Small Town Vermont Connections

July 31, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Rain falls heavily not long after dawn, and I close the windows, the cats in the upstairs hallway watching me silently. The rain pounds on the metal roof. Too hot to sleep in the night, too noisy now — if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

Three years divorced, I’m back in court, seeking child support — maybe just one payment? — but he’s not there. He’s elsewhere, traveling, his pockets full of under-the-table cash. In the afternoon, I’m in another Vermont county, in another courthouse, for another hearing, having worked in a library between the two, made an interview phone call on a bench beneath two enormous maple trees. Tell me about your farm program for kids and please ignore the ambulance siren whizzing down the street. Hot, hot, I’m barefoot, my hand sweating on my notebook.

In the courthouse — through a metal detector again — I wash my face in the women’s room and admire the high ceiling, the marble tiles. This courthouse — like the one in Orleans County where I’ve also been — were built with such craft, such pride, such respect and belief in law.

While rain crashes on my roof this morning, I remember that courtroom — those who are paid to be there, and those who aren’t — how desire in its myriad forms snakes through all of us. The public defender and I are introduced. A few years back, he was an attorney on a wind tower protest case involving people I knew. He doesn’t look at any of us. Instead, he gathers his files, says, That was in my other lifetime, and leaves. I’ll likely never know, but I can’t help but wonder, What’s his story?….

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention…

— Mary Oliver

Cicada Songs

July 27, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I find an empty cicada shell beneath a leaf on an oak tree I planted this spring.

That line sums up midsummer, this lush and gorgeous summer. I planted that tree from my bare root order, a mere stick with a frizz of roots. Maybe, my kids said. And yet these trees thrive.

stillness–
sinking into the rocks,
cicadas’ cry

— Basho

Molly and Fluffy

Book From the Past

July 26, 2019July 26, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Stopping by the new coffee shop in Hardwick last weekend — Front Seat Coffee — I discovered this gold-covered book which I am darn sure was The Book of my childhood. My dad actually bought this book for our house; he didn’t check it out of the library or stand in a bookstore reading it — his two main ways of gleaning information when I was a kid. He bought it and used it.

Need heating vents upstairs? Consult the book. Toilet broken? Get out the book, kids. Hot water heater on the fritz, again? Book. Move the washing machine, install a kitchen sink, put in a window or an outside door? Book, book, and book.

Inside are the classic ‘exploded view’ diagrams where my siblings and I honed our reading skills. Everything’s there, except how to smartly deal with the IRS…. a whole other lesson.

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!

— Faulkner

Thistles, Hemp, Coreopsis

July 23, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Rain moves in; the heat moves out. I get up from my desk and put on a long-sleeved shirt. My older daughter and I — just the two of us — make pesto and spread it over a pizza with broccoli she slices. She looks at the pizza before she bakes it and says, Garden pizza.

Swimming holds no appeal. Instead, in the evening, we walk up a long dirt road heading out of Hardwick. I follow her into an overgrown pasture. She hands me her phone and has me photograph her in a field of Scottish thistles. She wades shoulder-deep into the prickles and purple flowers, and the memory of traipsing through forests and meadows behind her as a girl child returns to me. Those summers she and her best friends were obsessed with false hellebore as an ingredient for soup-making in her outdoor kitchen. Don’t mind the snails, she tells me. Let’s keep going.

As here’s a few lines from Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound I kept thinking about, as I drove to Middlebury on back roads, wondering if all these new fields of hemp might positively help to reshape Vermont’s economy….

A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members. This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered. A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy.

Cultivated and wild in my garden. Photo by Molly S.

Single Summer Moment

July 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont midsummer in all its glorious stickiness. The towns empty out but for the perpetual delivery trucks and cars with canoes and kayaks on their roofs. In the post office Saturday morning, the buzz is Where are you swimming today? Where’s your spot?

In the late afternoon, we swim at Number 10 Pond, leaving our picnic and sandals on the rocky shore and swimming far out. A smattering of pollen covers the glassine surface.

I linger long in the water while my daughters laugh on shore, taking photos. Before we leave, I click a photo of my girls, too. For a brief moment, looking at this image, I realize even my youngest is just about grown up, too. Someday, I’ll look back and think, Good swimming that day.

At home, before a few sprinkles of rain, the girls pick peas for a snack. I weed and weed. The sun golds are ripe.

stream in summertime—
this joy of wading across
with sandals in hand

— Buson

Calais, Vermont, 2019

Teen Dreaming

July 20, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

What’s up with the lilies in Vermont this summer? Even my kids noticed they’re crazy tall — like an advancing army of flowers, about the coolest thing imaginable, in a summer that’s turning not so temperate.

Now fully a teenager, my 14-year-old is not a street-legal driver, which in rural Vermont makes a real difference. She and her friends have their eyes on the road, anxious to spread beyond this small town.

Summer to her now seems interminable; I remember that sense as a small town girl myself, as though the hot days would just keep appearing, one after another. While I’m at work, I leave her alone for long periods of time, with two cats and a list of chores and the freedom to do what she wants, within these physical confines. I don’t know if that’s wise or not — but at the very least it gives her the space to imagine….

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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