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Daughter, Words

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter and I had a long drive through Vermont today.  Don’t laugh — I know Vermont’s a small state, but the roads bend all around these mountains.  She’ll be at an art program for two weeks.  Driving, we listened to a CD my dad had made, a sixties mix of music for a class he’d taught.  As we followed a swollen river, my daughter suddenly asked, “What music is this?”

“The blues.”

She listened, then said, “I hate the blues.”

I laughed.  Old spirituals?  Who could listen to those?  Things picked up for her with the Beatles, but she kept flipping the case around in her hand.  The name Lead Belly?  What the heck?  Like the line in a Carver short story, my daughter is a long tall drink of water. She’s funny and smart, and lovely and prickly in all kinds of ways.  Driving through that rainstorm, in this summer of so much downfall, I felt my own version of the blues hammering down on me; perhaps it’s the place in my life right now, in these tempestuous forties, but so many people I know are singing the blues.  Looking at my daughter from the edges of my eyes, I didn’t bother to remark that someday she will be riding her own vehement blues, through that particularly human experience of grief, and unfulfilled longing, and desire all churned up in a maelstrom.  But not too much I couldn’t help wishing; enough of the blues to render the sweet genuinely savory, but not so much to twist and distort my girl, this fine and good young woman.

All the way there, we talked, talked, talked.  On the return trip, I followed the Mad River Valley, and then crossed over the mountains in a misty rain, with only my poor self for company.  Not until I was nearing home did the rain cut back and the clouds lightened to mere rags of mist.  I took a slightly different road, along Stagecoach Road, where the farm fields spread green as giant sheets of emeralds, with great pockets of black mud. On my way to work, I will be back soon enough, tracing this path around Elmore Mountain, noticing whether the fields have dried, remembering the masses of apple blossoms this May and looking for signs of fruit fattening.  But all the while, I will be wondering what stories my daughter is gathering and how she will eagerly tell me, You really won’t believe this! Until then, how much I will miss her laughter.

the world … was not enough for (my mother) without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea–none of it
was enough, for her, without me.

— Sharon Olds

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Love Letter to Walden Pond

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just before noon today, I arrived at my daughter’s soccer camp a few minutes early and picked up Walden where I had left off, at “The Ponds” chapter.  As it was the last day of camp, the session went late, and I sat on the grass, watching the kids circled on the grass around their coach, saying something I could not hear at all, only the laughter in their voices.  From where I sat, I saw the mound of Buffalo Mountain, a dark blue against the lighter hue of a cloudless sky.  This summer’s been a stellar one for butterflies, and even in this chiefly grassy stretch they were busy, the honey bees working, too, on the clover.

Thinking over these pages, I realized this chapter is a lyrical love letter to Walden Pond, an homage to her loveliness, this common pond, the miraculous universe reflected in this patch of water.

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.

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Peony and Walden Pond

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I began this blog with the concept that writing matters, and matters so much it’s bone marrow deep.  In these initial few weeks, I’ve written about living in Vermont and what I’m reading.  Have I amused anyone but myself?

These nights, I’m rereading Walden, a book whose spell I first fell under as a high school sophomore.  This reading around, in my forties, Walden‘s lyrical craft re-amazes me, while pushing the limits of radical anti-capitalism.  Any anarchist worth that word should be pencilling up these pages.  Further, I also see how deeply this book  — through my own novice reading — shaped the physical construct of my life.  Perhaps I was naturally inclined to living in rural Vermont; certainly, Thoreau strengthened that inclination.  I am certain the experiences of many others would concur.

This photo below I saw on my daughter’s laptop and asked for a copy.  She said, No, that’s not so good.  What do you like about that?

What I like is this:  this is a photo of extremes — rocky and fragile, crazed paint on an old house behind just-opened petals, and a great deal in between.  Isn’t that a portrait of Thoreau? Aiming for the core of living — bitter or not — seeking the sublime, and, between all that, eating a woodchuck.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.  If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in our extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

The Rainbow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, driving out of Stowe, I hit a rainstorm so tumultuous I turned onto a side road just over the Morrisville line.  I pulled over on the shoulder, shut off the engine and lights, and simply sat there, the window still cranked open enough to throw bits of rain and wind across my face.  I had been inside all day, and I sat there listening to the rain pinging on the truck’s metal roof.

Without deliberating, I got out of the truck and walked down the road. Traffic whooshed by wetly on route 100, but no one appeared on this side road.  I was immediately drenched, within just moments, the rain running over my lips and into my mouth.  I hadn’t gone far when suddenly I stepped from pouring rain to sun.  I spanned the line of storm with my outstretched arms.  I did what anyone would have done:  I looked for a rainbow, but I didn’t find it until I was driving further down the highway, and there the rainbow was, hung over the village.  I passed beyond the village and then along the lovely stretch of road through tiny Elmore and around the lake, where the rainbow, in vibrant colors, spanned the cornfields.  I hadn’t seen a rainbow since the rogue January one my daughter and I discovered, and, driving today, I marveled at the rainbow’s sheer size, spread from hill to hill, and the intensity of its colors, neatly ordered, smoothly arched, infinitely beautiful.

And then my road home turned around the mountain, and the rainbow was gone.

On my drive, I had been listening to Walden, and when I stepped out of the truck, perhaps I was intending merely to shake my day’s labors from my woolly head, or to drop a problem that had been worrying and gnawing at me, chewing my thoughts irritatingly, all through that drive, my day, my listening, even, to Thoreau.  The rainbow, my brief companion, stretched over all of us in the corners of those towns nestled together, a skyward gem for all.

The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.

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Coyote Song

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My book is headed to galley printing on Wednesday; hence, the last minute flurry of rereading and tweaking — is this quite right?  Can I hone this better?  This chapter, here in its entirety, is Fern one Christmas morning, about as far from this day as possible.  Tonight, so near the solstice, the windows are wide open, a breeze tossing in the maple leaves, the chittering robins presumably sleeping.  There’s an awful lot of snow in this novel.  I mean, an awful lot.  A Vermont book.  Tomorrow, back to my garden.

Chapter 6

Late in the night, I woke.

Tansy cried.

I lifted my sobbing child from her crib and pressed her against my shoulder, humming a tuneless wordless ditty. Her body shook fiercely with distress. Hal’s feet clumped down the stairs. A light glowed from the living room below, and, caressing my daughter’s silky head, I thought of the heat from the woodstove whooshing up the staircase, fleeing into the frozen night through the ceiling of this plank-built uninsulated second floor. Through the window, stars hung in the nightsky, forever distant.

The little girl calmed, wrapped in a blanket and my arms. Her shuttering, gasping breath gradually quieted into sleep. Then I heard a sound I thought at first was an orchestra broadcast from outdoor speakers, as if a DJ had arrived: a trumpeting I mistook on this Christmas morning for Handel’s religious music. Then I thought perhaps it was the ancient sea, dolphins or whales, their voices raised in holy harmony. None of this was so: coyotes howled down the hill, somewhere near the sugarhouse. In the great ocean of night, I couldn’t see them, but I sensed their muzzles were raised to the cold sky, howling in long chimes, one into another and another, and another. With only the little bit of light trickling up the stairs and the stars icy bits, my slumbering child growing heavy in my tired arms, I leaned our weight back on my heels, entranced by the loveliness of this Christmas morning wild serenade.  And like that, the coyotes ceased, and the farmhouse was mute again.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.