travel

Very Far From Diaper Land

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughters carry the kayaks through a cluster of serious party-goers — then we’re off, into the kind of pristine wildness so easy to find in Vermont.

At one end of the pond, we drift. The youngest jumps from her kayak and swims off. I leave my kayak on a rock and float on my back, staring up into the clouds. A loon calls.

It’s taken me just about forever to reach this place of parenting, a family life with a kind of togetherness where the girls load up the kayaks while I chat with a young mother about the fish hook she found on the beach.

This sentiment is pure August — like these mornings where the mist lies in the valley again, a harbinger of winter fooling no one.

We are everything, every experience we’ve ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don’t even began to touch upon it. There’s an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

— Ruth Stone

IMG_6245.jpg

 

Growing Girls

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hurray! Youngest child returns from summer camp, tanned and happy — but slightly different, altered, a little older and knowing she’s older without an edgy kind of teenagerness….. She’s grown, simple as that. In the Vermont woods and on a lake, without her family around.

On the way home, her older sister wades into a field of wildflowers.

Weaving back and forth
Through the lines of wheat
A butterfly

— Sora

IMG_6235.jpg

Small Town Vermont Connections

/ 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

IMG_6181.jpg

 

Cicada Songs

/ 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

IMG_6139

Molly and Fluffy

Book From the Past

/ 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

IMG_6132.jpg

 

Thistles, Hemp, Coreopsis

/ 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.

IMG_4632.jpg

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