Reasons to Love Vermont

May 15, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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Happy April is Poetry Month

April 10, 2016April 12, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night I heard Leland Kinsey read from his new book of poems, Galvanized, at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick. Leaving home on a weeknight is always a pain, with homework rearing up, dinner dishes, and – although it’s only ten minutes – the ten minutes in the car to drive. I’m always glad when I get to the bookstore, though. The company is familiar and jovial; the books are terrific.

I’ve been to many, many readings at this Hardwick bookstore, but this reading was particularly fine. I’d brought my knitting, but I left it in my lap, untouched. A couple in the back had come with their baby, and the little one’s babbles wove beneath Leland’s voice. Leland hails from a lengthy line of Vermont farmers, and his poetry is strewn with glacial erratics, swallows, ponds – with a keen awareness of mortality, of hard physical work, of human frailty, and love. Perhaps what I admire most about his poetry is that constant thread of beauty, winding all through his words like that baby’s murmur.

Galvanized is a collection of poems suffused with life, penetrating into the deepest recesses of our lives, a book of laughter and tears and beauty, the matter of our everyday lives. Isn’t that what poetry is all about?

…. The same uncle said recently about a blue suit,
“I bought it to be laid out in;
now I’m wearing it to the wakes of others.
Life takes so long.”

Wear.

From “Deer Camp,” Leland Kinsey, in Galvanized

Barre, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

The Civility of Vermont

March 26, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like anywhere else, Vermont has its share of injustices, but also a steady practicality. People generally lend a hand in need, to friend or stranger.

This afternoon, the girls and I took a teenage friend on a steep walk. Why? she inquired.

Because it’s fun, I answered.

On a day like today, full of sunlight, the grass beginning to green even in March, with no bugs and no ice, what a joy to be human, and not a machine.

We are born with some things in our veins…

Virginia Reeves, Work Like Any Other

Montpelier, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

In Between: Adolescence

December 11, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Raw. Mothering an adolescent daughter is like ripping a scab off your soul. My daughter’s agonized questions are existential: why do people suffer? What could possibly be the answer to this? A question I have asked since my own adolescence, more and more intently with each passing decade of my life, with each new encounter I have with the multiple varieties of human suffering.

Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood chronicles his young and pregnant wife’s death in an automobile accident. Luzzi, a Dante scholar, writes: My reading of Dante had always been deep and personal, but when I found myself in a dark wood, his words became a matter of life and death.

During both my children’s births, I felt myself poised between life and death, the scrim of our everyday world pushed aside in this small, sacred space. Surely, part of the keenness of adolescence is its odd pivotal place. Half in the clouds of childhood, not yet in the forest of adulthood, adolescence, for this brief (and yet simultaneously very long) moment, spins between these two realms.

November Blooms

November 11, 2015 / 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

Molly S. Photography

Freckled Jack O’Lantern

October 31, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

November is the season of mortality. Driving along the southern side of Morristown this late afternoon, the silage fields were harrowed up, dark earth and stone and pieces of corn stalk laid open and fallow for the winter.

Tonight, while the girls carved pumpkins and listened to music, I sat at my desk in the corner upstairs and called one of my oldest friends. We talked about frozen chickens in my freezer, pork, beets, carrots, cabbage. What do you need? I asked. I offered to make soup from beef bones and marrow. He hasn’t long to live, his life caught up quicker to him than he might have imagined. So many years ago, I met his pregnant wife for the first time. She wore a new dress the color of buttercups. That was in the house of many windows and myriad rooms, surrounded by fields of wildflowers. At a wedding one summer, I climbed rickety ladders in my bare feet to the hay barn’s cupola. That marriage ended. My friends’ marriage ended. Strangers to me now live in that house.

Downstairs, my children hunted for stubs of candles. My older daughter had carved flowers and vines and an earthworm on her jack o’lantern. The younger girl’s pumpkin had ears and eyelashes, smiling lips, hearts for hair, and freckles – freckles! – over bumpy orange cheeks. I struck a match and carefully put my hand in the pumpkins. We turned out the lights. The girls’ jack 0’lanterns glowed.