Digging Deeply, Vermont Cold Soil

October 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Returning home in the dark, much later in the night than we usually do, my 19-year-old grabs her camera and insists on walking through the dark. She wants a picture of the little white lights she sees from her window at night — where, she’s not exactly sure.

All afternoon, we’ve been in and out of the house and barn in the thin autumn sunlight, shoveling compost and carrying buckets of potatoes and beets. The 13-year-old and I played soccer in bare feet on the cool grass. The 19-year-old baked a cake. Her younger sister gave her curious cat a bath in the kitchen sink.

Like many people I know, my life is jammed with scrawled lists, with dates on the calendar, with attention given to work and money and house and cars — with gardening, with worrying about kids, seeing friends, making sure my desk has a pile of library books. Much of this is pleasant and joy-giving, and some of it — particularly the middle-of-the-night angst of what the hell am I doing with my mortal life — just erodes your soul.

As an antidote, simply this.

In the late afternoon, I snap off kale leaves. Overhead, geese honk — eight birds, followed by five more — calling, arranging themselves in flight, flying so low I hear the whoosh of their wings, as they press on their journey, south and away.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Driving, Dancing, Sometime in October

October 19, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The past few days — as though the deepest part of winter has set in early — I come and go in the dark, leaving early while my daughters are sleeping. When I return, I step out of my car and stand for a moment and gaze up at the inky sky, with that sprawling morass of glittering stars.

To break up the interstate’s monotony, I take Route 2 back to Montpelier from working in Burlington. Blue highway Route 2 follows the Winooski River — native name for wild onion — and cuts through small towns and sprawling farm fields. The corn fields, harvested for the year, are harrowed up, open earth against the mountains shouldering this river valley. Autumn opens up the landscape, sheds the leaves from the trees, and reveals more clearly where we are.

Where we are is the first scattering of snow on the ground yesterday morning. Soup simmering on the stove with what I’ve pulled from the garden — carrots, sage, beans, kale. Driving home, I switch off NPR and empty my mind of the day’s talk at work, of midterms and opioid use, of struggling to use writing to make sense of the world.

In our kitchen, my 19-year-old cooks bacon. I ask how the day’s gone. She says her ears are throbbing. The 13-year-olds had a dance party.

Rock on, I think. I close the curtains and ask if the chickens are shut in for the night.

We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree…
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

— Jane Kenyon, “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”

October Gardening

October 13, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the garden this late afternoon, a slow-moving bumblebee sways on a Mexican sunflower blossom tucked beneath a great sunflower leaf, its tender orange spared from frost. With a knife, I cut broccoli.

Every bit of sunlight we can get, I take — and urge my daughters to take, too.

The trees are throwing their leaves away. This time of year, some trees hold green canopies, while others have already emptied their branches.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky —
the moon seals it.

— Buson

Gabriela, Wheelbarrow

Beautiful Travels

October 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Reading Daniel Mason’s new novel, The Winter Solider, I’m reminded of first reading Russian novels — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev — when I was a teenager. How hungry I was for those books — what will these characters do? — in their snow-buried landscapes. Tender green shoots of spring poked through the gritty ice.

This reading mirrors the kind of life I carved out as an adult. Live on a hundred acres of woods, work outside in all weather, pull your toddler along the backroad in the sleet, just because…. Know that where the moon rises above your house is essential. Be afraid; know that the snow and the long-toothed northern cold can and will maim and kill, but how beautiful this world is…..

They were five hours east of Debrecen when the train came to a halt before the station on the empty plain.

— Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier

Cambridge, Vermont

Vermont Dawn

October 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

It’s autumn here. Better — Vermont autumn — a landscape hordes of people drive and fly hundreds, thousands, of miles to see.

Because the world is dying down, my prolific garden beginning to crumple, autumn always seems to me the season of memory.

A memory of pulling beets and carrots in an enormous garden while my friend’s husband lay in the house, dying of skin cancer. More happily: a memory of my older daughter’s first Halloween costume, a piece of a sheet I cobbled into a baby ghost costume.

Tricia Tierney directed me to Leslie Schwartz’s The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life One Book at a Time. Late nights, I lay awake reading, thinking how glad I am not to be jail. Early one cold morning, I pull on my down jacket, a beautiful turquoise hand-me-down, now worn thin and stained at the cuffs, and follow the path behind my house, disappearing into the darkness and walking all through the sunrise, the ebony sky streaked through with endless ribbons of luminescent pink.

Schwartz writes, “Writing is survival.” Surely creative work of any kind carries us along. Like the Vermont landscape I live in, creativity has its cycles, too, my garden’s sunflowers shedding their golden petals, bending down for winter’s dormancy.

End of September? Apple Pie Season

September 29, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Every year in Vermont there’s speculation about the upcoming foliage season — will it be good…. or lousy? While the season infallibly delights — and often astonishes — we view fall foliage very personally, almost as if the quality of its splendor reflects on ourselves.

More than any other season, autumn reminds me of being a child, of picking apples in the enormous Mapadot Orchard near our house (named after Ma and Pa and Dot, of course), of the distinct, humus-y scent of fallen leaves in the maples we raked from our trees, of how fine it feels to hike in woods painted like a wildfire — crimson and gold.

Last night, my older daughter decided to bake an apple pie today.

We might live in a society where the traditions of church have dwindled to near naught, but the ritual of apple pie? Still steaming, in our house. That’s something.