#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Knitting Circle

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Note this: a Vermont November day in the fifties. My girls toss text notes to me from Hardwick to my windowless desk in Burlington: Who did you loan the pie pans to? When will you be home?

The teenager and her friend are hatching a plan to pick up an old friend at the airport which requires, first, that ancient human activity: waiting.

The friend, nervous, taps her phone.

I take out the hat I’m knitting, and – like that – the girls ask for needles and yarn. My teenager, former Waldorf student, knits quickly, weaving in a second color. The kittens leap from one ball of yarn to another. Our needles, fingers, and voices work, in this other old activity: women at handwork.

Twilight comes to the little farm
At winter’s end. The snowbanks
High as the eaves, which melted
And became pitted during the day,
Are freezing again, and crunch
Under the dog’s foot. The mountains
From their place behind our shoulders
Lean close a moment, as if for a
Final inspection, but with kindness,
A benediction as the darkness
Falls….

From Hayden Carruth’s “Twilight Comes”

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Thread of Thanks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I turned off the lights and went home from the library the other day, I checked out a ‘thanksgiving’ tree a child had made and left behind, maybe to dry, maybe because the project was forgotten. Branches were stuck in a mason jar, with colored leaves tied on with white yarn, handwritten with the child’s thanks.

Whoever this child is, she or he had painted the jar a brilliant turquoise blue, and the branches were so large, they nearly tipped the jar over.

I read a few written in purple marker in a child’s handwriting: mom, my bike, the sky, chocolate.

These November days, the dark is ubiquitous. I rise in the dark with the mewling kittens. Before I begin dinner, the dark has already wrapped us again, familiar, like a long-term visitor we must endure. The heady days of an evening swim in the lake, of splashing while the late sunset descends, will return.

Here’s my own offering, from Julie Cadwallader-Staub’s Milk:

… and it was all too much then –
the endless stream of groceries meals
bills illnesses laundry jobs no sleep –
so to sit in the rocking chair was sweet respite,
to do just one thing:
watch the baby
drain the profusion of milk out of me
watch the baby
become so contented that nursing faded into sleep…

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Librarians Rock

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

5 hours of interlibrary loan training? Really, the best thing about library conferences is the decency of fellow librarians. Smart, witty – definitely quirky – exuding a capability far beyond the circulation desk. Usually women, many of these librarians are likely equally handy shoveling a roof or driving a tractor.

Better yet, wandering deep in the state library stacks, I found a row of the Little House books, and remembered when I first discovered these in second grade. Shelved in the Ws, the books were on the bottom shelf. Even now, I remember my intense happiness at finding so many of these novels.

The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Surprise Visitor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I went out to the garden yesterday morning for frozen sage for breakfast omelets, and my neighbor walked up from her woodpile and asked for a favor.

Without thinking, I said yes. Sunny and sharply cold, the morning was already filled with the radiance of a bit of fresh, sparkling snow. The grass crunched beneath our boots.

My neighbor’s moving, and her pump organ needed interior storage for the winter. The old, exquisitely crafted organ was made in Brattleboro, in the Estey Factory, near where I worked in college at a nursing home.

My brother, who’s visiting, says, Where are you going to put an organ?

I was on my way to work, so I mention that maybe he and my daughters could manage that one particular detail. We’re laughing at this unexpected turn of events. Who imagined an organ would arrive today?

Not one of us play. When I come home from work, the girls tell me how the neighbors’ two friends carried the organ up the icy hill and into our house. My youngest lifts the keyboard cover, puts her feet on the pedals, and pulls the stops. My brother and I look at each other. The melody, even from her untrained hands, bellows deeply, soulful.

My brother says, Wow.

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Radiance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My 12-year-old went wild with the row of tiny icicles along our roof. They’re back! It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s saying. When I do, I jam on my boots, step out, and reach up for two tiny sticks of ice.

Inside our sunny kitchen, I offer her the icicles. She shares them with her kitten. The ice melts quickly – it disappears to wet fur, and then that’s all.

The kitten wraps his paws in stray yarn. Our day moves along. First sprinkles of snow: beautiful.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

– John Steinbeck

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Ocean Waters at 80 Degrees?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night, I drove home in my fossil-fuel burning Toyota, thinking about the library program I’d just attend where a meteorologist kept returning to our “weird weather.”

Standing in the back of the Woodbury Town Hall, a righteous old building whose front door swung in the frosty night, I drank hot tea, shivering a little. He had data – reams of it – and reading one particular chart, I noted the sharp curves right around the year 2050. I couldn’t help but think, We’re seriously fucked. What kind of world might my daughters inhabit when they’re 40, wandering through their lost-in-Dante’s-miserable-woods? What kind of world will your daughters and sons, your grandsons and granddaughters inherit?

I’d like to write that the stars overhead, when I walked into my house, reassured me, but – their distant beauty notwithstanding – the firmament did not. Today, again, pondering the unclear future, I reminded myself that where I’ve always failed is when I narrow my vision to fear, to repugnance, to outright hatred. Here’s all these contradictions, like driving my car to an info session on carbon emissions. Isn’t this the way of the human realm?

Like a muscle, deepen imagination.

Beyond the low iron fence (of the graveyard), cows graze…
All that brute flesh wandering close to graves –
how calm it is –
like two hands about to touch.

– Howard Nelson

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Domesticity at our house…