Stillness

September 16, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The middle of September arrived today, with a reprieve from the prior days’ intimations of winter and dark, the imminent long gray Vermont cool-down of each fall, the lingering death of summer before winter’s glittery beauty. Through the window in the dentist’s office today, the sky shone flawless azure, tantalizing in its loveliness.

“Summer Morning,” by Charles Simic

…I hear a butterfly stirring
Inside a caterpillar,
I hear the dust talking
Of last night’s storm….

And all of a sudden!
In the midst of that quiet,
It seems possible
To live simply on this earth.

Photo by Molly S.

Chimney Sweeps

September 15, 2015September 15, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Until recently, I never really thought all that much about cleaning. A chore, an activity, play some music and make some headway. I’ve been in filthy houses, spick ‘n span abodes, the whole gray gamut of in-between. I once participated in an extremely late night board meeting in a school my children never attended, and towards the end of the evening I looked around the room, noted the chaotic clutter, and wondered how anyone worked in that classroom.

Today, as the cold weather begins digging in, I swept the ashes from my wood stove and readied my beloved stove for the months ahead when I will never allow the fire to burn out. The chimney, too–from basement to roof over three stories tall–needs cleaning. I pulled out the stovepipe and thrust my arm into its chimney’s cold center. I found thick layers of creosote, crumbly and pitch-sticky, two strange opposite and simultaneous qualities.

In the sooty, dirty basement I’ve knelt before the opened clean-out door and shoveled bucket after bucket of creosote scabs, then held a mirror flat in my hand and showed my little child the daytime stars in the heavens, visible only through that extended canal of darkness.

I’ve never cleaned this chimney before, but I feel certain my teenage daughter and I, with our strong backs and gritty muscles, could force that sharp-edged wire brush down that channel, scrape free the debris of last year’s long winter’s cold, and shove that brush, pole length by pole length, down to the chimney’s very root. This chimney is the lungs of our house, the passage of air and smoke that allows our hearth to burn, hot and truly. My teenage daughter is determined to begin this heating season with a scrubbed right chimney, and no fears of our house engulfed in nighttime flames.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.

–– Louise Gluck

Woodbury, Vermont

The Change

September 14, 2015September 14, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The children came up with a phrase one nighttime this summer when they were supposed to be tucked into their beds and sleeping like little dears, but were not. The older boy said, The change is coming. We can’t sleep.

I told him to go to sleep, and I went downstairs to talk to his mother.

This illusive change reappeared in various contexts in the coming weeks. Missing chocolate bars and crocs were blamed on this change, a screen pushed out a window, irritable tempers. For all this and more, the change took the blame. But I told you, the boy laughed, I warned you the change came!

The change has arrived here. Walking after dark with the younger girl, she remarked on how quickly the days are ending now, and the sky presses lower, filled with dark. The garden’s growth has entirely dwindled, and our northern piece of this earth is slowly rotating towards cooling. Ever cheery, my younger girl remarked, But this makes the house so much cozier. It’s board game season.

Work

The voice of the laundry says, Hang me;
hang me, or I will mold.
The voice of the clothesline says,
tighter or I will sag…
While the subliminal shrews are ferociously
eating, always eating, in order to waste away.

–– Ruth Stone

Work/Photo by Molly S.

Autumn: Coyotes Howling

September 13, 2015September 13, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, reading in bed with the windows open, I heard a pack of coyotes yipping 0n the forested hill behind our house. Abandoning my book, I lay with my eyes closed, listening to the way those wild creatures howled, throaty and jagged, as if biting each other’s calls.

Slipping downstairs, I passed my younger daughter’s room where she slept with her friend, the two of them twined in one bed, their breathing a whispery draw and release. I walked out into the Vermont rural dark, so heavy I saw the lights of the neighbors across the road as a handful of pearly light in tree branches. The hydrangeas, fragrant, faintly glowed in my window’s diffuse light. The coyotes cut into the night, two packs in the wooded hill behind the house and garden, the beasts wholly bodiless to me in the night, my heartstrings thrumming with their calls.

This evening, my older daughter returned from walking in the dusk and said the packs were howling again, not down in the valley where we’ve heard them for years, but far closer to our house. I asked if she was afraid. She said, It’s a little scary to hear the coyotes so close, but at the same time, I can’t help listening.

We talked a little about the back and forth calling, the mystery of sound from these hidden creatures, and then she said, It’s beautiful.

We shall not cease from exploration
And then end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

–– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Burlington, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Moxie in the Face of Fear

September 12, 2015September 12, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Laurence Gonzales’ Flight 232, he writes about a flight attendant who realized the plane she was flying on was going to crash. She was in charge of the cabin, and she determined not to allow the passengers to see her fear, so no one would panic. She stepped out of the cockpit with that fresh, horrific news, and thought, Oh please, God, let me be somewhere else.

My ten-year-old daughter can be fearless at times, but I don’t think that’s courage, per se. This woman in the plane had knowledge, coupled with steely nerves. When we most need to draw on our courage, I think, is often where we least want to. It’s one thing to dive into a creative or athletic adventure with aplomb and spunk, but a whole other circumstance to override terror and uncertainty, to push through a scenario with grace, when every instinct in your body longs to run.

I think of my young daughter as practicing and cultivating that force of courage. Surely such action as this woman’s didn’t arise unexpectedly. I can’t help but wonder if the way she lived her whole life primed her for that moment.

She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes….”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232