Vermont

Coyote Calling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

October already, again, the fall has bent around again, and before long, snow will fall again. What will we do? The same things, I suppose, we always do. Boil beans and onions and chilis for soup, keep the house warm, lace up the ski boots and slide over the fields.

At our old house, further along in the autumn, we’d walk down to the bus stop in the dark. The girls and I would listen to coyotes howling in the hills. Here, in town, we’ve heard coyotes, but rarely. It’s foxes we see here.

My daughter returns home from school enchanted with learning French, dreaming of distant lands. She has her summer tan yet, her hair sun-bleached.  She’s dreaming of her driver’s license, of flying to Africa, stuffing her backpack and hiking the French Alps…..

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

— Tom Hennen

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Listening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Two parents once came up to me after a school board meeting and thanked me profusely. They felt so much better. At the time, I thought I hadn’t done anything. No decision had been made. But I had done something. I had simply let them talk; I listened; I empathized.

Recently, I emailed my former neighbors — rabidly, on the attack — and asked how dare they employ my ex-husband? How dare they pay him cash when he hasn’t paid child support in years? I expected my former neighbors to be defensive and angry, but, instead, the email I received back was kind and thoughtful and incredibly insightful. They’ll likely keep employing him, but at that point, I didn’t even care. Their empathy for me had opened up my heart to be empathetic for their plight, too.

What makes me remember this on a breezy autumn is maybe nothing but my own unhappiness about the adult world, both in general and in particular. Recently, I realized with the work I’m doing now, I could actually pack up and take a geographical cure from my immediate adult world, head somewhere else to work for the next four months. Like, perhaps, a desert cave.

Bad idea, I think. Those former neighbors and I have finally made our peace, and this one is likely to be lasting.

On a withered branch
A crow has alighted:
Nightfall in autumn

— Basho

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End of September

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To counteract this seasonal shift from summer to autumn’s short days, I take the cleaver to gardenstuff — a carrot, a leek, an onion, garlic, parsley — and stew them with lentils and salt. Lentils, once the bane of our household (not lentils, again?). The younger daughter, still in her sweaty soccer practice shirt, eats hungrily.

Her older sister takes a knife to apples, listens to Stephen Colbert, rolls out dough. Pie, at least: it’s autumn.

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Late Night Reading

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As summer blended into autumn, the days were warm enough to swim, but we simply didn’t.

Instead, I lie awake at night, listening to the tree frogs thrip, thrip, thrip, singing as though this season will linger on and on, and then it’s me and the cat lying on the couch in the middle of the night, reading about economics and slavery, and when that’s too much for those tiny wee hours — while the stars pass over our roof — the cat suggests Alan Watts, which has somehow been shoved down the back of the couch. The book is an old paperback that I either swiped from my dad’s shelves when I was in college, or he passed along to me. Which of us can remember any longer?

Finally, the rain pours down in an enormous wash.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

~ Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown 

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Photo by Molly B.

Mooncrazed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Walking beneath the full moon last night, my younger daughter remarks how quickly the moon rises. Our conversation winds into the complexities of the moon phases, and I finally I admit I just don’t know the answer, but my father would.

Although we’re wearing jackets and jeans, the evening’s particularly warm for fall, the moon creamy and luscious. In the dark, flying geese overhead honk.

I mention something about “heavenly bodies,” and — despite my vehemence that this is, indeed, legitimate, these heavenly bodies — my daughters insist that’s too weird.

I don’t use my past reply about common knowledge, because my kids now have this kind of common language that might as well be from some remote Amazonian tribe to my ears. Apparently, I’m one of the last humans in their world to know this term “VSCO girl,” although the subtext beneath the so-called VSCOing activities and accessories remains a little vague to me. Likewise, when I shared some historical lore about the preppy movement (I notice Amazon has helpfully described the official handbook as facetious in case anyone missed that), I’m met with disinterest until I mention the flipped-up collar trend.

That’s just bad taste, both daughters immediately agree.

In 30 years, the full moon will grace Friday the 13 again. Walking along a dirt road in a light breeze, the girls mention how old each of us will be in 30 years. 30 years, I say, is a long time. And then: I was 30 when I became a mother.

Few lights shine in houses along the road. There’s no one else around. Back at our house, the moon is barely creeping over the horizon. We sit on the back porch while the moon rises, quickly. A luminous, heavenly globe.

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Stranger, Passing Through

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m weeding in my garden when an unfamiliar voice calls out. In the evening dusk, I’m thinking of my younger daughter eating dinner with her soccer team and, simultaneously, of walking to high school in the New Hampshire town where I was a teen. For no reason at all, I’m remembering walking on Union Street, which followed the railroad tracks above the Piscataquog River.

A neighbor I know only by sight is passing through. He stops and smokes a cigarette while we talk. His mother lived in my house, years ago. We talk about raising kids — his two sons, my two daughters.

The daylight recedes quickly. He asks for work, shoveling my roof in winter. We look at my house and its simple roof lines. We’ll do it, I say, and then he admits how much he hates shoveling roofs.

Mist has crept in, blurring the palette of zinnias and coreopsis in my garden. He’s gone, quickly, before I can ask more about his mother and this house.

On this final morning in August, ten feet tall, the sunflowers in my garden bloom. I planted late, but the mighty faces have peeled back the leaves over their gold faces, opening up to the sun. Their roots, thick as fierce fingers, dig into the sandy soil.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.

— Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

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