democracy

Oatmeal Chat, Vultures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Vermont sends its swiftwater team to North Carolina, repaying a favor when Vermont was in need. Word comes of similar terrain and climate causes, but far worse devastation. We send them our empathy, our skilled folks, certainly money, to their world broken apart….

In Vermont, these weeks have been tepid, the foliage gently rotating to gold, the sun warm in the afternoons. This year, the purple asters decorate the landscape everywhere, pallets of brushiness.

Thursday afternoon, I take my laptop to our picnic table, the bluejays creeping near, curious, my bent-over sunflowers in the garden shaking with feathered gleaners. I’m stuck on this notion of impermanence my father and sister and I have been kicking around, when we connect in our disparate parts of the country via our laptops. Autumn in Vermont personifies impermanence. Stepping out for firewood in the early morning, geese clack over my porch roof, getting their V formation together, out of here for warmer waters.

In the co-op, I round an aisle and meet an old friend filling a paper bag with oatmeal. You can imagine me, he tells me, standing at my back door, just staring at the mountainside. What perfection today. From there, our conversation quickly bends into small town democracy, how each of these three adjacent towns are different. We step to the aisle’s side and dig into the grittier details of a legal letter circulating on email. My friend, thinking like me, asks about motivation. Who’s desiring what? Why? What’s the intent, for what human footing?

Fascinating questions. Vermont Selectboard meetings are generally unfettered democracy. Anyone can show up and speak their piece, ask questions.

Later, I step outside with my pound of coffee and pound of butter. The turkey vultures are circling, swooping low over this section of highway and co-op and river. In my wool sweater, barefoot in Danskos, I stand watching for the longest time, the sun falling behind the hillside.

A passerby, walking in, glances up, too, and shudders. “Them. Those birds.”

I start up the hillside, under the gyrating vultures.

 Even  in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
 I long for Kyoto.

— Bashō

Saving…. Who?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One recent morning, on the lawn of the former schoolhouse where I work, signs appeared on the triangle green: Save Town Hall. Shortly afterward, with black spray paint, someone altered the signs to: Save Town.

This building has been around since before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. The entire top floor is a gymnasium, the middle floor four classrooms, the basement originally must have housed a coal furnace. After a $14k heading bill one winter for a building largely empty, I urged the Selectboard to consider other options. Oh, the furor that suggestion has now caused.

All summer, walking into the basement, I kept saying, I smell mold, I can’t work in a basement, I can’t think straight, can’t breathe, in a repetition that was doubtlessly whiny and certainly dull. But like the people arguing around this building, the building isn’t stagnant, either. I take my laptop upstairs to the empty rooms, where it’s me and the dusty windows, the paint shedding from the pressed tin walls and ceilings, the beadboard molding higher than my head.

In this wet, wet summer, mold blooms, and I rally the tiny office staff. Let’s move! I grab my jade plant. In a few hours, we’ve moved upstairs into the empty rooms, opening the windows and letting in the sunlight and breeze. I prop open the doors and sweep up cobwebs. Behind us, we leave so much. In our rouge occupation, we women set up housekeeping. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot over the maple floors .

We hire a crew to move the heavy things, and the men walk around remembering when they went to school in these rooms. Art classroom here, lunch there. All day long, with the doors open, the public wanders in and offers suggestions and stories.

A woman asks what we need. I’d like a pair of kittens here, frankly, or maybe a small old dog who wouldn’t mind sleeping on the rug in the sunlight.

Save Town? A question that opens up into a Jacob’s Ladder of questions….. in the meantime, we’re at least moving up into the light….

Keeping On….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I drive home from a Selectboard meeting with my friend the moon who hangs over the dark mountain ridge, a creamy misshapen teardrop shot-through with crimson. It’s me and her. The clouds have scrimmed low enough that the Milky Way does not join our duet.

My house glows when I return home. The girls have chopped up the cherry tomatoes I left on the table and added these sweet chunks to couscous they bought in Santa Fe and cooked on their camping trip (and why do I never cook couscous, anyway?) The girls are familiar with the town and the people where I work. I tell stories about who’s there and what’s happening — the nuts-and-bolts of local truckers who’ve appeared for the bid openings, hoping to score more work — a man who lives nearby, has no electricity, comes to use the internet, and wanders in and out, curious, offering a few comments. People are angry about all kinds of things, the sheriff’s there and then not-there, a man yells, the chair regains control, decisions are made, bids are granted, that FEMA word with its trailing uncertainties rises and falls. There’s a pause about a bridge washed out in last year’s flood with a replacement price tag that’s beyond comprehension. A board member and I whisper commiseratingly about the days when we shared homemade cookies at meetings while kicking around decisions. He’s heading fishing this week.

The girls eat up my stories, share their own stories of their day. In the humid night, we stand on the back deck, listening to the foxes bark in the ravine, the crickets sizzle away these final summer days. The girls head out for a walk, in search of the moon and some adventure. My cat follows me as I walk around the house picking up dropped socks and empty bowls, clattering forks in the kitchen sink. Forget about national politics for a bit. It’s the same human stories: the mixture of ego and thrumming anger, a knight-like determination to serve others, the uncertainties of how do we get along?

The foxes keep at it. Eventually, I sleep, too, wake in the murky darkness, fed my cats, and then I keep on, too….

Messy democracy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

So this whole democracy thing? Since we’re in an election year and all?

I work in a small town for a Selectboard. Monday morning, I pull into work (late, again), and a Selectboard member is eating a blueberry muffin as fast as he can in the parking lot, a muffin I’m certain the town clerk made. I get out and make some comment roughly along the lines of it’s a good thing I don’t do drugs anymore because Your Town….

He counters with, Let’s get serious. What’s your cucumber and zucchini situation? I’m coming back at noon with four full boxes.

Monday morning, it’s revealed that people have stolen signs. People have written letters to the Selectboard and newspapers and the Sheriff about the theft. People arrive in the office with dogs and laptops and questions, eat muffins and disappear. I walk outside with the phone. It’s possible that the thief arrives. It’s also possible there’s some laughter. Or maybe I’m making all this up.

Democracy is messy, chaotic, often brutal. People arrive who look as though they’ve slept in ditches for their entire adult lives and complain about the flood. People complain about their neighbors. People run for election. In all of this, I take off my shoes and walk around barefoot. I do all the things I’m supposed to do and I keep wondering if I’m doing any of these right. I give an old woman a bottle of water. I am always trying to leave, disappearing into the asters around the lake, into the rooms upstairs where it’s just me and the wasps and the open windows. I am always trying to sew the pieces of my life together. Sometimes I crumple paper and throw it at my coworkers, which is not really at all charming or funny.

As a writer, I learned from reading. I learned so much from sugaring — the majesty of the world, the inarguableness of cause and consequence. I learned joy and love as a parent. I learned grief as a broken wife. Working for a small town, I’ve learned the peculiar American craziness of little towns and politics, of gossip. How to spy cowardice and when to lean against the courageous.

There’s not one damn thing perfect about any of this. Here I am as usual, half in, my head and heart filled with my garden gone rampart with rudbeckia and coneflowers. But we’re all that way…. July is the season of joy, January the season of despondence and loneliness. In the heart of midwinter, I leap from the snowy shore to the frozen lake. Far out, I sometimes lie down in the middle of the day, the ice a bed between my bones and the sludgy lightless waters. Overhead, the infinity of the heavens.

But today it’s Good Old July. In the afternoon, I walk with a woman along the forest trails she’s cut. She’s eased white quartz from the soil. The rocks gleam, as if freshly scrubbed with rain.

The awful rowing towards God.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments
Hardwick, Vermont

My buddy Ben Hewitt writes about waking from a deep sleep where he’s lying in the back of a pickup driven by a woman with bejeweled fingers — but I wake from a dream where I reach under the bed for a bowl of brown rice and curried onions, strings of sautéed chard, diced tomatoes. Who dreams of that? But perhaps I’m dreaming of keeping cake beneath the bed from an old article my friend Dave showed me…. The cat sits in the screened window. Rain falls hard.

In the buttery dawn, my youngest and I walk around town, coffee cup in my hand. The river and brooks have taken over Hardwick again. A man sits on his porch, water a swirl around his house, and I sense he’s been sitting there all night. A year ago, to this day, the town broke apart in a flood.

Again, the river roars, mud-dark, boulders banging. Fall into that, and you’ll drown. The town reeks of clay and rot, the earth’s innards that are better off left unturned.

I’m working these days for a small nearby town Selectboard. This early morning there’s the stream of road crew and public, of the orchardist hired for last year’s FEMA reimbursement — which we’ve not yet received — who arrives in his orange vest. The phone rings and rings. The Selectboard members arrive with donuts and freshly made banana bread and a cheerful Irish Setter. The woman who’s just joined this limping Board (who, really, in their right mind would join a Selectboard these churned-up days?), explains in her calm way precisely her motivation. She’s neither young nor naive and says just simply that the world is falling apart; but this Vermont town doesn’t need to follow that course. In this strangely remarkable day of the world we know and broken badly again, I am caught in an upswell of her plain-spoken and can-do words, her confidence as she sets down that waxed-paper-wrapped sweet loaf. I am aligned. The alternative is narcissism or nihilism or simply foolishness, and I have been waiting for her words.

In this same unexpected morning, I sit with the Selectboard as the rain falls again. They agree on a mending plan which relies on that wing and a prayer of federal money. The town, well-off a year ago, is now running on debt.

In my own one-woman world, standing in the dark against my house that rainy night and listening to the river’s roar increase and gain, I especially miss the shelter I once had in a marriage when the world’s chaos smacks into my face, as happens more and more these days. But fiercely pounding waters are never one single thing; even the next morning, bleary-eyed and soaked, I can’t help but marvel at the creamy orbs of blooming hydrangeas, the gold rudbeckia. Drinking my bitter coffee, I think of Anne Sexton’s poem “The Awful Rowing Towards God.” I once chose to dig my oars into turbulent waters and pull myself and my daughters to dry land. Now my youngest, shimmering with the pollen of young womanhood, drives, her eyes wary over the dirty water.

Oh us, all of us, in our little boats, our dinky cars and pickups, our great complicated lives. These mud-choked whirlpools, the fallen trunks smashing into rubble, the rushing waters that have not yet stilled. Which way will we row? Remarkable, all of it, remarkable.

… I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it…

— Anne Sexton

Vermont Town Meeting Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Here’s Vermont Town Meeting Day in a nutshell: lousy coffee for a buck, the cash box in the hands of sweet kids who are raising money for field trips the school board quit funding years ago.

My father calls Town Meeting Day the purest form of democracy. And democracy, hoo boy, what a fascinating creature this is.

On this Town Meeting Day in Greensboro, the moderator drank water from a Daffy Duck glass that he said he’d used for the past thirty town meetings (not a tall tale). Knitting and side conversations, Presidential primary voting, school budget voting, knitting and more knitting, talk about housing and logging and, inevitably, taxes and delinquent taxes.

Late afternoon, a cold drizzle fell. On the playground, the kids had left a bucket of stick stew. I had about a hundred things yet to do that afternoon, but I squatted beneath the white pine and checked out the lean-to the kids had built from branches that had fallen in a winter storm. As we head into this election year, let’s remember the kids keep the world real. Savor some spring stick stew.

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

— Abbie Hoffman