#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Levity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughters and I drove north over snowy roads to have dinner with friends who were staying for a few days at a house built by a ship captain in the 1800s. The house is on exquisitely beautiful Lake Willoughby, deep into what I consider “way out there” in Vermont — but that’s all in one’s perspective, isn’t it?

I would have walked around that three-story house for a day and a half, just looking at room upon room, like an enormous treasure or jewel box. Fortunately, my friends know me and were nonplussed when I rubbed my hands over the peacock tails in the downstairs wallpaper. My teenager sprawled before the fireplace and said, We’re not leaving.

An oak table spanned the length of a long room that must have originally been a veranda. At dinner, the kids filled their plates and sat in a row on one side. I walked around the table and sat with my back to the wall of windows. It’s December and darn cold, and the kids, being kids, had likely sized up the draft on that side and chosen the warmer one. Or maybe they just wanted to be closer to the berry pies…

My friend’s elderly father sat beside me, and, after precisely cutting his meat, said very pleasantly, A bit of air conditioning tonight, isn’t there?

Driving home in the dark, around Runaway Pond, through the Bend, past dairy farms hazily illuminated by the moon darting in and out of scudding clouds, I thought of all the stories that house must contain, how all our lives are clumsily packed sieves of so much jumbled living — radiant happiness, crushing misery, sometimes dullness, aching and unmet desire — and then the levity of that sweet sentence rose again into my thinking.

One terrible thing about divorce is losing the person who holds the other half of your shared secrets. That highway north was studded with memories from the very earliest days of my marriage. Driving north, I passed those places and said nothing, knowing the only way to continue is to create.

So when my daughters asked why I was laughing as I drove those final miles home, I told them I aspire to have that gentleman’s light grace when I’m a little old lady, with — God willing — many more miles traveled.

I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.

— Holden Caulfield

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Daughter at work, home, Hardwick, Vermont

Postcard #10: Uninvited Guest

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This marks an even dozen of Hardwick posts, despite the #10, but all of these have skirted around the jagged edges of where I’m really aiming: that community, like family, is suffused with some of the best and some of the very worst, too, of human nature. The little, one-room library (nearby, but not the Hardwick library) where I reign as Chief Cataloguer and Window Washer is visited by kids who sprawl on the carpet between the shelves and read, who crawl behind the wing chair and create magical worlds with puppets and stuffed animals — toys I leave when I vacuum and then turn off the lights, for children I expect will return.

My library has also been visited through a window and burglarized. My desk, where I keep stickers and budget sheets and book orders has been touched by hands not mine.

There’s a story behind this that’s not a nice story, about this visitor I didn’t invite in, but whom I would have, had he used the door like anyone else. My face, writing this, must reflect my anger and my fear. I’m no tabula rasa, and this entry into a place I’ve considered a kind of personal sanctuary cuts me.

And yet — and this is a very, very big and yet — I’m familiar with that ghastly howl of addiction, and my guess is that this intruder seeks the intrinsic human need of coming in out of the cold.

Yet, he didn’t come through the open door.

Driving home with my daughters over snowy roads in the dark last night, listening to their music, we drove around Lake Willoughby with no one else on the roads, and the waxing moon pushed through a scrim of clouds. Cold, cold: nearly zero. Enchantingly beautiful. A terrain known and yet unknowable.

I don’t have answers to why some children are well-tended and dressed, while others have drawn a short stick of basic things like food and clothing. I’m not naive enough to think the uninvited guest will ever use the library door, nor do I ever intend to welcome him through a window. But in this Christmas season of redemption and giving, I keep returning to that reality that doors and windows open, and the world is wider than I’m often inclined to credit.

I wanted to try to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places. Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.

— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

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Hardwick, Vermont

 

 

Hardwick Postcard #9: The Close and Holy Snow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’ve never lived in the tropics, but my friend has, and she’s remarked on the suddenness of nightfall in that region of the globe. A crepuscular walk in autumn’s lengthy twilight is a boon of Vermont living. The first solid snowfall of the year is another.

Now just a few days before Christmas, the other night my daughter and I were in Montpelier, in the frantic traffic, the rush of after-work shopping, and so this morning, when the snow began falling, one silent flake after another, the dawning day seemed filled with a particularly brilliant kind of light.

Whether we want the snow or not, it will come, and a snowstorm always sheds a certain silent grace. When my children were very small, more than anything, I wanted Christmas to be full of joy. Like so much else in my life, I’ve half succeeded and half utterly failed. We’ve had plenty of joy and lavish laughter, but the older I get, the more I understand joy travels hand-in-hand with sadness and grief, too — that the exquisite beauty of that snow carries a killing cold as well.

I think it’s taken me all these Christmases to understand the spirit of this season is so perfectly illustrated by Dylan Thomas’s “close and holy darkness,” and that the most miraculous aspects of this season are the profound mysteries upon mysteries unfolding despite (and perhaps in spite of) my own blind ignorance.

Today, watching the snow fall, my face upturned to the clouds, I remembered being ten-years-old and speculating with my sister about the origin of all those millions of snowflakes, drifting and twirling down. What did it look like, so high above our heads in those clouds?

Awesome.

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, “Would you like anything to read?”

— Dylan Thomas, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

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Jeudevine Library, Hardwick, Vermont

Hardwick Postcard #8: Talk, Talk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

There’s not a bland way to write this: gossip is part of the human condition. Gossip in a small town? Can be funny. Or scorching.

Arriving at a library meeting, someone walks in and says, I’ve been to the post office. I’ve got gossip.

I come out from the stacks where I’ve been shelving books and say, Do tell….

I spend a lot of time at the post office, and I frequently have the odd sense the post office folks know me intimately. While my email inbox may have more details, a whole landscape of my life channels through that slender box. Like gossip, sometimes the mail’s good, sometimes bad, and sometimes rather dull.

From the post office gossip unravels laughter, but then much seriousness, too. The story is about one person, one family, but really about our community. In a multifaceted way, it’s a variation of the contemporary disfunction of our greater society, about emptiness and loneliness, and the natural lust to fill those caverns in our souls, and how badly awry human nature can go.

Then we stop talking for a moment. We just stop.

Later, my daughter sends me a photo of a post-it she found on a classroom building at Johnson State. She snapped the photo and left the note for another passerby to read.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.

– Ann Patchett

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Hardwick Postcard #7: Middle School

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

At the middle school concert’s intermission, my merry-eyed daughter sat behind me with a girl I didn’t know, so I turned around and introduced myself. Being 12, the girls laughed at this weirdly formal introduction, and then the couple beside me began laughing, too. I had been sitting beside the girl’s parents.

It’s a little world we live in.

I chatted with the new friend’s parents. Quickly, the girl’s mother and I realized we had both served on an elementary school board. The lights dimmed just as we started a conversation that could have launched into a very long conversation about school consolidation.

For all its myriad faults, public education — at least in Vermont — is still all about the local community. Chances are, at a middle school concert, you’ll sit beside people you like, and, equally possibly, besides people you don’t.

But you’re all still there.

My father sent me this Wendell Berry essay. Read it.

In 1936, moreover, only a handful of people were thinking about sustainability. Now, reasonably, many of us are thinking about it. The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—should turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is meant, by “sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The cultural cycle turns on affection.

– Wendell Berry

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Main Street, Hardwick, Vermont

Hardwick Postcard #6: Young Men

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Without much discussion in the hardware store’s parking lot, the girls picked out a tree from the high school’s forestry program, then looked at my small car, the tree, and the car again.

The young man who had sold us the tree said, If you’re not going far, I’ll take your tree home for you. He had been selling trees all day in the cold, and his cheeks were red. Like most of the young men who work in the woods and know how to use tools and their hands, he was polite. He was a young man who would insist on taking off his boots rather than track mud on your kitchen floor.

He put the tree in the back of his truck, followed us home, and carried it to our back porch. I gave him a handful of chocolate chip cookies the girls had made that morning.

Barter economy? Perhaps an illustration. Or maybe just young man decency.

The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.

– Wendell Berry

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