#amreading

Whale Bones

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Vermont’s state fossil is the Charlotte Whale, a whale skeleton unearthed in a farmer’s field over 150 years ago. The skeleton is not Moby Dick-sized, a detail I should have researched before visiting with my 11-year-old daughter. Almost immediately, I realized I was in for Act 2 of the Hope Diamond. (That little thing is the largest diamond on the planet?)

The reality is, the whale skeleton is about as cool as cool can be, hand-wired together and displayed in UVM’s Perkins Museum; admission free. My children and I walked in, took a self-tour, and left without seeing a living soul. 11,00o years ago, these beauties were swimming right where we ate ice cream on a sunny June afternoon.

To an 11-year-old, five years spans an eternity; 11,000 years is imaginary. The number may  mean little, but the whale – enamored of or not – this child is unlikely to forget.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee!

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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Photo by Molly S.

Revision: Made by Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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

Know the World Through Wildflowers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I moved to Woodbury, Vermont, in my twenties, walking along our dirt road was a novelty I enjoyed. After I had babies, I spent even more time along the road, walking with a child in a pack to put her to sleep, and then following a little girl as she learned to ride a bicycle with training wheels.

Moving here in the month of July, almost immediately I noticed all kinds of wildflowers whose names I didn’t know: yellow rattle, cinquefoil, speedwell. With a small paperback, I gradually began to learn the wild world around me. One of my younger daughter’s first words was vetch, and she said this word often, with great determination. It’s worth considering – that the naming of our world is how we begin to understand and know our world.

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?…

Robert Frost, “Flower-Gathering”

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West Woodbury, Vermont

 

On the Quest

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenage daughter hands me her high school summer reading book the other day and asks me to read a paragraph. She’s seventeen, wearing sunglasses and a new swimming suit, lying on the beach, and exasperated with this assignment. Her younger sister and friends swim in the lake, searching, faces down, for the giant rock named Big Yellow.

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like a Professor

With enormous gusto, I keep reading, and then I begin laughing at the chapter’s end; the writing is that great. Then I point out to her, Look, this is about you: a young adult, beginning the quest of her life.

She takes her sunglasses off and holds them in her hand. I am? she asks. And then she repeats, I am.

I hand her back the school’s book and tell her gently, Literature is about you. 

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Greensboro, 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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Cutting Wood and Soul

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The first piece of writing I ever published that I made any kind of money from was titled “Maple,” and it was about the intense labor of cutting wood. As a family of sugar makers, for years we cut and split wood at far greater amounts than almost anyone else we knew. Particularly through my older daughter’s life, cutting, stacking, and hauling wood, has been a constant.

In that autobiographical essay, I wrote: “Perhaps it’s that Puritan streak driven so deeply in my soul, but I believe that living demands its toll: that creation is lockstep with destruction. As such, wood forms the crux of our life, the cycle of our turning days, months, years. And yet this rural life has also bequeathed my girl her wild wood.”

Today, undergoing yet more repair of a tooth broken twenty years ago when a piece of firewood fell from a pile stacked too high, I realized, again, our souls may be fierce, but we live and die by the body. It’s a marvel to realize something as small as tooth may do in a body. In the chair today, with my eyes closed, I smelled an antiseptic that reeked of bleach, and then…. cloves. Cloves? Exotically rich, sensual, nourishing. Could there be a greater juxtaposition?

The young endodontist showed me the film of my tooth, its root illuminated like a miniature splinter of lightning. In his pleasant, southern accent, he advised me to think good thoughts. I intend to. But I will also never stack wood higher than my shoulders again.

…When I was ten
we lived in a bungalow in Indianapolis…
Once I got up and went outside.
The trees-of-heaven along the track swam in white mist.
The sky arched with sickle pears.
Lilacs had just opened.
I pulled the heavy clusters to my face
and breathed them in,
suffused with a strange excitement
that I think, when looking back, was happiness.

Ruth Stone, from “What We Have”

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the kitchen window