Beautiful Travels

October 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Reading Daniel Mason’s new novel, The Winter Solider, I’m reminded of first reading Russian novels — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev — when I was a teenager. How hungry I was for those books — what will these characters do? — in their snow-buried landscapes. Tender green shoots of spring poked through the gritty ice.

This reading mirrors the kind of life I carved out as an adult. Live on a hundred acres of woods, work outside in all weather, pull your toddler along the backroad in the sleet, just because…. Know that where the moon rises above your house is essential. Be afraid; know that the snow and the long-toothed northern cold can and will maim and kill, but how beautiful this world is…..

They were five hours east of Debrecen when the train came to a halt before the station on the empty plain.

— Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

Cambridge, Vermont

Loving Yellow

September 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Lador Day Weekend, we’re all home Sunday — both girls and myself — and I followed in the family tradition instilled by my father: painting the house. Our previous house was cedar shingled, with paint only on the window trim. That house had many windows, so, most falls, I painted some of the trim or old storm windows, always the same exterior deep blue teal.

My daughter, when she was three, called this Mama velvet-tealing, a neat way of turning a noun into a verb.

While gray is a traditional New England choice for steps, I had picked up a remainder can of exterior floor paint for a mural on the barn door. When I opened it up, the paint sparkled the glossy richness of spring dandelions.

No, the girls said.

Yes, I said.

Later, when the new neighbors walked over for cake, they asked how long the steps had been so brilliant. Since today, said my older daughter.

Once again, I find myself wildly painting. Next, a deep yammish orange for the upstairs floors. Color, the consolation of fall.

…What is yellow? pears are yellow,

Rich and ripe and mellow….

— Christina Rossetti, from “Color”

End of July, Postcard From Hardwick, VT

July 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Until she was 18, my older daughter lived on a dead-end dirt road, surrounded by mixed hardwood forest, dense conifers along the house’s northern boundary. Walk ten minutes from our house now — all right, maybe six minutes — and we’re deep in the woods again. Every evening, hermit thrush sing behind our house.

While July is stunningly beautiful across Vermont, I see how quickly July varies from home to home. Where do the pollinators flock? Just a few miles from our former house, we see cardinals. Here, the water is nearby, and the mornings are misty.

Yet another boon to Vermont summer — walk just a little in sandals and the wildness surrounds you.

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,” said my mother. “Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

— Cheryl Strayed, Wild

Site of former pest house, Hardwick, VT

Lilacs!

May 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Every morning these days, my daughter and I look to see if the lilacs have opened. Today, today.

Their scent reminds me of some of the best things: early childhood, summertime dinners on the grass, the return of spring.

a scrap of iron–
without fail, menfolk
stop to look

— Uda Kiyoko

Interlude of Merriment

September 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughters are like me this way: a difficult week? Pack lunch and retreat into the woods.

Yesterday found us hiking along a series of cascades, then walking barefoot through a shallow, boulder-strewn stream. Among mushrooms, we walked on cushy pine needles in a shaded forest. At the end, chilled from swimming in the mountain stream’s pools, my car didn’t start, tossing me that curve with its recurring electrical problem.

In those two hours we spent by the side of a not-well-travelled road, at some point I began laughing at everything humorous and absolutely not-humorous in our lives, verbally listing, and once I began laughing, I laughed so hard I sat down on the graveled roadside. More than any words, my daughters found my laughter exquisitely reassuring.

In times of acute family duress, I’ve laughed with my siblings and father until tears have run down our cheeks. The people I am most aligned with (whether I know them well or not) wield the same two practical tools I return to, over and over: the inherent (and physical) need for comedy and an awe of beauty.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune…

– Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, I

Bingham Falls, Stowe, Vermont

Vinegar & the Lupine Metaphor

June 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter asked me if I knew Christ, dying on the cross, had been given vinegar to drink. Why? she asks, mystified.

Why is it that these profound questions so frequently appear when I am about bled out of energy? Could I not write a veritable book on this subject? Our kitchen holds five vinegars – apple cider, balsamic, white, rice wine, an herb infusion – and we use it for preserving, cooking, cleaning. But soak a spongeful and press it your lips? My daughters are horrified at the image.

I offer what my children consider an unsatisfactory answer: the antidote to drinking sour wine is wild lupines. I remind them of the children’s book they both loved so dearly, Miss Rumphius. Could this be the weekend’s challenge, in a realm beyond folding laundry? Amend that: could this be the existential challenge?