#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Bearing Up

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I’m nearly sure to lose our household bet of what date the garden will be freed of snow — our variation of “ice out” on the lakes. I’ve picked Monday, April 15, both tax day and the anniversary of Lincoln’s death.

April’s the season of running water in Vermont, the carrying off of snow to Lake Champlain. Nature’s licked us — once again proving the futility of competition, industrial revolution notwithstanding.

On our evening walk up a nearby dirt road, snowmelt reveals a winter’s worth of Bud light cans. We see three deer, maple trees stitching together the sky and the great hayfields brown and drying in the spring breezes. Spring, going about its business.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
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Heron’s Return

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The snow’s back, keeping the population in Hardwick predictably low.

This time of year is both ugly and tantalizing — the trash bleeding up, the tree buds fattening, robins chittering. And yet, the snow lies ubiquitous.

What else would we complain about? a friend asks at a middle school concert. We sit in the very back row — she and her husband, myself and my knitting I take out of my bag, but no further. Quickly, we’re laughing, giggling, silly, admiring our middle school daughters, intrigued at their age and maybe a little afraid — so new, so new; everything about adolescence shrieks of heading over the nest’s carefully mudded wall.

Often, I think of Robert Frost’s line: In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. So it does. But, like anyone, I’d prefer life to go on better, rather than worse. So, perhaps, grousing about the weather is nothing.

Despite the snow, the lakes have opened up. The herons are back, their great wings cutting across the gray sky.

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What I’m thinking of….

 

The Only Question

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Picture this: the three of us — two daughters and myself — clustered together in my older daughter’s car, driving to Craftsbury to ski. My older daughter is talking, talking, talking, when her 13-year-old sister dryly mentions from the backseat the kind of tepid comment she sometimes offers — a sentiment along the lines of what the heck is life all about, anyway? A kind of classic, existential angst that seems perfectly normal — to me, at least — for a rapidly-heading-toward-adolescent.

Bingo, I think. There’s the question. The only question, really.

Her sister, cut perhaps from a very different philosophical cloth, directs our attention to the afternoon which is turning sunny, and notes the skiing is going to be amazing, yet. That terrific kind of April skiing that’s like dessert.

Later, I go looking for my old copies of Alan Watts and find this:

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

— Alan Watts

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Oh Goddess, This Way…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On this spongy, springy April day, may Fortuna smile a little more warmly on northern Vermont…..

With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious.

— Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

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14 Years Ago… On a Hot Day…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nearly 14 years ago, my friend and I drove to Burlington to shop for a baby carseat. I was pregnant; she was pregnant. In the backseat, our two  6-year-olds chattered and ate snacks. Somewhere in the midst of our errands in Burlington, we discovered it was Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day.

What’s 14 years in the scope of human history? A nearly nothing. But for us, two baby girls, one death, five jobs, one book, a rabbit, two cats, one divorce, and a whole lot of living later — 14 might as well be a trip around the moon and back.

No free cones on this trip. We returned with four boxes of Narcan, oodles of info, and even more talk….

Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.

— Louise Glück

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Magic Trick

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Like a great joke, a few more inches of snow arrived on April Fool’s Day. By afternoon, however, the day evolved to a breezy sunniness, brisk but radiant. I walked with writer Natalie Kinsey-Warnock to her car in the Woodbury School’s dirt parking lot. It’s Woodbury — the village built in a swamp — and, for that moment, there’s nowhere I’d rather be. In the treetops, blackbirds sang crazily. Why not? It’s Vermont spring.

Natalie shared stories with the school kids today, and at one point, I couldn’t figure out what she was headed — how did a 1865 steamboat catastrophe in the Mississippi River figure into rural Vermont?

Then, abruptly, like whisking an indigo rabbit from a top hat, the story shimmered. It’s as though Natalie unfurled one of her grandmother’s handstitched quilts, and the connections between the history’s enormity and this woman, and these children and their own place in history, lie visible as much as can anything can be seen in history’s rough beauty, the concealed pieces teasingly beckoning.

I’m the librarian, the hostess of this event, the timekeeper to move this along, make sure the kids have time to grab their coats and catch the school bus, but for these moments I’m merely me, surrounded by these rapt children, loving this particular story.

Oh, the long days of circling to sow and reap,
but, O, those few days on the river each year.

— Leland Kinsey, from “Northern Traverse”

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