#Unstitchedbook

Sink.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Sunday morning, I took my broken sink drain pieces to the hardware, laid them on the floor, and asked for help. At some point, I realized I’d need to be an active brainstorming participant, although, let’s face it, in the scheme of things, this isn’t exactly brain surgery.

I paid my twenty bucks and headed home.

Here’s the thing — when I began screwing these puzzle pieces together, I realized I’d have to go off script again. The floor drain was epoxied together, and then spraypainted white, as added glue.

I reached in my kitchen drawer and pulled out the super glue. Will it hold? Who knows.

But here’s the more important thing, the water’s flowing. Our kitchen is humming with cooking and cleaning again.

In these dim November days, I often find myself thinking back on my life, wondering what would have happened had I gone this way, or that way. Foolish, maybe, and definitely nonproductive. And yet, like a wound, I can’t help touching that.

Light a Candle. Keep It Alive.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments
Mt. Mansfield, Vermont

My daughters’ preschools had a sweet November festival called the Lantern Walk. The little kids each made their own lantern, from a mason jar or metal or wax, and strung it through with a wire. On a dark November evening, always right about now, the families arrived, and everyone took a walk through the woods with these candlelit lanterns, singing. The metaphor was, and is, immensely appealing.

In all my daughters’ lantern walks, the route often changed. One year, the teacher led the families down a steep hill. Rural Vermont is dark, dark, dark, on these November nights. The parents whispered to each other, fence here, and watch the big root.

These November days and nights, the wood stove is again glowing in our house and the wind blows over our hillside. Like Shakespeare’s play within a play, I remember those walks as Lantern Walk within a Long Lantern Walk.

On another note, State 14 ran an excerpt of Unstitched. It’s always such a pleasure to appear in this Vermont publication.

Late Fall Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

This photo sums up November — little remainders of green, intermittent mud, and a long road ahead. It’s not all bad news, for sure. November twilights are the loveliest — pale blue and blood red.

On Anne Sexton’s birthday, a line from this poet: “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” 

What could be better advice for November?

Planting Bulbs…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On this frosty November morning, a few lines from Rebecca Solnit’s newest book:

To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”

Woodbury, Vermont

Brief Pause. Sunrise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Driving into Greensboro this morning, I pull over at the lake. The mist is suffused with crimson from the rising sun. I have the odd sensation I’m walking in an Impressionist painting, shot-through with sunlight and wet, rising dew. A pink bird dips into the water, and I hurry along the frozen shore, wondering at this odd creature.

The bird is a common, ordinary seagull, floating along in this morning, just like me. Thursday morning.

The bottoms of my shoes

are clean

from walking in the rain.”

— Jack Kerouac

Late Autumn. Tamarack Gold. Rain.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Here’s where we are in the world of tender gold tamarack needles and cold mud.

For two nights, I got up and read Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child, unable to leave that world, needing to know how Elliott ended her book. I won’t reveal that. But here’s a few lines worth an extra mention:

“The world ‘understand’ comes from Old English — understandan. Literally, it means ‘to stand in the midst of.’ It does not mean we have reached some ultimate truth. It means, to my mind, that we have experienced enough of something new, something formerly unseen, to be provoked, humbled, awakened, or even changed by it.”

These words ring true for me in my own writing and, I’ll add, my experience of parenting. Elliott goes on to write, “Almost nothing counts more than the person who shows up.”

Here’s hoping you’re all weathering the weather wherever you are.