Travel Into Places Familiar and Unfamiliar

February 27, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Yesterday, the girls and I left Vermont – currently a giant slew of ice and running water –and drove over the Connecticut River into New Hampshire’s White Mountains, an ancient granite range. At the crest of the Notch, I stepped out in the blowing snow and snapped a photo, the temperature not much above zero. In the backseat, the little girl pressed against her teddy bear. I drove down the steep switchbacks, listening to music, the girls quiet, while the temperature soared and the snow that shrouded the pass lifting and disappearing.

For years, I’ve impressed on my daughters to make a mental map of their world as they go. Memorize road signs; note the position of the sun, rivers, cairns; remember your turns. And yet, more than our perceptions of places falter. A few years ago, with our daughters, my husband and I returned to the mountainside where we had married. We hiked up this once-familiar area and could not find the field of our wedding. The mountainside, a former ski area, had not been mowed for years, and the field had been reclaimed by scrubby thickets. In the end, we found what we were seeking, completely altered but for the shape of the earth: a flat knoll and a once-upon-a-time drop off now concealed by emerging birch.

These ancient mountains are all of this: familiar to me through swimming and river rock collecting and backpacking into the peaks, and so infinitely mysterious, ever-changing, miraculously beautiful. And, this morning, sunny.

….to see beyond boundaries to the subtle heart of things, dispense with names, with concepts, with expectations and ambitions and differences. Tao and its many manifestations arise from the same source: subtle wonder within mysterious darkness. This is the beginning of all understanding.

Lao Tzu (c.604 – 531 B.C.)

Franconia Notch, New Hampshire

Hearth

February 25, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, the house grew cold as I let the fire in our wood stove dwindle. When it was nearly dead, I pulled apart the stove pipe and stretched my arm deep down its throat to loosen the rattling creosote. With a shovel, I removed the ashes from the stove, then vacuumed the damper vents at the back, so the air will flow again. In the baffles at the top, I reached between the metal and fireproof insulation and pulled out handful after handful of silty, warm brown ashes, silky as kittens. I kept thinking of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s story “Housewifely Arts.”

This evening, after a day of snow and freezing rain and sleet, our hearth is rich with heat again, the children sprawled luxuriously on the rug. One of the interesting aspects of writing is a tendency to turn things upside down and inside out. Our stove is not merely a source of heat, but also consumer of wood and air, creator of ash, its lungs linked to the chimney funneling through our house. I once spent the greater part of an afternoon with a heating specialist who explained the inner workings of a nearby hospital, the channels of electricity and oxygen and water and waste, the circulatory system of an enormous building, generally unseen but vital.

Maybe it’s a day like this, when winter relinquishes its hold reluctantly, hurling ice at our windows in fury, that brings us back to our hearth again, gratefully.

There is no need to explain to our daughter the death of her first dog. Poppy, better than any of us, understands the urge to have what you must have. She can still wring what she wants from the world. It has listened to her cries and delivered. She still trusts the raw pull of desire. One day it will tear her away from us, take her down a dirt road to a place she does not recognize, and there she will make her home. Away from everything she understands, and close to everything she wants.

– Megan Mayhew Bergman, “The Two-Thousand Dollar Sock”

Winter Garden, Vermont, 2016

Maple

February 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This week, I gave away maple leaves, small shapes of pure maple sugar. For so many years, maple was queen in my life. Maple is all taste and scent, literally the life of the tree boiled into steam or crystallized into sweetness. Both my babies, when I carried them back to the house after long afternoons-into-night of boiling had a satiny patina of maple sugar glazed on their cheeks, from condensation descending through the sugarhouse.

For years, maple was livelihood in our house, but also a gift, particularly sugar which is harder and dearer to make. For numerous reasons, this year queen maple has laid her scepter down in my household – and yet, the other day, eating crumbles of this candy, I remembered this world in a grain of amber sugar: the immense fire’s roar, the billows of steam that stretched across the road, the daughters’ play tea sets and how they chalked on the cement floor and rough wood walls – and the satisfaction in drinking good syrup.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour….

– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Woodbury, Vermont 2013

Midwinter Hunger

January 31, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sizable deer appeared in my garden this morning among the bean stalks I never pulled, lifting its head, listening. In the woods around our small field, a flock of wild turkeys comes and goes, bent over dark creatures who remind me of Puritan old women dressed in black, crouched at their work. In the kitchen, my daughters mix pork, scallions, garlic, vinegar, for soup dumplings.

This stillness of winter is a false cliche; overhead, the crow flies for its meal. Squirrels run rampart over the compost. Even the wood stove devours. The children, asleep in their beds, dream of journeys. In the morning, sleepy at breakfast, they appear to have grown in those dark hours.

When we eat a steak, we build its proteins into our bodies and become part cow. Eat an artichoke, become part artichoke. Drink a glass of orange juice, become part orange tree. Everything eventually corrupts: from our first draft of milk, we are corrupted, the world is corruption, time is corruption, and we are forever hungering for more.

–– Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

West Woodbury, Vermont

Midwinter Lady Moon

January 24, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Winter moon… in my novel, the Lovely Lady Moon appears from the beginning so frequently I think of her as a character, too. The other night, I lay reading in bed for the longest time, and then my brother started that texting thing again. He has this way of texting like no one else I know: as if he wraps his deepest, pithiest, and often funniest words in a rag, knots it up with twine and rock, and chucks it over the Connecticut River to me. Afterwards, I lay in the cold room under a thick wool blanket, staring through that uncurtained window, thinking of those words of my brother’s, his phrases of what had given him a sweet, rare joy that day.

I learned to follow the moon’s phases all those myriad March nights of sugaring, as I hurried back and forth from the house to the sugarhouse, over treacherous ice and sucking mud, beneath her radiance…. which channeled into all those nights I was awake with nursing or sick children, my eyes watching the moon as she rose and arced and descended through my slender view of the cosmos.

Those nights, in my rural house, I wondered about other women all over the planet who were awake with their babies, feeding and tending these tiny beings, their faces turned up to Lady Moon’s pristine presence – utterly familiar, uncrackably mysterious, infinitely beyond the touch of our hands. Steady as clockwork, infallible, she beams on: a beacon.

Bright Moon

after Buson #843

Cold is the bright moon
All those trees
and this vast sky.

David Budbill, from AFTER THE HAIKU OF YOSA BUSON

Photo by Molly S./West Woodbury, Vermont

Living Sonnet for this Holiday

December 26, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In my daughter’s geometry homework, she’s struggling to take a flat diagram and turn it into a three-dimensional object – harder than might be imagined, even for an art-minded kid. In this holiday break, with a teenager and a savvy ten-year-old, we talked with my brother about who we know and how their lives shape out, and the choices people make in their lives. That clarity of hindsight notion…

Sometimes it appears as though our lives unfold into myriad geometrical shapes, complex beyond any imaging. Walking in the garden this afternoon, around the beds banked over with raked leaves, we saw two fluttering moths, blooming johnny jump-ups, and purple ground ivy flowers in the hoop house. Those petals are a dimension not so long ago I would never have imagined in the month of December. What way will this story bend? All around us appears this mighty world, seemingly all-powerful, greater than any of us: and yet, here we are, a handful of people – my family – walking in our kitchen garden. Who is the folder of this shape?