Marvelous March Madness

March 6, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Spring may be fêted with pastel bunnies and pale eggs in the Hallmark and Nestle worlds, but Vermont’s spring must be brutally strong to break winter’s back.

Thaw, and the ice pounds back. Melt, and freeze steals into the night.

The hardest I’ve ever worked in my life is sugaring season. When my younger daughter was two, I remember lying with her under the skylight over our bed, completely spent, reading Louse Gluck’s poem in The New Yorker. I had little time for reading in that season, and this poem always reminds me of this season’s pithiness, the stubborn desire to press on through mud and ice, toward the blossom season.

The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes; it doesn’t lie. You ask the sea, what can you promise me and it speaks the truth; it says erasure…

Nothing can be forced to live.The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away, a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you. It says forget, you forget. It says begin again, you begin again.

From March by Louise Gluck

Rough-Hewn Grace

March 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been scavenging donations to my library’s yearly book sale, digging through stuff I’d never read (but others may deeply love) for some real gems. In one not-so-hot memoir I skimmed, I found a reference to a Flannery O’Connor line from one of her letters. The line — such a good one — also depicts this Vermont March.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

I skied over the pine-needle-strewn ice, took off my skis and crossed an oozy mud road. Then the snow gave out. Here’s a photo of an empty house along the road, once a farm beside Big Hosmer Pond, now padlocked up, with a For Sale sign in the front yard, waiting for new inhabitation.

In its online listing, a black-and-white photo from the 1950s shows a woman in a dress standing beside what might have been a fancy new car. Who? Where have you gone? Did you love living in this house? And did the loons sing then, too?

Craftsbury, Vermont

Dinner Chat

February 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My daughter and I are often eating dinner in the lengthening daylight at the kitchen table, just the two of us with the cats under our feet, and my daughter offering bits of her day — if I listen, and don’t press too hard, what she cares about she slowly spills.

Our conversation drifts into what it means to grow. Through our glass doors, I see the box elders behind our house swaying in this spring-is-coming wind, the Vermont winter gradually eroding. So much of my life I sought stasis — the imagined security of here is where I am. In my daughter, I see this same illusion of when I am grownup, as though adulthood is a kind of plateau.

We linger at the table, with the unwashed dishes and evening chores undone. While she speaks, I think, here, now. The wind curls around our house.

Accept yourself: be yourself. That seems a good rule. But which self? Even the simplest of us are complicated enough.

— From Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World

Caspian Lake, Greensboro, Vermont

New Growth

May 17, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The maple tree before my house was seeded in this ragged lawn before I lived here, and it has grown steadily over these years. This beauty is likely much older than I’ve ever given her credit for. And yet here again, this May, her gnarled, lichen-covered branches are sprouting green again, with the tenderest of leaves.

I love that mystery; I love that rebirth; I love that change. One of my most favorite endings in a novel is Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, at once simple and exquisite, while throwing the reader back into the depths of the novel, the infinitely deep, living sea.

That was when I knew I had a problem.

– Akhil Sharma

Travel Into Places Familiar and Unfamiliar

February 27, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Yesterday, the girls and I left Vermont – currently a giant slew of ice and running water –and drove over the Connecticut River into New Hampshire’s White Mountains, an ancient granite range. At the crest of the Notch, I stepped out in the blowing snow and snapped a photo, the temperature not much above zero. In the backseat, the little girl pressed against her teddy bear. I drove down the steep switchbacks, listening to music, the girls quiet, while the temperature soared and the snow that shrouded the pass lifting and disappearing.

For years, I’ve impressed on my daughters to make a mental map of their world as they go. Memorize road signs; note the position of the sun, rivers, cairns; remember your turns. And yet, more than our perceptions of places falter. A few years ago, with our daughters, my husband and I returned to the mountainside where we had married. We hiked up this once-familiar area and could not find the field of our wedding. The mountainside, a former ski area, had not been mowed for years, and the field had been reclaimed by scrubby thickets. In the end, we found what we were seeking, completely altered but for the shape of the earth: a flat knoll and a once-upon-a-time drop off now concealed by emerging birch.

These ancient mountains are all of this: familiar to me through swimming and river rock collecting and backpacking into the peaks, and so infinitely mysterious, ever-changing, miraculously beautiful. And, this morning, sunny.

….to see beyond boundaries to the subtle heart of things, dispense with names, with concepts, with expectations and ambitions and differences. Tao and its many manifestations arise from the same source: subtle wonder within mysterious darkness. This is the beginning of all understanding.

Lao Tzu (c.604 – 531 B.C.)

Franconia Notch, New Hampshire

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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