came home from work, she said “I kind of like it.” I agreed with her. So we kept the lights because everyone liked them.

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Photo by Gabriela Jean

The Gloaming

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

At this point in my life, some things I can easily do – create a meal from a handful of ingredients and a hopeful smile. Here, I think, the making of this is enough. I can passably braid a child’s hair, weed a vegetable bed, paint a wall, read a novel, stack wood. All these, at varying points of my life, I put real thought and energy into accomplishing.

I’m sometimes tagged as a writer who has a “sense of place” – a phrase I’ve more or less taken for granted. Sure, I have a feel for Vermont, a love for my state, and I’ve shed my share of sweat and blood in agriculture. But the longer I remain in one place, the greater my love of this place deepens in complexity. My garden this year was infested with cabbage root maggots; the brassica seedlings I planted withered within a week of planting. A year ago, I had 80 kale plants; this year, none.

The dynamic, however, is one of the key beauties of this place. Working outside in the dusk, my daughter and I stacked wood this afternoon. The twilight inched in, shade by shade, taking its own sweet time. So much of American life exhorts homogeny: the same food chains, grocery and hardware stores, clothes and electronics, even the same education for our children. To love a place deeply demands knowing that place in all its vicissitudes, even the raw dark of rainy November or the frost that might have stomped in early and quashed your cucumbers. As my child and I lingered in the gloaming, I reminded myself that these in-between places are fertile, too, imbued with mystery.

“In the Gloaming” by Meta Orred

In the gloaming, oh, my darling,
When the lights are dim and low,
And the quiet shadows falling,
Softly come, and softly go…

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Morristown, Vermont/photo by Molly S.

Children Laughing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, we were having dinner with friends in our kitchen, laughing and talking, when suddenly one of us ordered the others to be quiet. Our friend held up his hand. I had recently laid my baby in her crib upstairs, in that rosy end-of-the-day glow. She lay there babbling her echolalia, singing away happily in her own baby world. Our friend, whose children were older then, insisted we listen. Our own clamorous adult chatting ceased, and from the open room just above, we listened to the baby’s talk.

This morning, I sat on the couch and ceased my own work for a moment. My ten-year-old daughter and her friend were whispering in the bunk bed they had slept in together, giggling and planning their day off from school. Like a brook, their laughter tumbled to me, clear and sweet.

…Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

— Pablo Neruda

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Photo by Molly S.