Capitalism and Commodification

October 4, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Everyone’s late to dinner last night, except the cats, who are never late to dinner, so I lie on the floor and finish reading Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Spoiler alert: there’s no laugh-aloud sections in this lengthy book.

Although I consider myself at least mediocrely educated, the book was a revelation to me — a enormous swathe of history, like Hemingway’s submerged iceberg, still mightily driving along our society.

Here’s a two-line excerpt.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

Meanwhile, little pumpkins in Vermont.

And the Bands Beat On….

May 9, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter plays clarinet in the band. Her school’s so small the band is both middle and high school, younger kids mixed in with the kids who are driving and working jobs and on the cusp of grownupness. It reflects the small town kind of world we live in, that, by the nature of its size, encourages acceptance. I linked up with a woman I’ve known since our oldest kids were nursing babies, 20 years ago.

Twenty school bands from all over the state played in a parade last night in Montpelier. As I walked around the high school, looking for my daughter, the evening sun in my eyes, I followed the tunes from one band to another. So much live music! So many kids!

For that brief time — the best of parenting. Laughter and silliness in the heady May evening, beneath trees just barely beginning to leaf out. I drove my hungry kid home, listening to her, as we drove through the dusk tumbling down, back to our house and the cats at the door, mewling for affection.

Money and Community — and More

March 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As Woodbury’s town librarian (population 888), my wages are paid directly by the townspeoples’ property taxes, a few donations, and Woodbury Pie Breakfast. Now the main yearly event in town, nearly 300 people showed up at the town’s little elementary school, trudging up the stairs to the second floor gymnasium, to eat pie yesterday morning.

Friday evening — and this is my most beloved part of pie breakfast — people arrive with covered dishes, explaining this is pumpkin and maple or bacon and sausage with a little dill.

Late last fall, Vermont’s State Board of Education mandated that Woodbury’s elementary school merge with two other local schools — one school much larger. After a winter of endless adult meetings about how to keep Woodbury’s school and library open, what pleasure — and relief — to fill the school with live music, the redolence of warming quiche, laughing kids — and adults in need of coffee.

Of all my photos, this is my favorite: the little girl waiting for pie to be served, while adults do adult things….

And They Brought Pies…

March 17, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I never went to work with my parents, although (in very different ways) I heard so many stories I know my parents’ occupations, wittingly or not, fed into my young writer self.

My mother worked the night shift as an RN, floating all over the hospital, from pediatrics to the ER, often returning as my siblings and I were drinking orange juice and heading to school. She always had stories — of washing diesel from a child’s hair or an ER doctor who snapped, took a fire ax to a door, and had to be restrained. She told stories of an administration who treated nurses terribly, of family members in the cancer ward who thanked her on Christmas morning.

My older daughter was in the sugarhouse when she was three weeks old, her rosy cheeks slicked with a sugary patina from the clouds of maple steam. Like many Vermonters, the girls’ father and I have done all kinds of things for work, and generally never hesitated to take the kids along.

This morning, I’m one working piece of Woodbury Pie Breakfast, one of the best of New England traditions, and late last night, my younger daughter helped set up.

In the dark, I walked back and forth from the school to the library, in the snow beginning to fall again, magically wafting down in the outside lights. Townspeople I knew and didn’t know carried in still-warm pies in their hands, offering their homemade gifts.

I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Woodbury Elementary School

Cold – And Warm Communities

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

January’s always cold in Vermont. Sure, we may have a few thaws here and there, but generally, January is dependably cold, in any number of permutations. Today, conserving my less-than-ample woodpile, I opted to work at the public library. While the library’s not heated with wood, the building appeared to be metering its fuel, too; the radiators were stone cold all the hours I was there. The other library-goers and I all wore hats, many of us coats, and by mid-afternoon I had pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my palms.

My fellow Vermonters are hearty and generally good-natured. When I packed up my work, an older woman at the table beside me – wearing a well-knit hat – laughed when I raised my eyebrows. Sunny and clear; 3 degrees above zero; a bit crisp.

Most religions turn their adherents toward the things we are afraid to face: mortality, death, illness, loss, uncertainty, suffering – to the ways that life is always something of a disaster. Thus religion can be regarded as disaster preparedness – equipment not only to survive but to do so with equanimity and respond with calmness and altruism to the disaster of everyday life. Many religious practices also emphasize the importance of recognizing the connectedness of all things and the deep ties we all have to communities…..

– Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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