Vermont

Silent November News

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As if there was any lingering doubt, yesterday’s first snowfall marked a definitive end to the swimming season. And a beginning to the Winter Boot Season.

Sitting in a meeting in Burlington, Vermont, I stare through the window at the clouds pressing low over the slate-hued lake, the snow spitting at first — flake by flake — then sprinkling like a giant basket of milkweed seeds and fluff turned upside down.

Already? I think. Winter? And in my next heartbeat, spring oddly feels not so far off. In January, of course, this will be a different story, our house banked in by snow, my hands longing to sink into the earth.

But for now, there’s just that snow silently drifting into the lake, melting.

I don’t know why it made me happy to see the pond ice over in a day,
turning first hazy, then white.

— Jane Kenyon

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Pre-snow! Calais, Vermont

Wrong Way Closed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

While poor California is burning, Vermont is flooded.

Driving to Burlington to meet my older daughter at the airport, my younger and I are suddenly stopped on Route 15. Road closed. I pull into a gas station and run up to a young man and ask him for intel. He’s from somewhere else and tells me Wrong Way Bridge is closed. That’s all he knows. The Lamoille is impassable at this point — the river, I’ve already seen, has risen wildly above its banks.

I stand there, thinking, unwilling to follow his advice to cut back through the mountains. I’m driving my older daughter’s car, which has — naturally — no paper map.

I approach a man who’s just bought a six-pack of tiny Coke cans, and ask for advice. He’s much taller than me, and bends down to look at my face, putting us at eye-level, then takes me to the edge of the parking lot and tells me where to turn, which roads to follow. It’s beautiful country, he says, where I’m sending you.

He tells me to turn left at the Y, but he’s gesturing right. I ask for clarification, and then he has me repeat the directions back to him, so he’s sure I know where I’m going.

We drive along the western side of Mount Mansfield, through farms with their cornfields shorn to stubble. November. His breath had a vague scent of whiskey, but the directions were spot-on, and countryside? Enchanting.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in — when the old loyalties — God, country, and the hope of Heaven — aren’t very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends.

— William Carlos Williams

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Burlington, Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email inbox this morning, a lovely poem by Raphael Kosek, beginning:

My daughter is driving
across the continent, eating cheddar
in Wisconsin, waking to a cougar’s yellow
rasp, sleeping tentless
in a corn field….

Last night, with the power out, my younger daughter and I walked around town, the Main Street stores either marked closed with a cardboard lettered sign — gone home — or filled with folks simply hanging out, talking.

Later, we’re stuck in traffic, where the highway has washed down into the Lamoille River. We’re driving home from the one lighted town around here, my daughter eating fried rice with chopsticks, talking. We’ve nowhere in particular to go. I’ve let that constant press of time slip away. As we come into the town where we live, the darkness ubiquitous but for a gleaming slip of crescent moon, we’re still talking, just the two of us. She’s no longer the darling five-year-old I once tickled daily — daily tickle? she’d ask. How the world changes, and how it doesn’t. Short as time is, time is also long, too. We stand in the cold November night, beneath the starlight, listening.

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Losing Our Leaves

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Here’s this in my sometimes too-much-adult world: my 14-year-old and her friends have been diligently doing odd jobs for weeks now — stacking wood, planting bulbs, painting, and raking leaves.

She showed me a photo today of herself and the friend she’s known for years leaping backwards into an enormous pile of leaves they’d raked. I sure hope the homeowner laughed as hard as I did.

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.

— Robert Bly

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Away Game

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Leaves drift through the air wherever I go these days, in autumn’s near-constant breeze, whooshing out of sight.

At a high school soccer game beneath lights, bundled in boots and hats, we watch the boys cheer for the girls. In the second half, the boys brush off an impending fight with a rival team. For just a moment, we wonder, Which way will this go? Overhead, Vs of geese call loudly, heading out of here, south. The scent of frying hamburgers tantalizes.

The high school’s the most run-down I’ve seen in Vermont, the field patchy, dwarfed by an enormous research facility for adult work, gleaming in the setting sun. Somehow, we have the sense the adults’ cafeteria serves up finer fare than subsidized school lunch. My daughter’s high school is one of the state’s scrappier — no secret there — but much more moves beneath the sailing soccer balls.

All the long drive home, the river swallowed up in the dark, we talk and talk and talk, passing the time and the miles, our two headlights illuminating the first traces of snow.

Home through the woods,
through the chill rain.

The last leaves down
and sodden on the ground.

The end of autumn...

—David Budbill

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In Praise of Pie

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

When I came home from work, my daughter was cutting up apples on the kitchen table while her cat lay beside her on a chair, gnawing a leaf of chard from the garden. How many pies have we baked and eaten together?

Really, there’s one predominant theme in our family life — I could list reading and work, hiking, friends and so on — but eating ties us together. Haphazard as our lives may seem at times, each of us doing a slew of things, when we’re together, we cook together; we eat together.

My daughter dug into the bag of cookie cutters and stamped out a heart from the scrap dough. She pressed the heart on the center of the pie and took fork tines to the pie’s edges, crimping them prettily.

There are
other things you can do in Vermont. So goes the
rumor: like observe how the clouds thin
deceptively before blizzard, let go of yr
natural hostility & don’t accuse anyone of
running a junkyard; he’s only making
his ends meet.

— Barbara Moraff

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Long Trail, Johnson, Vermont