#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

One Gallon of Paint: What It Creates

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughter and I paint my bedroom a light blue that reminds me of a bedroom I painted the summer I was 21 and living in an old house in Brattleboro. Those hot months, I was waitressing at the Skyline Restaurant, making great tips. On my days off, a friend and I painted much of that house and drank gin and tonics. While my afternoons of G&Ts have long passed, painting hasn’t.

I pour the paint into the pan; my daughter gently sets her cats outside the door and then takes the roller from my hand. I got it, she says. I stand back, offering my pro tips about using enough paint, and she repeats again, gently, I got it.

Truth is, she does.

I pick up the paintbrush and continue cutting in, keeping ahead of her in some kind of way. After a while, she hands me back the roller and heads out to her cats who are stretching their paws under the door.

Listening to the redwing blackbirds through the open window, I wonder about the paint and wallpaper layers in this 100-year-old house. Who’s been here, over these years? Us, now.

“Finding A Long Gray Hair” by Jane Kenyon

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.

IMG_5047.jpg

Birdsong, Mortality

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Where the fields have opened up, robins flock in the trees, singing the melodies that always remind me of spring’s running water — icy cold and much welcomed, harbingers of green. These are the first flocks we’ve seen this year, and we’re doing what I’ve done with this daughter since she was a little one on my back — we’re searching out robins, these beloved spring birds.

Same activity, different backroad. We’ve moved towns and houses, and so tinged through all of this cusp-of-adolescence for this girl is both the headiness of new experiences threaded through with loss. Impermanence, I remind myself over and over, sometimes daily, is the ticket price for all of us, even these little palm-sized birdies, the fat earthworms they’re devouring, and the stones in the fields, gradually giving up their edges to the elements.

We stop for a moment and talk about the dirt road behind our boots, the shape of its crown in the middle. Birdsong, wind, running streams. The fields are so wide open here we glimpse a herd of deer at the distant crest, just a quicksilver moment as they rush across the ridge and vanish again.

My daughter, humoring me, hungry for her late dinner, asks me, Are you actually talking to those robins?

Oh, that thin scrim between mind, body, landscape….

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

— Alan Watts

IMG_5030

Hardwick, Vermont

Rain Patter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In our former house, the pink Owens-Corning insulation had been so shredded by mice in the ceiling that we could easily hear rain on the metal roof — a pleasant sound, although the resulting winter cold didn’t match that coziness.

Our house now is cool in the summers, warm or certainly warm-ish in the winters, the most well-insulated house I’ve ever lived in, and I’m darn grateful for that, all the way around. Last night, I opened my daughter’s window so she could hear the sound of the rain. Her cat jumped up on the sill, his nose pressed against her screen, curious about what was happening in the night. We haven’t heard the rain for a very long time now — a few aberrant storms in the winter — but this steady rain promised the chirping peepers will return.

Nearly 40 degrees out, I left the window open a few inches so my daughter could lie in bed, reading and listening to the rain.

On the other side of her wall, I read an article in The New Yorker about lost notebooks in Egypt. The sap will be running all night.

IMG_5022.jpg

sometime in late March, collage

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughters and I place bets on when the snow in the garden will completely disappear. The stakes? Yet to be determined….

End of March: either the dusty or snowy or rainy season in Vermont. The back roads are miserable, rutted-mud driving. In this season, I no longer take the narrow dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais, that long slow rise (or fall) above #10 Pond. Instead, I drive along paved Route 100, road of my past years. Over the highways hang clouds of dry road sand and salt, rising like our Vermont-esque version of insect clouds. The roads wind between the mountains and along the rivers — ancient traveling paths I follow on my way to that long-ago sea of Lake Champlain.

I hang the bedsheets to dry on the clothesline, snapping in the breeze, teach my daughter to play euchre. We read in the evenings. I’m awake before dawn, drinking coffee and talking to the cats and wondering if I’m heading down the crazy woman path…. I decide to paint my bedroom blue.

Evenings, the light lingers in the sky now. I show where I intend to plant two oak trees this spring. With a bit of a shock, my 13-year-old realizes she’ll never climb these trees as a child. Why plant them? she asks. I give her the only answer I know: Because.

This morning, I heard a dove cooing.

You that lose nothing
Know nothing.

— W. S. Merwin

2 Things About Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Saturday morning, the snow is above my knees on the long path from the parking lot to the library. Halfway up the door, the snow has blown off the school’s soccer field, and I tug the door open. Snow and I tumble in.

A patron shows up while I’m shoveling, his glasses fogged with snow. He’s walking in my footsteps, and he’s laughing. Why do we live in Vermont?

After dinner, my oldest daughter asks her sister and I to go on a walk with her. Cold but not that cold, we walk against the landscape of sunset.

No one else save a few pickups pass us. A flock of geese flies inexplicably south. This whole long walk I remember exactly why I live in Vermont. We return after 7:30 and it’s not yet full dark.

IMG_4997.jpg