#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Tasty Treats

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A very first food my daughters ate — or gummed, more precisely — was applesauce and then bits of skinless apples, tiny juice-beading triangles.

One of my daughters — who, I can’t recall, younger, older, maybe both — named this cut-up fruit appleys. Our house had a diminutive child’s kitchen; now on our front porch, the well-used stove and sink look so small. In that wooden kitchen, the girls worked mightily with a small blue frying pan, a white colander, and a collection of found things — miniature jam jars, colored wooden beads, petite bottles in the shape of maple leaves and hearts I filled with our maple syrup and sold as wedding favors.

Every now and then, tidying up, I’d find a silver measuring cup sourced from my kitchen, with the dried remains of tiny apple triangles.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones….

— Mary Oliver

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End of September? Apple Pie Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Every year in Vermont there’s speculation about the upcoming foliage season — will it be good…. or lousy? While the season infallibly delights — and often astonishes — we view fall foliage very personally, almost as if the quality of its splendor reflects on ourselves.

More than any other season, autumn reminds me of being a child, of picking apples in the enormous Mapadot Orchard near our house (named after Ma and Pa and Dot, of course), of the distinct, humus-y scent of fallen leaves in the maples we raked from our trees, of how fine it feels to hike in  woods painted like a wildfire — crimson and gold.

Last night, my older daughter decided to bake an apple pie today.

We might live in a society where the traditions of church have dwindled to near naught, but the ritual of apple pie? Still steaming, in our house. That’s something.

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all….
Slow! Slow!
— Robert Frost, October
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Through my window.

Cream Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The other night, my friend and I stand on my back deck, watching the moon rise above the black horizon, a curved sliver at first, then quickly revealing all her radiant round beauty. In the house, my daughters and their friends play a game at the table, eating brownies and laughing. Little white lights sparkle above their heads.

The next night, fever lies me low, and my girls are awake in the wee midnight hours, comforting an oddly crying cat. As I rise out of the fever now, I think of how glad I am to return to our life. Worn out before, as we all get — buried beneath the everyday accrual of putting together work and life and parenting, and the non-everyday weight of am I failing? — I’m simply glad to return to the jumble of our lives, in this somewhat sleep-starved life, keeping the midnight shift, reading in bed or wandering around to the windows to admire the moon. Oh, the autumn moon.

Children grew in their sleep. They were growing now, bones lengthening like bamboo.

— Melanie Finn, The Underneath

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Lucky Charm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

By the side of Route 14, my younger daughter leaps, waving at me to stop.  Nearby, her sister’s car is pulled over.

Flat tire.

The older daughter rails about her brand-new tire, likely ruined, and then her younger sister says simply, It’s just a flat tire.

“Flat tire” may become our new mantra — our own, hey, lighten up, change the tire and move on — maybe even a talisman, as if the tiny bit of ill luck might ward off the greater.

September 23 — birthday of the young man we’ve known since he was 1, who’s logged a million miles on his bike and is heading to Europe for even more. Safe travels. Much happiness in your new decade.

 

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Tiny Running Toddler

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A very tall father and his nearly-one-year-old daughter live across the road from my library and often swing by. Yesterday while I’m in for a board meeting, not really open, they swing by, and the little girl runs to me.

Not even 7 days ago, the small curly-headed girl was tentatively taking steps, and here she is now, rushing across our worn carpet, her smile radiant.

When my daughters were babies, I was amazed how quickly their nearly translucent fingernails grew, how rapidly a scrape healed.

Babyhood’s quicksilver, sure, but adolescence mirrors that age. My 13-year-old has changed so mightily in the last six months, in face and body, that when I arrive at soccer games and can’t easily find her — idiotic, that I can’t immediately recognize my own daughter across a field — her sister says, Look for the green cleats.

Really? I think to myself. Identify my girl by her shoes?

When I was a mother of a toddler, I would have found this situation sad, maybe even just awful, but — and this may just be a combination of worn-down single mothering and that my daughter’s busied her life with all kinds of great kid projects and friends — I find her endlessly interesting, like a blossom whose name I don’t know, opening petal by petal. Where are you headed, I wonder. Where are you going?

Because he’s so good, here’s a few more lines from Andre Dubus:

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another.

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Late Night Rambles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughters and I often wonder where our cat Acer sleeps at night. His brother takes turns tucking among our feet, or curling on our faces.

In the middle of the other night, I walked into our upstairs glassed-in porch, looking for a book. On the little couch there, Acer sprawled, wide awake in the moonlight. I bent down and rubbed his velvety pink nose, this little cat who needed his own private room.

Here’s a few lines from the late master, Andre Dubus.

So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers…. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth…. in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan…. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

— Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels

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