Loving Yellow

September 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Lador Day Weekend, we’re all home Sunday — both girls and myself — and I followed in the family tradition instilled by my father: painting the house. Our previous house was cedar shingled, with paint only on the window trim. That house had many windows, so, most falls, I painted some of the trim or old storm windows, always the same exterior deep blue teal.

My daughter, when she was three, called this Mama velvet-tealing, a neat way of turning a noun into a verb.

While gray is a traditional New England choice for steps, I had picked up a remainder can of exterior floor paint for a mural on the barn door. When I opened it up, the paint sparkled the glossy richness of spring dandelions.

No, the girls said.

Yes, I said.

Later, when the new neighbors walked over for cake, they asked how long the steps had been so brilliant. Since today, said my older daughter.

Once again, I find myself wildly painting. Next, a deep yammish orange for the upstairs floors. Color, the consolation of fall.

…What is yellow? pears are yellow,

Rich and ripe and mellow….

— Christina Rossetti, from “Color”

Postcard From Hardwick: September 1

September 1, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After an intense week of work and family — of wondering where is this heading? — my daughter locks her keys in her car and texts me. Can I bring my keys? And there’s a sketchy stranger near her, too.

When I arrive, she’s leaning against her car, looking up at the sky, and the sketchy somebody is a dad in the high school parking lot, teaching his kid to drive, in that jerking, slow way my daughter and I both recognize.

I mention that my brother can teach my second daughter to drive.

From a soggy patch in the weeds, a bullfrog croaks.

September 1 today, the anniversary of the fateful day Hitler rolled his tanks into Poland, beginning the war that destroyed so many lives.

September 1, the anniversary of my former inlaws.

This morning, all’s quiet on this green patch of Vermont, overcast, with cricket songs and bird calls, a day that begs reflection.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie...
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

— W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Being 13, Hardwick, Vermont

Turtle Visitor

August 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A wildlife biologist smitten with wood turtles makes an evening presentation at my library, turtle in tow.

The room fills with people I know, and some I don’t know — a little girl from Montpelier with her grandfather whose family has owned a lakeside camp in Woodbury for 100 years. The trustees bring homemade desserts; there’s cold cider; we borrow chairs from the elementary school’s second floor gymnasium. In the humidity, I wipe sweat from my forehead with the school’s paper towels.

An older couple brings their dog, who otherwise would have cowered alone at home, if thunderstorms moved in.

These evenings are a microcosm of small town Vermont: one woman quietly counsels another about obtaining a medical referral. The kids pile a paper plate with brownies. Another woman raids my book sale, asks for a box, and says she’ll drop a check by later.

In the end, I lock up, saying goodnight to the silent 100-year-old schoolhouse. So many people have gone through these doors; so much living has happened here.

In my library, next door, I glance around at a bit of chaos — a pile of old buttons in a pie plate the children have strung into necklaces, picture books on the floor.

Enough for one day. I turn off the light, lock the door, and walk out into the cooling-down rain-sweet night.

And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along.

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

Ides of August, Buying Gas

August 16, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Stopping to buy gas late in the evening, I walk into D&L and immediately stop: the familiar clerk is mopping the floor. It’s so muggy, even long past dark, that he holds the back of his wrist to his sweating forehead.

Go ahead, he tells me. Walk on it. And he crosses the wet tile floor himself.

We talk a little about this hot, sultry summer, now winding down. Already, I’m waking in the dark, turning on the light over the kitchen sink to feed the mewling cats.

In this liquor and gas station on the edge of town, the clerks are sharp-eyed, scanning the crowd, but this evening, it’s just him and I. He leans on his mop handle, nearly finished with his day’s shift, nearly closing time.

I mention that six months from now, in lightless January, I’m going to be complaining to him about the subzero cold.

He laughs out loud. Oh, boy, I can’t wait.

Outside, the gas station lights are an illuminated bubble in the surrounding darkness. Most people sleep at night in this little town. I’m sure there’s mothers and fathers awake with crying babies, the heartsick or troubled who wander their dim rooms, drug users or simply those who are sleepless. The crickets whirr their song, this still night, with not even any passing-through traffic. August: season of t-shirts and sandals, and, this morning, rain sweetly falling.

The Chinese junk
not stopping
moving on through the mist

— Buson

Morning Notes

August 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

An August Sunday list with the daughter:

put up dill pickles
can peaches
write questions for tomorrow’s interview
pick blackberries
pluck Japanese beetles from the bean vines and feed this salad to the hens
bake a tart in the pan found yesterday in a free pile
wander somewhere unknown

The screened door slamming tells me it is summer…

— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”

Summer Growth

August 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I wake this morning listening to rain, thinking about shears I left in the garden — such a little worry. Dry the tool off and put it back on the shelf.

My younger daughter is home again — two weeks away, and I didn’t recognize her from the back. It wasn’t simply that she wore a shirt I didn’t recognize. I was looking for little girl — how she’s imprinted in my mind — when she’s nearly all caught up to her sister. Here they are, scavenging in another’s garden.