Sometime in August

August 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I’m picking up the pace on a wool sweater I’m knitting — a roundabout way of realizing the patches of red on some maples (and no longer just the sick or stressed) mean I actually will be wanting to wear those knitted strands before too long.

Still, summer folks fill my library these days. They all have houses along Woodbury’s lakes, or visit people who have houses along lakes. They’re full of good will, polite, curious about our winters, ready to swap tales of their winters. One family had twins last October. The parents plop the babies on the library floor, and take a deep and exhausted breath.

Driving home, just before the swamp separating Woodbury from Hardwick, the sun hits the goldenrod just so, with scrubby pink clover along the roadside. Rags of mist amble along the swamp, around the bend in the mountains.

For a moment, it’s just me and the road, the gold and the emerald and transient strands of cloud. August, at this very moment. At home, the girls have made blueberry pie, and that’s equally fleeting.

All the way I have come
all the way I am going
here in the summer field

—Buson

Why Memories?

August 9, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’ve never been a woman to “make memories” or cherish photo albums, but here’s the thing: memory and story are so intertwined. The other night, eating dinner around a fire with the parents of my brother’s girlfriend, we began stitching our baggy and cumbersome story into their long and craggy story.

The daylight dispersed, dark pressed in around us, rain began falling in sprinkles, and still, patiently, back and forth, question by curious question, we kept at it.

Come January, sea fog, a curious barred owl, driving through a pounding rainstorm — these elements of August days we’ll remember in January.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

― E.B. White

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Down Easting

August 7, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s a snapshot of both the easy and hard parts of family: my brother and I — in Acadia with my family and his family — hike The Precipice, scaling a rocky ledge studded with iron hand holds and ladders. Before ascending, I read the profuse warning signs at the bottom. His girlfriend asks me, You’re not frightened of heights, are you?

Naturally, I lie, and follow my daughters up a hike I would never in my rational mind have attempted. The views and the hike were sublime — the enchantment of pink granite, ocean views, an unusual arid climate in New England that reminds my brother and I of hiking in New Mexico. That’s parenting in a nutshell: you head into what can be terrifying terrain, with these incredible, ineffable rewards.

He reminds me where we hiked as kids, where we ate cream scones. But I was never here as a kid with you, I remind him. I think you’re wrong, he counters. We go back and forth, swapping stories, noting where our memories meet up and where they divulge.

And my daughters? What do they think? Are they mesmerized? Irritated? Bored? We hike on and on, until the youngest is beyond ravenous, and then we eat.

Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.

— E. B. White

Growing Girls

August 3, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hurray! Youngest child returns from summer camp, tanned and happy — but slightly different, altered, a little older and knowing she’s older without an edgy kind of teenagerness….. She’s grown, simple as that. In the Vermont woods and on a lake, without her family around.

On the way home, her older sister wades into a field of wildflowers.

Weaving back and forth
Through the lines of wheat
A butterfly

— Sora

August Love

August 2, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

August is national picnicking month, I hear on the radio, in my crazy too-many hours of driving yesterday. I also catch an interview with a female comic whose voice reminds me I swear of all those August afternoons of picking blackberries. It’s not blackberry season yet, but soon will be. August often means the dirt roads have turned dusty.

First, I picked alone, then newly pregnant, then had a baby on my back, then all those years with a fat-wheeled hand-me-down stroller. Later, the children walked or biked. Our baby, on the back of her father’s bicycle, held out a hand and said blacks, blacks, hungry for the berries.

What to do with blackberries? Last August, the girls baked a tart with fresh peaches and blueberries, served it with maple-sweetened whipped cream.

That’s how good was this woman’s voice.

Home too late to swim, my daughter and I walk through the cemetery and down to the community gardens. Only the mist is out and a few women walking dogs.

August 1. We go to bed ridiculously early, because we get up ridiculously early. This morning, I open the windows to let in the gray dawn and its cut-grass scents. As a child, we camped nomadically, crawling out of the tent in the morning and discovering cold dew and trails of mist from the night. In the eternity of childhood, we were hungry for breakfast and whatever the day might bring.

Here’s Hayden Carruth’s August First poem, too good not to read again.

Small Town Vermont Connections

July 31, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Rain falls heavily not long after dawn, and I close the windows, the cats in the upstairs hallway watching me silently. The rain pounds on the metal roof. Too hot to sleep in the night, too noisy now — if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

Three years divorced, I’m back in court, seeking child support — maybe just one payment? — but he’s not there. He’s elsewhere, traveling, his pockets full of under-the-table cash. In the afternoon, I’m in another Vermont county, in another courthouse, for another hearing, having worked in a library between the two, made an interview phone call on a bench beneath two enormous maple trees. Tell me about your farm program for kids and please ignore the ambulance siren whizzing down the street. Hot, hot, I’m barefoot, my hand sweating on my notebook.

In the courthouse — through a metal detector again — I wash my face in the women’s room and admire the high ceiling, the marble tiles. This courthouse — like the one in Orleans County where I’ve also been — were built with such craft, such pride, such respect and belief in law.

While rain crashes on my roof this morning, I remember that courtroom — those who are paid to be there, and those who aren’t — how desire in its myriad forms snakes through all of us. The public defender and I are introduced. A few years back, he was an attorney on a wind tower protest case involving people I knew. He doesn’t look at any of us. Instead, he gathers his files, says, That was in my other lifetime, and leaves. I’ll likely never know, but I can’t help but wonder, What’s his story?….

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention…

— Mary Oliver

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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