Vermont

Why Love Cats

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughters’ cat and I are listening to Chris Hedges lecture about the collapse of the American Empire — extremely serious and unfunny — when the cat falls off the hutch and splashes into my pan of lemon-yellow paint.

The cat probably yowled; I certainly shouted. The creature scrambled through the dining room to living room, through my study, into the kitchen, where my daughter grabbed the paint-soaked cat. While she cleaned paint from the cat in the basement, I washed wet paint from our floors on my hands and knees.

We’ve lived in this house not much more than a year. While I love the maple floors, I generally don’t spend much time mopping.

While Hedges kept talking, I realized some of the narrow boards were birdseye maple. Through the closed basement door, I heard my daughter murmuring, comforting her beloved cat.

Whoever laid the floors in this house passed from this life decades ago. I thought of these slender, hard boards in a carpenter’s hand, his sight appraising the grain.

The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire…. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.

— Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

IMG_3819.jpg

The Larch Season, November, Vermont

 

Stockpiling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the garden withers for the winter, I collect seeds — tithonia, marigold, coneflower — pulling the dry seeds with their tufted ends with my fingers, secreting them in my coat pockets.

My daughter takes a handsaw to the mammoth sunflower stalks fencing the garden, their heavy heads picked nearly clean of seeds from marauding birds. From a scant palmful of seeds, what pleasure these beauties have given us this summer. Now, the birds and the scavenging squirrels feast, too.

A friend stops by with a bare peony root, cushioned in paper, transported in a Negra Modela box. I’m out that evening. When I return, my daughter carefully unwraps the root — not merely a stick but a complicated branching — and then lifts another smaller root. Good luck, she says. They may not grow.

Or, they might.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

— Galway Kinnell

IMG_3757.jpg

 

Juncos flock the double glass doors in our kitchen, tantalizing our cat.

Pond Swimming — In October?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rain moved in overnight, but yesterday was a sultry 80 degrees, the school kids running into the library and standing just inside the door, panting, their faces rosy, sweaty. A grandfather and I stood talking in the doorway. About an hour more, you think, this lovely weather will last? I asked. He laughed.

After work, I swam while my daughter sat on the bank with our friend and her old rabbit, stroking the bunny’s white fur and talking. The pond water — when I thought swimming had ended weeks ago — had an initial flash of cold. Then I swam out where the deep, nearly inky water held me, tepid. The dragonflies are gone. I grabbed fallen, floating leaves.

I knew the sun would set before long. I had chores. My friend was leaving. And yet — swimming, October 10, northern Vermont. Mark that.

IMG_1258.jpg

#10 Pond/Photo by Molly S.

Why I Hate the Corn Maze

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Ever read the late David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again?

Okay, that was about cruise ships. My supposedly fun thing was a corn maze which began as lots of fun, driving along maple-lined dirt roads, past hayfields, laughing with the kids about the mist we kept entering and exiting, apparently in the middle of rural-Vermont-nowhere.

In this amazing corn maze, hard-packed dirt paths wound between immensely high corn. An hour in, actually beginning to wonder if we might not get out, I dredged up what limited survival skills I might possess, and ordered the kids to follow “the rule of right” and only make right-hand turns — as if that was the key out. Even smarter, perhaps, we tagged behind a cheerful grandparent-ish couple who practically ran through the maze and got us out.

So much for fun mothering experiences, these few hours that seemed, honestly, a little too close to the marrow, a little too near my life — wander around and conjure some savvy to get out.

Much later that Sunday evening, picking up stray socks and library books and putting away laundry — getting ready for a working week — I realized I failed that metaphor for life: enjoy the journey. Take note.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

— David Foster Wallace

thumbnail_IMG_3461

Lucky Charm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

By the side of Route 14, my younger daughter leaps, waving at me to stop.  Nearby, her sister’s car is pulled over.

Flat tire.

The older daughter rails about her brand-new tire, likely ruined, and then her younger sister says simply, It’s just a flat tire.

“Flat tire” may become our new mantra — our own, hey, lighten up, change the tire and move on — maybe even a talisman, as if the tiny bit of ill luck might ward off the greater.

September 23 — birthday of the young man we’ve known since he was 1, who’s logged a million miles on his bike and is heading to Europe for even more. Safe travels. Much happiness in your new decade.

 

IMG_3433.jpg

 

Tiny Running Toddler

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A very tall father and his nearly-one-year-old daughter live across the road from my library and often swing by. Yesterday while I’m in for a board meeting, not really open, they swing by, and the little girl runs to me.

Not even 7 days ago, the small curly-headed girl was tentatively taking steps, and here she is now, rushing across our worn carpet, her smile radiant.

When my daughters were babies, I was amazed how quickly their nearly translucent fingernails grew, how rapidly a scrape healed.

Babyhood’s quicksilver, sure, but adolescence mirrors that age. My 13-year-old has changed so mightily in the last six months, in face and body, that when I arrive at soccer games and can’t easily find her — idiotic, that I can’t immediately recognize my own daughter across a field — her sister says, Look for the green cleats.

Really? I think to myself. Identify my girl by her shoes?

When I was a mother of a toddler, I would have found this situation sad, maybe even just awful, but — and this may just be a combination of worn-down single mothering and that my daughter’s busied her life with all kinds of great kid projects and friends — I find her endlessly interesting, like a blossom whose name I don’t know, opening petal by petal. Where are you headed, I wonder. Where are you going?

Because he’s so good, here’s a few more lines from Andre Dubus:

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another.

IMG_3426.jpg