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August Fragrance

/ 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.

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Myriad Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These summer days, I often work at home, awake and drinking coffee while the girls slumber, and the sun rises and slowly steams off the dew from our croquet patch, the garden, and the town’s rusted metal fence and cemetery beyond.

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I walked into the sultry town for another of my meetings at the town library. Some rouge patron had plugged up the basement plumbing, so I shopvacc’ed the cement floor while librarian lifted boxes from the spreading flood. Then we sat outside in the sunlight, nodding to patrons, while she answered my questions about the little library I manage. One patron returned three books, including the novel I’ve written. I restrained myself from quizzing, What did you think?

At home again, in the late afternoon, my daughter picked handfuls of cucumbers from our small garden. While we talked, I made a savory dinner the girls love – peppers, onions, herbs, sausage, tomatoes, rolled into bread dough, coarse-salted and rubbed with olive oil. While the bread baked, we worked in the garden, the half moon rising through crimson clouds over the peak of our house. She was chattery and happy. I love the evenings best, she said.

Poem (As the Cat)

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

– Williams Carlos Williams

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Repeating Patterns

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few years ago, my daughter bent all the paper clips in our house into necklaces, a project involving pliers and colored beads, with incredibly cool results. One necklace still hangs from the windowsill in my room, crooked over the sill.

At the time, I was running a business out of our house that involved frequent and complicated mailings. One morning, I fumed around the house, muttering about the lack of paper clips, before I realized all those boxes of small metal pieces had been transformed into kid art.

There’s one pattern in my life: my intent adult life knocked up against the busyness of childhood.

In the end that day, I mailed out those so important papers sans paper clips, and here I am, years later, having forgotten what was on those papers while the necklace still hangs over my desk.

In the penetrating damp
I sleep under the bamboos….
One by one the stars go out.
Only the fireflies are left.
Birds cry over the water.
War breeds its consequences.
It is useless to worry,
Wakeful while the long night goes.

– Tu Fu, from “A Restless Night in Camp,” in David Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape
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Watering Down Deep

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was a kid in the backseat of our green Jeep while my parents drove back to New Hampshire from our trips to Toledo and then often west of the Mississippi, Vermont was the final stretch on a very long journey home, and my mother claimed it was always raining in Vermont. It sure can rain in Vermont.

This morning, mist waters broccoli starts I planted yesterday, spinach and lettuce sowed for fall consumption. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by Vermont, with its infinitely promising green depths – what’s in all those woods? We stopped at a sugarhouse, and I was lifted up to peer into an enormous pan steaming with boiling maple sap, where we tasted hot syrup from tiny paper cups.

Later, as a young adult, I lived for years not far from that very stretch of highway, Route 9, all tangles and bends, some of which the department of transportation straightened out since then, some which will always reflect the jagged steepness of those mountains. I later possessed a giant sap pan myself, and served countless cups of hot syrup to children.

What does a kid remember from a childhood, anyway? While my parents were fighting exhaustion and worn-out windshield wipers, bending the atlas, their younger daughter was in the backseat, sowing the seeds of her adulthood.

In retrospect: could have been worse. What’s going on in my backseat, while I’m reading the map?

Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggles for what – your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins.

Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

 

On the Footpath

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Rain last night – cold rain in July. What about a sultry summer sunset?

At my parents’ urging, my 12-year-old and I watched Lion last night, and driving to work this morning I thought about how this is a story about home – about longing for home and what that means – a story that unfolds with secret after secret, all the way until the very last line.

Lion is a journey story, too. My daughters and I have taken so many journeys in these last few years, literal and metaphorical, that I might almost be tempted to lay down the journey fascination if traveling weren’t at the very heart of human life.

As my daughters grow up, now long past the toddler or little kid age, that cuddling, hand-holding phase, the journeys we each take get longer, deeper, more intricately complex. At the crux of our journeys, like everyone else on the planet our travels are inherently about ourselves and our loved (and sometimes unloved) ones. Same household, same parents: but each of my daughters travels a uniquely bending path, which at least has the benefit of keeping domestic life lively.

Here’s a few lines from my early morning reading, from Dave Eggers’ Heroes of the Frontier.

That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.

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Where we live now, Hardwick, Vermont

The Ten Thousand Things

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I always believed Vermont champion of summer iridescence, but Prince Edward Island glows, vibrant with a handful of colors: greens, blues, lupine purples, and all that red earth, tilled in tidy mounds and planted with potatoes.

Walking along the hidden rust-stained shore of a lake last night, the kids and I discovered glass and ceramic shards newly-broken and raw-edged, and scattered bits of glass already worn into cloudy sea glass. This particular stretch of sand was lavish with sea flotsam: human junk and the sea’s live and cast-off beauty – scuttering crabs and half-submerged tires and an enormous fantail of shells, some nearly too small to see, pearly white and gray and violet, discarded from creatures’ lives and breaking into bits, returning into the sand and the sea.

My youngest daughter remarked on the mixture of things, alive and dead, exquisitely beautiful and not at all. Bald eagles winged silently, fiercely powerful, through the sky, and we kept walking on all that sand, red as the desert where I was born, far away on the earth’s curve.

… simple evidence. That life is relentless, demands of us to take us the reins of life and drive the wagon.

Jeffrey Lent, Before We Sleep – early morning reading.

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