The Town at Night

November 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving through Hardwick, Vermont, last night, beneath a crescent moon, the 11-year-olds in the backseat playing a word game and clapping, the 17-year-old dreaming thoughtfully at the wheel, I marveled at how good Hardwick looks in the dark, the handful of streets lit up, the Town House’s double doors open for a musical, foyer chandelier shining welcomingly.

Run-down Hardwick, with its perpetually empty storefronts, the town of two auto parts stores, five gas stations with cheap greasy food, one food co-0p with pricy produce, and one thrift store. Reservoir of cheap beer and highly-taxed cigarettes and way too many scratch-off tickets. A town of more well-heeled days, called theirs now by those who have moved in with plenty of money or education or both, while those who have lived here for generations frequently are scant on both.

I left the Town House before the finale, standing outside in the cold. Freakishly, a structural fire burned behind the Town House, bright flames turning billowing smoke and steam bright red, split through with blue police lights. The cold gnawed at my feet. Overhead, clusters of stars and that curl of moon pushed through the streetlights and hazy atmosphere. From the closed doors, I heard a girl’s clear song, her voice graceful as a heron in flight, slowly winging its way through the sky.

Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the children. Only the governesses.

The Sound of Music, 1965

Hardwick, Vermont

Some Warmth

November 3, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday burst into a late Indian summer, the early morning balmy, the air alive with the scent of thawing frost. A day like that stretches on and on. Working in the library, I propped the door open, and a little girl went in and out, her small hand outstretched, patiently waiting for tiny blue flies to land on her fingers. The flies had a scruffy bit like a seed carrier. Waiting for her father, she stapled together a book of colored paper, and wrote a story about a rabbit and her fly friends.

As the dusk descended, in a gorgeously gradual fall twilight, my daughter and her friends played outside, pumping on swings beneath a crescent moon and single twinkling star that gleamed with a faint amber hue. A teacher worked late in the school garden, the long strips of dark earth tilled up, sweet rich soil for garlic, my most favorite of the garden’s savoriness.

Today, those tiny blue flies have vanished. Here but for a single day, they filled our world with a snow globe variation of Indian summer, a reminder of unexpected good things.

Here’s one sentence from what I read this morning:

… from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, a light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting.

– Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

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Feather Pens

November 2, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, in a wild windstorm, we were lucky to have the lights go out. My teenager and I had – painstakingly – filled out her college financial aid papers, and, at the very end, I could not electronically sign and submit. The younger daughter lay on the rug asking what’s wrong?

Frustrated, I snapped that, in a real world, I could just take a pen and sign my name. But not in a virtual world where the synchronicity of username and password didn’t jive.

With relief, darkness unexpectedly enfolded us. I closed my laptop, and we lay on the rug before the woodstove’s glowing glass door, the firelight flickering over us. The wind whooshed around our wooden house. Lacking light, we played my old stand-by, 20 Questions, traveling in our imagination to Portland, Maine, and then remembering sweet potato tempura we had eaten in a Japanese restaurant in that city. We discovered an interestingly ontological conundrum: was my brother’s dog Mona a thing? A live thing? She’s not a person, not a place….

By candlelight, we brushed our teeth and, rather than read by flashlight, I went to sleep far earlier than usual.

This morning, I’m reunited with my laptop, in work I genuinely love; however, while I do live in the world where papers are signed with clicks of my keyboard, I also reminded my girls that their ancestor signed his John Alden on the Mayflower Compact with a scratchy quill. And the implications of that document have long lingered…..

IN The Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation…

– Mayflower Compact 1620

Hardwick, Vermont

The Barbed Past

October 30, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Hefting rotted stumps in fall clean-up today, I tripped on a surprising strand of rusted barbed wire and tore my pants. What crude past is this, surfacing near my well-trod woodpile path?

Whoever strung this barbed wire is no doubt long since passed from the living.

Here’s the past again – tangible in my hand and elusive with its story – or so the cliché goes. But this last week, I received an email that explained a great deal of my life, all the way back to my very earliest childhood, that gloaming of early memory. Like a tangled wire that has been straightened and trued, I saw a clear thread of my own life shiningly clear.

And yet, time is a strange thing. Ten years ago, I might not have understand what an illumination these words are; I kept the letter to myself. Someday, perhaps, I’ll pass it along to my own children. In the meantime, I’m likely to snip away at that barbed wire, so no one else trips on that particular debris of the past.

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

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Non-Academic Grit

October 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In my twenties, I made a decision which changed the course of my adult life: I left the academic world and threw in my (considerably small) fortune in agriculture. My former husband and I sugared for nearly twenty years, on a small family-scale, and, while he was a carpenter and I worked various jobs (census taker, book seller), the bulk of income I brought in was through the Stowe Farmers Market. I made more money at that farmers market than I ever have anywhere else.

Yesterday, my teenager daughter skipped high school and stayed home to help load some of the heaviest things from the sugarhouse into a buyer’s truck. Are you kidding me? she asked. I’m not going school and missing out. The buyer was a New Hampshire family with their 26-year-old son and sleepy dog, and they arrived in a wet snow with such good cheer and humor in our unheated sugarhouse that they convinced another gentleman who arrived to write me a check for a sap tank.

The man and his son and my daughter with her honed tractor skills (“I’ve been driving this tractor since I was 10,” she explained) loaded up the heavy stuff while his wife and I talked about novels and farmers markets and, oddly, sex.

Afterwards, eating apples with my teenager, I raved about how terrific sugarmakers are, with their can-do because must-do attitude. She answered me, “You sugarmakers are all nuts, mom.”

I didn’t bother to point out that she’s one of us, too, with her graceful physical strength, her gritty determination to accomplish what needs to be done, and – even more so – her sizing up of priorities: why sit in a classroom doing hated trigonometry when you might put your hands and back to work and accomplish something useful?

Before she left, the woman told me they had taken a ten-year hiatus from sugaring and then commenced again. You will, too, she assured me.

My daughter eyed me. No, she said.

One of the things I loved best about sugaring was leaving the house’s confines at the end of the winter and moving, essentially, down to the sugarhouse and outside. Yesterday, my feet freezing on the cold cement floor, smelling the pervasive scent of fresh snow and remembering the blackbirds who nested in the white pines and sang every April, seeing the chalk drawings my daughters made on the rough-board sugarhouse walls and the huge rope swing hung outside the door, I assured my daughter, I’d do it differently, the second time… even better…. How could we not make sweet syrup?

She looked at me and shook her head.

And yet, I can trust she’ll lend her hands, again.

Here’s a few lines from the Van Gogh letters I’ve been reading.

You will no doubt tell me, the moment may well arrive when one regrets becoming a painter. And what could I then reply on my own behalf? They who have such regrets are those who neglect solid study in the beginning and race hurry-scurry to be top of the heap. Well, the men of the day are men of just one day, but whoever has enough faith and love to take pleasure in precisely what others find dull, namely the study of anatomy, perspective & proportion, will stay the course and mature slowly but surely.

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Photo by Molly S.

And Then This…

October 28, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, the heavily overcast sky hung low, sullen with the threat of snow. The day lay cold and gray. In this dismal time of year, even the most valiant of Vermont admirers must wonder what holds us to this piece of earth.

In the night, emerging from the school’s basement library after a lengthy school board meeting, one of us marveled it did snow, after all. In the school’s sharp floodlights, the snow sparkled, and I remembered in a flash that the saving grace of winter is its beauty. Even in the darkness, I saw how the snow promised a brightening of the next day.

In Hardwick, I met my daughters, the town nearly closed up for the evening. The younger girl, giddy with staying out late, scooped up a handful of the wet white stuff and kept giggling, What is this? before she answered herself: Christmas coming. She pressed her face near the snow, dreaming.