#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Unexpected Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A naturalist did a program at my small library last night, appearing with a red-tailed hawk, a rabbit, a wood turtle, a frog, a snake, and a curved-beak raven. As the room was packed, I stood by the door, watching when he offered to let my daughters touch that gorgeous snake. Wincing – but polite – both declined.

The library is one of those essential places in our society, where everyone is welcome to drink a cup of hot tea in an evening after it has rained – hard, all day – browse the books, listen. Simply come out of our rural Vermont homes and realize the rest of the town is sodden with spring rain, too.

Closing up, I stepped outside, and the clouds had cleared. The sky was pink at the horizon, and an enormous rainbow bent over the library, the small building constructed with volunteer labor, years before I arrived at the scene. My daughter remarked about a pot of gold somewhere, maybe down by the school’s garden. The air was swept clean, already warming, promising sunnier skies. Robins sang.

My daughters walked across the field, oohing and ahhing, my older daughter with her camera, while along the path an older man moved step by step, making his steady way under those clearing skies, going from here to there.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

– James Baldwin

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Classic Reprint

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

 

By chance, I’ve discovered a reprint of The Farm in the Green Mountains by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, published originally in 1968, about a German family who sought succor in my state during the terrible years of World War II. Herdan-Zuckmayer’s writing flows clear as water, pragmatic and thoughtful. How I wished she lived down my road today, and I might ask her to take a walk.

Among the states they (Vermonters) are a relatively poor state, but they are not afraid of their poverty; they don’t love wealth, they have little to gain and not much to lose. This modesty and moderation give them an independence from uncertain times and arm them with pride and fearlessness.

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Sunny Skies

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last year, my daughter played her snare drum in Hardwick, Vermont’s Memorial Day parade; afterwards, a pragmatic child eyeing years of marching band ahead, she traded in the heavy drum for a skinny clarinet.

In one of the best small town rituals, just about everyone I know attends the parade and festival afterwards, on the dandelion-studded field with a sagging-roofed granite shed at one side.

Years now into this town and these people, from the summer days when I had a baby in my belly to now, when some of these once-upon-a-time little kids head into their own travels, what emerges clearer and clearer to me is the muchness of our lives, my own family story linking through the tales of others, each of us with our own unique desires for a patch of earth and a well-built home, the latitude for creativity, the comfort of kin, the nectar of happiness.

In this day commemorating profound sadness, early summer is best begun by vanilla ice cream, a rainbow sheen of soap bubbles.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

– Henry David Thoreau

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Mini Road Trip

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last night, as my younger daughter was getting into bed, her sister says, Want to go on a field trip?

In the dark , we drive around the mountain on our dirt road, passing precisely no other vehicle, and suddenly the nearly full moon appears in the sky, luminescent, unearthly, so near I imagine I could stretch out my hand and touch this gleaming orb.

While my older daughter leans against the car hood, busy with her Cannon, the younger girl and I admire the constellations, the night’s darkness ameliorated by the moon’s brilliance. Cold for May, I tug my down jacket tight.

The peepers sing. We breathe in the aroma of wet soil, standing at a hayfield’s edge, with no need or rush to go anywhere at all, drenched under star and moonlight.

 

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

– Buson

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Lounging on the Lawn of the Loony Bin

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my older daughter was a babe-in-arms and all through her toddlerhood and young childhood, she and I delivered tiny bottles of maple syrup for wedding favors, usually tied up with ribbon or raffia, with a small slip of colored paper with the couple’s names and wedding date, and a cheery phrase, like Eat, drink & be merry! Or A Sweet Beginning.

With my little kid, goldfish crackers and the Vermont Gazetteer, we met people in  Price Chopper’s parking lot, tony lakeside resorts, or – one of my favorites – outside the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane in Waterbury. The hospital then had locked wards, and the purchaser of maple syrup bottles came down and met us on the grass. She was on her lunch break and had time to chat. I offered that my mother is a RN, and had amused us as children with her nursing school stories of the woman in the state asylum who swallowed spoons.

My daughter, who was four, looked up at me, completely puzzled. Why?

The woman and I laughed.

Of all the people who bought my wedding favors, this woman is the one I wonder about. We lingered on the grass that day, the sheer expanse of tended lawn a novelty for my child and I. This woman was happily getting married in a few days, and I took my child to a playground that afternoon. There were not enough playground trips in that girl’s childhood. Maybe that’s one of my few pieces of advice to young parents: more playgrounds. Linger barefoot on the grass. The strangeness of people who devour spoons doesn’t disappear.

The American way of life has failed – to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected), that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants, that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be, and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.

– James Baldwin

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Waterbury, Vermont

Kid Chat

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The May my younger daughter was born, rain fell every day, from May 1 to May 31. At the beginning of June, cornfields sprouted shoots of green, and the summer turned sweltering. We are yet in the rainy phase. Everyday, my daughter, now nearly 12, claims the apple tree leaves unfold their leaves noticeably wider. Fragrant blossoms and pollination are imminent. This girl changes, too, on the tender cusp of childhood and adolescence, past the why stage of toddlerhood and wondering at the pieces and people in her life.

The other morning, she asked about a church’s billboard sign: Jesus was a low-wage worker. She asked what Jesus did; I answered he was a carpenter, not a low-wage job in our town. Then what does the sign-writer mean? We wonder, who’s telling this story, anyway? The story of Jesus? The story of our town?

Then we were at her tiny school, the handful of graduating sixth graders wild about their trip to Maine, nearly trembling with excitement. On my way to work, I stopped again at that sign, pondering its existential statement. Rain fell lightly, and I sank my fingers into the church lawn’s soil, glad to see grass for the first time this year, long as my fingers.

….art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience; it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

– James Baldwin

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Hardwick, Vermont