The Swedish Word for Joy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The dental hygienist tells me about fishing trips to Lake Ontario, sailing far out into the lake where the land was no longer visible. Like the ocean she tells me. You can’t do that in Vermont.

With her gloved thumb, she presses on my lower jaw, my source of infection and misery and a veritable hemorrhage of money. The December before the pandemic, an oral surgeon took a scalpel to my gum and cut. A few days later, my brother and his girlfriend arrived for the holidays. He grilled on the back porch and drank beer while I leaned against the clapboards. In the kitchen, my daughters and his girlfriend cooked and baked.

On his phone, we studied footage of China, closed up and quarantined, back in the days when we couldn’t envision our own streets and highways closed up, the border closed between Vermont and my brother’s house in New Hampshire.

In a world of enormous possibilities, that bone infection is currently on the down low. The hygienist tells me I wouldn’t believe the things she’s seen — fishing, and in the dentist’s office. On my way out, she cheerily reminds me about floss.

Here’s a 100-story of mine published this morning about happiness.

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” 

— Rebecca Solnit

Facts Yet Matter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As one of the things I do to keep my household of daughter and me and two cats churning along, I spend an inordinate amount of time on minutes for a complicated development review board hearing. The writing poses the interesting questions of what to include, what to delete, clarity of the whole, simplicity of sentence. Beneath this, the minutes are a miniature of a town and the push-pull around building and change, of past and present and future, of how multiple stories of people intersect.

A deep appeal for me, writing these minutes, is that the facts matter. I arrange numbers and percentages, how these describe boards and a proposed building beneath a stand of cedars.

What I don’t include is that beyond the cedars the bank drops steeply into the water. The water is particularly clean. I’ve been swimming at the public beach for years, and I know how you can swim far out and look down at the sandy bottom. Flecks of mica glitter in the sunlight. The facts of my own story include an especially warm October day many years ago when a friend and I ventured far out into the lake. We swam among the first of the fallen red leaves. The day was so warm and the water so still.

And a line from Nikita Gill that sums up my tenor of thinking these days….

“We have all taken turns being Red Riding Hood and we have all been the wolf.” 

— Nikita Gill

In Very Vermont Fashion….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

… I stopped by an art opening in a former brick stagecoach inn. In the Vermont way, the art was eclectic and superlative, the cheese local, the diminutive cupcakes homebaked, and the company excellent. My friend is the easy kind of person who doesn’t mind stepping forward with a plate of olives in her hand and introducing herself to a former library volunteer of mine whose name I can’t quite place….

Across the dirt road is an old barn where a stone labyrinth was placed a few years back. While my friend and I were talking, we watched two strangers do an excuse me, no, excuse me, sorting out who was going to enter the labyrinth first.

Small pleasures, friends, against the inevitable chaos of life.

A Story in Here…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I visit a woman whose family bought a house on a peninsula in a glacial lake. She invites me in — a stunning place of wood and glass and French doors — nothing polished, all preserved as if it’s still World War I. There’s an enormous stone fireplace. She tells me that, after a hurricane in the 1930s, the original owner (who lived elsewhere, New York or Pennsylvania) never returned after he heard that all the trees on the peninsula were destroyed, save for eight. He sold the house to this woman’s family. Great pine trees tower over the lawn and hydrangeas.

She says to me, Imagine the view of the lake in the thirties, when the trees were all gone? That must have been stunning, too.

I drive home in a sudden windstorm. I’m passing a stand of poplars, their leaves crinkled and finished with summer. The wind blows leaves through my open car windows, over a bucket of apples, on my library books, into the lap of my skirt. Ahead of me, two cars are pulled over, blinkers flashing. A branch smashed the windshield of one car. Two young woman stand in the road, the wind circling, twigs snapping, rain beginning in earnest. One woman raises her arms in a giant Y.

There’s a story (or two) in here for sure….

FEMA Folks and Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last week, when the FEMA folks make their initial appearance in our town office, I step out and chat with a woman from Georgia. I intend to skip the meeting that’s about to transpire, but I’m interested to hear what these people are seeing around my state and how this whole FEMA thing works anyway. My new acquaintance tells me immediately that she’s exhausted. They’ve visited multiple towns, driving through rural Vermont.

She’s quite concerned about the impending cold, and I assure her that snow is (probably) not going to appear in October, almost certainly not accumulate. The FEMA folks are apparently working on the state’s natural deadline, putting as much of the state back together before the snow sets in.

By the time she heads up to the meeting about the FEMA portal and so much talk about culverts and more culverts, we’ve swapped stories about working and parenting and she’s shared her love of Atlanta.

On her way out, she leans in my door and says goodbye. It’s a moment: the handful of Vermonters and a few FEMA people — politeness all around — brought together by enormously complex events. A selectboard member says, We’re hoping for a nice fall so you can see Vermont at its best…

Last evening, I’m talking to my parents on the phone, standing on my porch and leaning against my house’s corner board, looking across the little valley that holds the town where I live, when I realize the world around me is pink. The light isn’t the streaming crimson of sunset. A soft pinkness suffuses our world: sky, valley, village, right down to my bare toes. September that feels like August, but is still definitely September. That’s where we are.

Stealing Flowers Gone Wild.

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Bear Pond Books in Montpelier reopened yesterday, nearly two months after the July flood, beloved bookstore in Vermont’s capital city. “The flood” sounds Biblical, and I’ll note that the Old Testament has never been known as a Hallmark read.

Last fall, I often parked my car behind the town garage so I could run on the rail-trail. On a heap of gravelly slag, a variety of yellow asters blossomed. At the fall’s end, shortly before frost, I brought a bucket and shovel and dug up a clump of stalks. I buried that clump in my garden. The leaves emerged this spring. By then, I had forgotten that re-homing of the yellow aster. Now, the green buds are on the verge of opening.

There’s a submerged theme between the three things in this post that I imagine only I can see— the bookstore and the flood, my stolen flowers, Mary Ruefle’s lines about clouds: the unstoppable force of our planet, immense, immense. Meanwhile, our toiling: the bookstore folks carrying out mud bucket by bucket, me with my shovel and a small handful of what might appears to be merely weeds.

Mary Ruefle:

All that summer there were so many clouds we

didn’t know what to do with them. They overflowed the

sky – they were on our streets, in our homes, in our draw-

ers, and in our cabinets. They were in our cars and on our

buses, I even saw them in taxis. No one had ever seen so

many clouds, to the extent that, as often happens with a

glut, no one could remember a time without them…

From My Private Property