Hayden Carruth

November Blooms

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drove along the road to East Hardwick today, a narrow road I’ve driven countless times. I’ve transported numerous kids in many vehicles, often to the lake’s beach, wearing our swimsuits, the trunk filled with floaties, our bags packed with sunscreen and snacks and knitting. This road means to me little children in diapers, stacks of library books, and the long winter the crew worked on an old farmhouse along this road. The snow blows mercilessly across this road. This road means the public library at the end, and the general store where I buy groceries, mud boots, sugaring supplies and lemonade.

Today, driving a companion to a doctor’s appointment, we talked about his dream to get piglets and sheep. You have to think about something, he said.

There’s a line from a TC Boyle novel, World’s End, where a character defines himself as hard, soulless and free. How I aspired to that in my brash youth. But now, fully immersed in Dante’s woods, I see hardness crazes and breaks, whereas a malleable heart, smeared across the terrain of a road and intersecting journeys and lives, offers a tensile strength, the possibility for growth, the chance to bloom in this brief, dear life.

… The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

–– Hayden Carruth

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Molly S. Photography

Those Necessary Tire Wrench Skills

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The kids and I ended up outside a gas station today in Orleans, Vermont, loitering under a No Loitering sign. We’d changed a flat tire on my sister’s car and needed air for the (also flattish) replacement. Earlier, we’d absorbed history, in a stunning old four-story schoolhouse in Brownington, where the kids admired rooms chockfull of nifty antiques and gadgets, and I kept wandering around somewhat idiotically marveling to the guide, This building is so incredibly well-built, as if she’d never noticed that before.

My older daughter, newly sixteen-and-a-half, took charge of the tire change, then drove the car home through yet more rain and sun, commanding her cousins to stop horsing around in the backseat. When I left again, she baked and frosted a cake for her aunt’s birthday, oversaw the younger kids decorating the house, worked on her summer homework Salinger essay, and emailed me photos.

No doubt, the Brownington students in the 1800s must have been capable farm kids, but as a mother, it’s darn satisfying to see your leggy 21st century daughter tackle a tire wrench, a kitchen aide and camera with equal gusto.

While the kids were eating false maple donuts under the No Loitering sign, and my sister and I drank a thermos of coffee, we laughed at our planned day all jumbled up. It’s all in the journey, I said, thinking how trite that phase sounded to me just a few years back, so phony as Holden Caulfield would have kvetched. That doesn’t mean sometimes I’m not unbearably crabby along the way, but surely wielding a tire wrench, capably and well, sweetens your slice of cake.

…My wife is at her work,
There behind yellow windows. Supper
Will be soon. I crunch the icy snow
And tilt my head to study the last

Silvery light of the western sky
In the pine boughs. I smile. Then
I smile again, just because I can.
I am not an old man. Not yet.

–– Hayden Carruth, from “Twilight Comes”

Old Stone House Brownington, Vermont Photo by Molly S.

Old Stone House
Brownington, Vermont
Photo by Molly S.

Seeds and Sorrow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

All day long, maple seed pods fluttered down in a spring breeze, a shower of twirling seeds.  Where I live in Vermont, the seasons release easy rain and fierce rain, snow in leafy flakes and snow hard as buckshot.  Last week, the dandelions burst, and all day long, all night long, seeds lifted with their miniature canopies of sail and soared free from their stalks, heading out on their journeys.  Now, maple seeds are thrown in veritable handfuls from the trees and cast into the breeze, floating in an emptied glass of lemonade, on the little daughter’s new sweater left on the porch, against the window glass, into our hair.

June 6th.  Season of renewal, of surging growth.  My daughters and I walked along an abandoned railroad bed this afternoon, bending beneath greenery tenting over the railbed.  Domestic cows, wild geese, a cardinal, the crickets already counting down the days of warmth.

June 6th.  When I was in high school, a French exchange student told me, My grandmother is from Normandy, and she will never forget D-Day.

All day long, those seeds swirled.  All night, while we sleep and dream, and tomorrow morning, too, when the girls wake and wash and eat their sleepy breakfast, while we walk down our driveway to meet the school bus, the girls already thinking of their school day ahead, me holding my coffee and saying, Have a good day, goodbye, goodbye, see you this afternoon, those seeds will still be shedding on our shoulders and hands and before our eyes.  Then, for this year, too, that will be done.

Birthday Cake

….This is the season of mud and trash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, inarticulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another.

Hayden Carruth

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Mapping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

May, as opposed to November, brims with the joys of living in Vermont.  Oh, November’s okay, but May is exquisite — the apple blossom season — albeit a little fickle.  We’re not free of Jack Frost yet.

In school, my daughter was asked to envision a mental map of her world.  As maps — living with and without them — figure prominently in the novel I’m writing, this exercise set me thinking.  How would a mental map of the world for a Vermont ten-year-old differ from a child in Turkey?  Or say you are a Chilean miner?  Or a skydiver over Dubai?  How radically the topography (miles high or miles deep) of those worlds would differ.

The places we hold dear, a vernal pond or a child’s rope swing; the places we fear, the night’s blind country dark or the midnight territory of our own troubled heart; and the places we imagine and desire….. all these places are marked on our own unique maps in space, time, and memory.  November’s rainy days hold repetition, but these spring days are unfettered by similarity; the world’s busily growing.  These days, the map is not static.

Yet I like driving at night

in summer and in Vermont:

the brown road through the mist…

                                                                                 Hayden Carruth, The Cows at Night

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