#ruralVermont

Broken Down Stuff

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Vermont Public Radio is filled with cheery news. Worst Super Bowl. Lousiest State of the Union Address.

More locally, the Honda buried at the neighbors has fully emerged. Where the headlights should be are two gaping holes, the lights themselves on top of the car.

My 20-year-old sets her gas cap on top of her car and drives off in a rush. When she discovers this, I send her to the auto parts store, where she suspects the guys behind the counter are laughing at her. Why not? I ask. I laughed at you. Give me a little mirth, girl. She laughs, too, delighted the cap is nine dollars. What a deal I got, she says.

I resist pointing out that a better deal would have been not losing it. I’ve gotten a nine-dollar laugh out of this one.

It’s February. This is the time of year when things get worse in Vermont, but also better. I’ve lived here a long time, and generally I like living in Vermont. I actually like it very much, despite the things in Vermont that aren’t cool but are hardly endemic to Vermont—isolation and intergenerational poverty and the increasing bent in American life to see the world in narrowed vision.

This is the time of year when  cabin fever begins to creep in with a kind of communal silliness. We are all together in this. Even folks who foray out to Florida or California, winter is long, and then longer, and then even longer.

February marks the time of both weeping and giggling. The light floods back, more every day, crazy-making. Spring may be far off, but the scent is in the air.

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Evening Meet-up

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

With two 12-year-olds and a giant dog cage in my small Toyota, I drove along the dirt roads in Woodbury, in search of the woman who said she had chickens. Ignore the no trespassing sign at the foot of the driveway, she told me, a warning for burglars. That part of the Woodbury is mountainous in the small, Vermont way, with curved hillsides cupping homes, and lots of clear running streams and glacier-carved ponds.

It was nearly dusk, and she was outside, waiting for us. The girls eyed the chickens, who were not yet in their houses. Waiting, the woman showed the girls her fluffy chicks, and then we went inside. Her house had an amazing floor made from stones on the property. While the girls waited quietly, the woman and I talked about her relatives who had been in the area since before the Revolutionary War. She showed us a photograph on the wall of her distant relative in a Civil War uniform with his wife, who must have native blood.

The woman’s house was filled with dusky light. She was one of my people, a small woman, and, standing, we were eye-to-eye. I could feel the girls getting antsy for the chickens, but they were quiet, saying nothing. This woman had raised three sons alone in a mobile home on this property, and then built a house about the time the boys moved on and began their own families, cutting a deal with her ex-husband’s child support arrears for more land instead of the  money he owed.

The girls petted her lovely black lab. I stood listening to the unexpected bends of her life, to an autoimmune disease and the loss of a job, and then, she said, the chickens saved her life. Began her on a new track. In the descending gloaming, we walked behind the coops and visited her new bees. For a moment I guessed she would offer to take us further, up that steep hillside I admired where she and her son cleared a field.

But the girls edged toward the chickens. The hens muttered, stepping slowly into their houses for the night. We took four, driving out through the sound of the clattering peepers.

Morning glories
enough thatching
for this hut.

— Issa

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