Vermont

Technological “Advances” in Rural Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Living in Vermont and relying on a cell phone means knowing the best reception landscape around you – precisely which few feet along your dirt road have enough bars to dial out.

Yesterday, with our home reception reliably lousy these days, I parked behind the Greensboro Garage’s yellow barn, opened my notebook, unstrapped my sandals, and went to work. The crickets were singing, and the sun was a peachy end-of-August temperature. I spread my notebook on the dash, with the doors open, in a little breeze that moved along that valley. As a writer, I’ve worked in all kinds of places, from cemeteries to a hospital closet, and this was prime territory, but I’m not sure this represents all that much of a technological advance.

I once used a landline at my own desk; now the phone fits in my hand, which is good thing because I sometimes need to hold it up, believing that will improve reception or send off an email I’m anxious to move along.

Admiring this substantial barn reminded me of Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Remember Seymour Glass calling his fiancée in World War II?

The connection was so bad, and I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back “What?”

– Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

Yesterday evening, parked at the top of Kate Brook Road, near a meadow storybook-beautiful with wildflowers and ringed by mountains, neighbors stopped and asked if I had a flat tire. When I held out my phone, they said, Use our landline anytime. The door’s unlocked. If I stopped by, chances are, I’d leave some of my tomatoes, and sample some of theirs.

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Hardwick, Vermont

 

 

Book Group

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

For years, my daughters and I have been eating peppermint stick ice cream at Cassie’s Corner in Greensboro, Vermont, while admiring an immense red barn just across the side road. Who lives there, we wondered?

This sun-filled afternoon, I was lucky to sit with a group of women who had all read my novel and asked stellar questions. What a gift for a writer. Often, I imagine myself straddling the outside ledge of a cupola, my fingers hardly holding a grip, my toes clenching a ballpoint pen, while I fervently ponder plot and backstory and spy on passersby. The truth is, maybe I just need to get out more.

Many doors have opened to me via Hidden View, but to sit with a group of smart women, talking about craft and literature, is an especially savory bit of summer. Who knew open barn door would reveal such a stunning view of the lake  – and couple that with conversation? – terrific.

One has to be just a little crazy to write a … novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

– John Gardner

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Round Church in Richmond, Vermont

 

Revision: Made by Hand

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I’m revising both a book and my knitting these days, yanking apart for the fourth time the same skein of yarn. At some not-too-distant unraveling, this lovely yarn may disintegrate. Isn’t revision one of the great beauties of knitting? Unlike in my own life, I can re-do, refashion, re-envision. That’s a gift in writing, too, that the writer cannot use in her own life.

I keep returning to that Aristotelian word teleology from my undergraduate philosophy days. What is the purpose of this ball of yarn? How can I aid that lovely azure linen to achieve its intended purpose? What is the purpose of the book I’m writing, and how do all these pieces within help achieve that end?

Here’s the faith aspect: I’ll find the proper gauge and use for this yarn. The writing will clear. And what cannot be undone in a human life is an intrinsic part of the whole.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy “To Be of Use”

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Shelburne, Vermont

The Making of Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

If you write about Vermont, you’ll write about rain. There’s a myriad ways to know rain: lying in bed on a summer evening with the windows open, relishing the needed watering of thirsty garden greens, or the unwelcome tear of November ice in your eyes.

In knitting, my hands know how to create using wool (or linen or hemp) and needles. I can read a pattern, measure and gauge, but the bulk of that knowledge is through the experience of my hands and eyes. My fingers know if the tension is right, or whether to rip apart and begin again.

My daughter draws beautifully; something I cannot do at all. When I ask her, how do you do that? she says she doesn’t know. But yet, clearly, on some level, she does know. She just hasn’t yet articulated it. Writing, too, is that fascinating mixture of craft and raw, direct experience. Rain is a handful of soil so sodden it runs between your fingers, or lies heavily over fields and lakes, so dense and unending it might as well be a territory unto itself. Like Janisse Ray’s lovely line: Sometimes all day, days, rain falls.

But once I held
a kingfisher
in my hands,
I touched its blue power.
That may be the only time
I ever do.

From Janisse Ray’s “Kingfisher”

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The Garden’s Geometry

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As a new mother, I was surprised by the weight of children; even babies, carried all day long, are heavy, and nursing in the nighttime, my arms often drooped with exhaustion. While my daughters are long since beyond the babes-in-arms stage, all afternoon yesterday I carried buckets of mulch and compost, bent with my hoe and scythe, and tugged my garden back from wilderness into domesticity: for a brief bit of time.

Step away, and the raspberry canes will run their way back. Creeping buttercup – or creeping crowfoot – proliferates knottily.

May is the season of optimism. I’ve planted melons for my watermelon-loving daughter, and promised to water well. The vertical territory of my beds lies low yet; visit in a few months and – like growing children – the vines will be lushly magnificent, the peppers spread out and holding hands, the bachelor buttons in bloom. May, like mothering, is the season of patience, too.

I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none.

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

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Prayer for A Little More Kindness

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This morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest kids shared their work and ended singing a country western song together. I’m no particular fan of country western, but listening to these small kids sing, I realized this song was really a hymn, a prayer for children to retain their sweet and noble natures.

The share had begun with stories the children had written, envisioning their grownup lives, but the song took the children’s stories to a different dimension, mixing qualities of the heart with their written projects. Maybe some of these kids will never remember this song, but my guess is more than a few someday, in the midst of their own unexpected (and hopefully marvelous) adult lives, will remember singing in their kindergarten classroom with real fondness. 

Am I still kind? Humble? Do I yet have the better part of who I am? Then again, maybe this song is really an adult prayer.

…When it’s hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Always stay humble and kind
Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you…

– Tim McGraw, “Humble and Kind”

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Photo by Molly S.