Amazing Things

December 2, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Years ago, when I was a board member at the Stowe Farmers’ Market, I stopped in at bookstore before a board meeting to buy a child’s small sticker book. Board meetings often ran three hours long; I had my four-year-old with me, and for a dollar or two, I was looking for an usual activity for her, something to sweeten some of that time.

While my daughter picked out her book, I browsed through the new fiction, and bought a book I’ve long since lost, passed along to other readers.

Why? The novel is one long melody, one continuous song of the beauty and harshness of human life.

What did my little girl choose? A birthday party sticker book, with cake and candles, balloons, wrapped presents on a table beneath an oak tree – also a song.

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

– Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

December morning

Gold and Gray

November 6, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Vermont, November is knitting season, time to pull out your stash and see what might make a decent hat. This purple paired up with that long-ago blue from a child’s vest?

November is also the season of pulling the house finally tight against the winter, an odds and ends Sunday of mulching garlic and wrapping a glassed-in upstairs porch against the cold.

My 18-year-old and I left the younger girls crafting tissue paper flowers today and drove north up gray Route 16, flanked by patches of those golden tamarack torches. On a tip from Ben Hewitt, we were in search of doors, passing Crystal Lake, white-capped and as cold-looking as the Maine Atlantic.

Following directions, I stopped at the place with the dozer and knocked on a metal door. A man opened the door and said, Well, that’s a first, no one ever knocks.

I told my daughter, Bear that in mind. Don’t knock here again.

He was extremely genial and somehow in our conversation we went all over the place, from Vermont to the post office to Michigan, to a mother-in-law. Following him in a cavernous shop, against the back wall, he showed us gorgeous wooden doors, far better than I had imagined, with double panes, solid against the cold, and yet the kind of door that would let in streams of sunlight.

He asked how many doors we wanted, and while I said two, what I really wanted was to wander through that shop and see what-all was there. The doors, I had the sense, were just the beginning.

Outside, my daughter asked to go to Willoughby, just a few miles more. On this November day, time was suspended – somewhere in the not-yet-dark spectrum. The last time we had been here was a fine day of hiking and swimming with the cousins.

My mother recently remarked that it’s hard to believe my oldest is all grown up now – or nearly so. Sixteen years ago, I was driving around in an old blue Volvo, delivering syrup, while she chattered in the backseat and pretended to read the atlas. On one of my longest delivery trips, hopelessly lost in a tangle of dirt roads in Waitsfield, I pulled over, grabbed a handful of pebbles from the roadside, and she dropped them one by one into a plastic water bottle, emptied the small stones in her lap, and did it again, all the way home. Not so, now.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope.

– E. B. White

Lake Willoughby, Vermont

The Shape of A House

October 29, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the moonlight last night, with the stars overhead, my daughters and I walked up the hill to our house with a single window lit. Our former house, tall and narrow with a cupola, always reminded me of sailing ship, steady through sunny days and pelting sleet.

Our house now is square, its windows like eyes to the mountains and the valley. Entering feels like greeting the embrace of folded arms.

In the village at night, the houses are alive, even those sleeping with darkened windows. Enter our kitchen door and discover our white tin table strewn with hand-scrawled notes, hair ties, library books, a wooden car my child made, Halloween chocolates. What’s on the tables of all these neighbors, I wonder. Just how fine a photography mosaic all our tables might make.

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

– Ezra Pound

A Few Minutes

September 23, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my brother was learning how to ride a bike, he started at the neighbors’ cement step, leapt up on the banana seat that was too high for him, wavered across our scraggly lawn until he banged into the side of our house, and fell over. He hadn’t yet mastered turning, and so he repeated those steps – the vaulting ascent, the uneven pedaling, the thunk and crash – until he swerved left, up a slight hill, and kept going.

Washing dishes the other night, listening to the the increasingly grim NPR news, someone kept smashing the side of my house. My daughter was doing a handstand, kicking her heels against the clapboard – working as she said.

I thought of Dr. Spock’s Play is the work of babies – equally applicable to 12-year-olds. Laughing, my daughter demonstrated her ability to tuck her heels around her ears. She suggested I try that neat trick, but instead I lay on the grass and gazed at the clouds silently shifting over the sky’s expanse we can see behind our house. Shot through with sunset’s pink, the evening stretched around us, the cooling air nipping just the slightest on my cheeks and bare toes.

She lay on the grass beside me and said, There’s a snail just above us. See it?

I did.

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

casually.

– Issa

Dinner Prep

September 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just before the twin towers were destroyed in New York City, we moved into a new kitchen we had built on one side of our house. Our old kitchen had a single window. The new kitchen was its own ell, with three walls of windows, the true gem of that house.

I remember washing Red Russian kale leaves in a white enamel sink we had scavenged from somewhere, mesmerized by the sunlight over my hands, and how the kale spines flashed silvery like minnows under the water. I was listening to NPR and staring at my garden’s kale as if I had never seen it before.

Soil in that garden later became contaminated with clubfoot, and I ceased planting brassica. Transplanted healthy plants miserably withered and died within a few weeks, and none of my remedies worked. Now, miles away in this new garden patch, snipping my first kale leaves, I thought of that afternoon so many years ago, with my toddler daughter tricycling around the kitchen, surrounded by sunlight streaming over freshly stained pine, the only adult in the house listening to the radio, wondering what would happen.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

– Ryokan

August Fragrance

August 6, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My car stunk of shit when I arrived in Vermont’s capital city Friday afternoon, the debris from an enormous manure spreader I’d passed on a dirt road in Calais jammed in the undercarriage. Add to that, the fat stalk of garlic I’d nabbed from the school’s garden. I’d tugged it out to see how near (or late) to picking it was, and the pearly head, beneath the crumbling dirt I’d thumbed off, smelled so fragrantly delicious I decided to bring it home for dinner. Manure, garlic, and someone’s running shoes left in the backseat.

This past month, fierce thunderstorms have deluged us, and our piece of Vermont fluctuates between sodden and freshly-dried, smelling of wild blackberry vines and the pine bark mulch I gleaned from the town garage. Yesterday afternoon, my weeding interrupted, I read Adam Gopnik’s line in his article about Buddhism in The New Yorker – “…the things we cherish inevitably change and rot…” – which is likely the entire, unvarnished sum of human suffering.

The kids complained about the co-mixture of odors in the car – naturally. And, inevitably, I laughed off those complaints. Even with this early morning rain, I think we’ll swim today.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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