#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Robert Pirsig

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.

I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.

What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..

Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.

– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature

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Working

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my girls were little, we played Signs of Spring for weeks, enthusiastically spying the first unfolding daffodil bloom, robins’ beaks clamped around strands of nesting material, tiny dresses flapping on clotheslines.

On the evening shift now, my 18-year-old came home last night and said a goose wandered into the nursing home. With another woman, they lured the wild, spitting creature through the open door with bread.

Spring tidings in Greensboro, Vermont?

Laughing, my daughter digs into her salad, a pile of fresh greens piled high with salty feta and kalamata olives, already thinking of other things. She’s sparkling, this young woman.

spring begins
as it has deigned to do
for a thousand ages

– Issa

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Montpelier, Vermont

Soaked

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re in a holding place, these days of rain and returned cold, the earth sucking up the steady, daily downfall, gradually greening. I tell my daughters the line my mother used when I was a girl, April showers bring May flowers. They appear as unimpressed as I must have seemed, in my own long-ago girlhood.

This school break, after dinner dishes and reading, the 11-year-old is determined to watch all The Lord of the Rings movies again, while eating watermelon. The older sister’s working evenings now, so to keep her company, I sit beside her, finishing up a little more of each day’s work, ridiculously over-occupied in my own adult world.

Last night, my daughter asked me what the heck was happening with Gollum. I glanced at my marked-over pages I had tossed on the rug, where I had written about Buddhism’s Three Poisons. I said simply, He’s gone mad.

Ever pragmatic, this girl studied me. I like the Shire, she said.

Yeah.

This must be every parent’s perfect moment: watching a child asleep and safe from all the storms of the world outside…. I’ve been through enough to know this kind of peace is rare and fleeting. This is all I’ve ever asked of life: just to be here, to achieve this humble goal of harmony… to smell lilacs and the coming rain, to move beyond economics and consumption into dream work, to live as if this life is an open window in spring.

Stephen J. Lyons, Landscape of the Heart

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Photo by Gabriela

Morning March Music

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I unlocked the elementary school yesterday morning when the day was yet in that black-turning-blue phase of dawn. I was there to get the coffee going for that venerable New England tradition, pie breakfast. Allow me to brag for a moment about my town. With a population of 902 (including newborns), nearly 200 pies appeared in the school kitchen, carefully wrapped, many warm from home ovens.

Pie Breakfast is a hustling sweet-and-savory morning, bursting with conversation, live music, laughter, lots of kids. The most welcome melody I heard, though, was the red-wing blackbirds in the white pines below the library. My booksale volunteers and I stood on the icy pavement in the brilliant March sunlight, surrounded by two feet of sparkling snow, listening to the first harbinger of migration’s return, the promise of spring, the full-throated song of mating.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all…

– Emily Dickinson

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A Condensed Parenting Manual

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

There’s an odd line from Lee in Steinbeck’s East of Eden that’s always stuck with me, since I first read the book when I was sixteen or so: I will not put my finger in any human pie. What a strange metaphor (as if we’re baked goods?).

Tomorrow is Woodbury Pie Breakfast, the community-wide sit down to pie and coffee, live music and cabin fever conversation. This afternoon is pie baking in my house, as I suspect it will be in many Woodbury kitchens. The question around town is, What kind of pie are you baking? Or, wishfully muttered, I hope I get some of Skip’s chocolate with raspberry swirl this year.

Pie is easy – crust and filling – but human pie? Human creation? A family member this winter drove to North Dakota and joined the Standing Rock Protests, then disappeared underground, in a variation of Five Easy Pieces, with not a word to family he had left behind. He must have profoundly believed he was called to that Jihadist path, leaving behind a grief like earth crudely harrowed up but untended, uncultivated.

Steinbeck is likely at the heart of my own raw parenting philosophy. As one daughter steps into adulthood, and the other teeters on adolescence, my mantra repeats Socratic self-examination: What the heck are you doing – and why? What an annoyance it must be to have a mother more concerned with keeping the darkness of Nihilism at bay, rather than building a really stellar college application.

March is always the season of entropy, cabin fever, quarreling. We’re surrounded by depths of snow: Currier and Ives picturesque, and a real complication, too. And that’s another metaphor.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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Snow Child

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

It’s an Ezra Jack Keats kind of snowy day (or days) in Vermont. If you’re not out foolishly driving around (and not many are), the snow is spiraling down exquisitely. After hours of tedious work inside, while the snow swirled against the windows, I walked along our unplowed road. Pausing on my way to meet my neighbor, I remembered those winters when my firstborn was a toddler, and winters really were one months-long housebound snowstorm.

Every day, I pulled my chattery child along the road on a runner sled. Always, at the same place she would beg me to lumber through the deep snow into the woods and pluck a few miniature hemlock pinecones from a low hanging branch.

Years later, unboxing this red snowsuit for her younger sister, I discovered tiny pinecones in every pocket.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

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