Early Evenings

October 26, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just when it seems like the gray may finally be settling in for months, it’s tamarack season. On my way to pay the yearly property taxes today, I realized those trees were rich gold. Then that amber, too, will pass, and I’ll forget about that autumn splendor, until next year. I’m not a fan of that phrase “it’s all good,” because nothing is all good, but this autumn has been radiantly gorgeous.

Someone remarked me the other day that there’s so little time in our lives, but late fall holds a profusion of time. Night closes in early these afternoons, and our after dinner strolls along the road have ceased for now. The children sprawl before the wood stove. Our house smells of slightly overripe apples, and around us glow the last vestiges of this fall.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

– Vincent Van Gogh

Woodbury Village, Vermont

October Snow…

October 23, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. is not my favorite. Too wet, too scant, and the hydrangea suffers.

With enthusiasm, though, the children have dug into paper crafts and apple pie baking. My contribution to the household is vacuuming the ratty living room rug, spreading out my papers, and working in front of the wood stove. My brother sends a request for a knitted winter hat.

Our house, tall and narrow, reminds me of a clipper ship sailing through uncharted waters, resilient through gusty wind, its largely inaccessible cupola a crow’s nest. Overnight, while we were sleeping, the seasons turned. We are now gliding into the outer edges of the snowy season, and the children seek mittens. I’ll search for sage beneath that white for sausage and potato pie.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale

West Woodbury, Vermont

Family Life

October 22, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

One of the more revealing titles of my recent reading is Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, a novel hardly of the slick parenting magazine fare I leaf through in that dentist office I so frequently visit these days. A slim, fierce, terrific book.

This morning, reading another book about family life – Margot Livesey’s Mercury – this line jumps out at me: “The human brain often juxtaposes the sublime and the trivial.”

The line encapsulates the book, true, but also domestic life.

Parenting often seems an endless routine of gathering twisted toddler socks from beneath the kitchen table. When my girls were teeny-tiny, I often muttered to myself during unbroken days a line from Shirley Jackson: “All day long, I go around picking up things.” The tooth-brushing trivial.

And yet, embedded like gems in the midst of sandbox squabbling, there’s marvelous moments: braiding my daughter’s hair, inhaling the familiar, salty scent of her scalp, listening to her stories.

The blue vase on the sideboard was from the Song dynasty, eleventh or early twelfth century. How had it survived nearly eight hundred years when I could barely survive forty? I was in that state between waking and sleeping, neither fully inhabiting my body nor entirely absent, when I heard footsteps. The mattress dipped.

– Margot Livesey, Mercury

Two Bears

October 20, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving down our curvy back road the other morning, a young black bear loped before my car, coal-dark against the morning’s gold leaves woven through with mist. The creature faced us, then, in no particular rush, disappeared over the edge of the steep road. Behind me, a pickup rushed up in my mirror, missing the scene.

Midday, the kids were out of school. When I returned at dinnertime – full dark already in these shortening days – my older daughter told me the younger girl had lain on her back with her enormous teddy bear all afternoon, staring at the sky. She was fine, the teenager relayed. She just wanted to lie there for a while before we put the trampoline away for the winter.

Two young creatures – the bear cub and my child – at ease in the glowing woods.

….didn’t October do

A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries

Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool’s gold in the trees.

Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,

While it lasted?…

– Maggie Dietz, “November”

Truth? in Dialogue

October 19, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenager came home today excited about a major disagreement in her senior high school English class. Is it okay to lie? Is it acceptable to lie to prevent harming someone? Or absolutely, categorically never?

What do you do? I asked her.

The truth is, when you write dialogue in fiction (or when you listen, really listen) to how people use language, you quickly realize the lines of truth are blurry – in fact, remarkably unclear.

At seventeen, my daughter sees herself as mistress of her own fate, and while I certainly don’t want to unsteady my girl, I encourage her to keep her hands steady on the wheel. Listen, I urge: that unbelievably difficult challenge I butt up against, over and over. Listen.

I’m reading Margot Livesey’s Mercury in these early, dark mornings. Here’s a few lines from a previous novel:

If someone tells you a lie, they’re not telling you the truth, but they are telling you something. It just takes longer to figure out what.

– Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street

This eternally warm, long and lovely autumn, Woodbury, Vermont

Treasures

October 17, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the middle of last night, wind blew in a scattering of rainshowers. Without turning on any lights, I stood on the kitchen porch, amazed at the midnight balminess. The apple tree shed a few yellow leaves.

My teenager had left a screwgun on the deck, a piece of unfinished cleanup from putting up the storm windows. I lifted the heavy tool and held it in both hands, remembering when this girl was a baby and a screwgun like this one had fallen out of the back of our pickup. We’d loaned the screwgun to a relative in Montpelier, who must have merely slid the tool in the back of the truck. When I returned home, the case was missing.

With my baby in the truck cab beside me, I drove those miles back to the capital city, looking all along the road, but didn’t find the blue plastic box. I remember weeping over what was a very expensive tool for us then, and how badly I felt at its loss, caused by my own carelessness. That tool, in the early days of my husband’s carpentry business, meant so much to us then – or perhaps it was more the potential, the life ahead, that tool promised.

In the end, a neighbor found the screwgun and returned it to me.

Seventeen years later, how many thousands of dollars worth of tools have now passed through our hands, used hard, their finite lives consumed. I thought of all that with the gentle autumn rain falling, and how happy our neighbor was, returning to us what we considered our lost fortune.