#thoreau

Like the creation of the cosmos out of chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I stopped in a wood stove/chimney sweep shop in Montpelier, looking for a replacement length of insulation for my stove.

I’d bought the stove in 2020, in that strange period when some businesses had reopened; Vermont’s mask mandate was brand-new. I was looking to install a metal asbestos chimney in my 100-year-old house, determined to heat this house with wood and not rely on oil. I was new to wearing a mask. My teenager waited in the car.

Four years later, on a rainy morning, I stop in and two men are warming themselves at glowing stoves. I ask my question about the catalytic combustors and insulation wrap. One man reaches in a stove and pulls out a honeycomb piece. He asks me if I’ve taken my stove apart. Yes, I answer, and I’ve put it back together — not once or twice, but regularly.

The store is on the retail strip between Montpelier and Barre, and the greasy scent of the never-closed McDonald’s pumps through the damp air. On that same 2020 trip, I texted a staff member of the state’s Department of Libraries about hand sanitizer. The department was closed, of course, and I never met this woman, who left me sanitizer and children’s books. We wrote back and forth to each other, and then she vanished elsewhere into a job, or so I guessed, a different phase of her life.

This morning, my daughters and I park at the edge of town and follow the running water: tracking uphill from river to streams. The mushy snow melts in the rain. Three geese fly overhead, clamoring. There’s that famous line from ol’ Henry David Thoreau: the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. On this March morning, the silty waters running high and fierce, Thoreau’s chaos line returns to me. My old familiar, chaos, the companion sometimes in my pocket, sometimes in my face.

Then, this: the evenings are beginning to stretch with light, rich with the scent of wet earth. Last night, my daughter and I pull on our jackets again and head out into the damp world, in hopes of red-winged blackbirds. A no go, yet. But halfway through, I interrupt her and say, “Robin.”

And again, “Robin.”

Empty House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The afternoon’s end finds me on a remote road, looking at an abandoned house. No one’s lived here in a long time, save for intermittent squatters.

It’s the first day of school for my high school sophomore. Although I’m at this property for work, I keep thinking of my daughter.

Behind this house are two immense white pines. I stand there, listening to the breeze rising off Lake Eligo, imagining what it was like a hundred years ago to farm here. What will it be like a hundred years from now? The question looms impossibly.

I bend down and peer through a missing pane of glass in the door.

In Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, I read a line from Thoreau: “Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

In so many ways, that sums up my experience. But that lostness I know now, is hardly a brief experience. The thing about the pandemic is that it’s exposed all the weaknesses in our society, and in ourselves, too. In my own world, I see acutely how pandemic has highlighted the near impossibility of single parenting, as I find myself these days unmoored, the thinness of my life exposed.

These days, in my work, I’m able to listen to people’s stories about how they’re experiencing the pandemic. These stories are often so much about loss — particularly about families separated — and worry about an uncertain future. Surely, I think, if there’s a time stories connect us, it’s now.

So on this first day of school, with the sweet scent of Vermont’s fall, with so much uncertain, I walk around this abandoned house, thinking of how time flows on. Near the step, I find a tiny plastic pig. Using the hem of my shirt, I rub dirt from the creature, then leave the toy on the broken step, hoping a child will chance upon it.