#amreading good books

Keeping the Roof Intact

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night, my daughters began shouting in the other room. In what I can best describe as my attitude of what fresh hell now? I asked what was up.

A raccoon was climbing up our cedar-shingled house in the dark. Which might fairly well explaining living with kids. Expect what you could never expect. Say you’re deep into an Elena Ferrante novel and you realize a mole has scurried out from behind a kitchen cabinet and is now in the sink, checking out an unwashed dinner skillet. Where is that on a day’s plan?

We trapped the mole and released it down the road (at the neighbors’ driveway), and the girls determined the raccoon tracks led into the sugarhouse and didn’t come out (fine).

The younger daughter and her friend ran into the house yesterday and grabbed ice skates. The roadside ditches were frozen perfectly for ice skating.

This afternoon is filled with sunlight and lemon meringue pie baking. How’s that for poetry?

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.

– Epictetus

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Author-ity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

With my sixth-grader’s basketball season’s schedule, I’ve been spending some working hours hidden on the elementary school’s back staircase, working at a child’s desk so old it has an inkwell hole. I love this old schoolhouse; dating to the first World War, the schoolhouse is not only solidly built, but beautifully as well, with interior windows, pressed tin ceilings, and detailed woodwork. Schools are built like prisons now, with none of this school’s elegance. Carefully kept up, the schoolhouse isn’t shabby at all, but is comfortably well-used and loved.

The other day, a teacher stopped to talk and then showed me two books her students had written and illustrated which made me laugh out loud. The kids’ books were just so darn good. What the teacher had done was allow the children unfettered freedom. I’ve found unbinding myself from the expectations of peers and the social framework around myself very difficult at times. Think how hard that is: to dig deeply into the unknown terrain of creativity – and then know how joyous that is, too.

The teacher told me about one little girl who said, I am the author of my book.

How powerful that knowledge is. Whether that child becomes a novelist or a welder, I think of that statement like a candle that girl may hold before her, a single flame, burning brightly.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

– Marcus Aurelius

 

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Put on Sunglasses

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Thaw. The wind screamed all night, breaking the deep cold’s back, strewing broken branches around our house, and even shattering a storm window. In return, we have a reprieve from the deep cold, and the earth – still buried beneath snow – exudes the fragrance of spring’s promise, albeit months yet in the coming.

That there’s promise in scent is remarkable in these monochrome winter days, when much of the talk seems about politics and what the future might bring. None of us know.

My teenager insisted on driving to school this morning on an icy road. I gave her two pieces of advice and let her go. How could I keep her now, at nearly 18-years-old? It’s been overcast for months in Vermont, and perhaps all over the country, and yet she and her friends insist on wearing sunglasses, these young women, so full of giddy promise.

Old man’s love affair;
in trying to forget it,
a winter rainfall.

– Buson

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Sap line

Talented Kid

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Ever since the holidays, I’ve noticed the same boy riding a unicycle to the Main Street Middle School as I drive through Montpelier on my way to work in the mornings. The cycle is fat-wheeled, sensibly built for Vermont’s rugged terrain. I can see concentration tight on the boy’s face, as he cycles down the steep hill, wearing a helmet and a winter coat, pack on his back.

The boy is maybe eleven or twelve.

Although I don’t know this boy at all, I find myself looking for him on the sidewalk, admiring his tenacity as – at five degrees fahrenheit the other morning! – he pedals down that uneven, icy incline. I imagine him arriving at school, triumphantly cherry-cheeked, hoisting his one-wheeled steed over his shoulder. As I go into my own day, I wonder what kind of man he will become, this hearty, focused, child unicyclist.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind. 

– William Saroyan

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Stillness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Repeatedly, I’ve said that Vermont winter has two saving graces: its exquisite beauty and skiing.

On my way home from work today, I stopped briefly at #10 Pond in Calais, where it was just me and a black crow and two pairs of footprints with a sled trail.

Winter, perhaps, is equally about economy, and economy is poetry.

There are certain times where it does not matter if you hear the word yes or the word no in answer to your question, whether you turn left or right, you will reach your destination.

Not many but some.

Joy Williams, “89” in Ninety-Nine Stories of God

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#10 Pond

2017

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Vermont, the winter is ubiquitous and possibly unending now. Fresh snow falls frequently, and all day yesterday the children were in and out of the house, hanging snow pants and mittens and hats clotted with snow to dry beside the wood stove.

Last night, driving through the tiny town of Lake Elmore, I pointed to a glowing line of lights on a hillside, and mentioned to my teenager that I wondered who lived there.

She answered, “It’s obviously a merry-go-around.”

This is a terrific thing about having a teenager – despite the crabbing or the exhausting insistence that life should be fair when of course fairness is not a universal principle – teenagers are simply fun. Why shouldn’t there be a merry-go-round in rural Vermont? It’s possible.

So, beginning another year, I’m bending toward brighter possibilities. Maybe that line of lights was nailed up to outdo the neighbors, or maybe the lights were bought by a teenage girl and her sister with money they earned, to illuminate their house, or maybe it is a carousel spinning around, welcoming in 2017 with music.

Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover…
Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed….
mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.

Marge Piercy, from “On New Year’s Day”fullsizerender