Vermont

Authenticity.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

With a stranger, I have a passing conversation regarding a documentary about Gabor Maté. My father recommended the documentary. I originally pointed my father in the direction of Maté when I picked up In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in a house where my daughters were catsitting. And so it goes…

This stranger, too, has coincidentally just seen the documentary. We’re standing outside the post office, talking, the afternoon sun bright in our eyes. The documentary is about drama and authenticity. I ramble on about authenticity, how I once considered an authentic life something like enjoying cheese, whether it was artisan cheese or Velveeta, just really leaning into life. What an utterly superficial understanding of authenticity, I muse.

What about doubt? What about fear?

This morning, fog lies in the valley, forerunner of fall. Authentic as all get-out.

“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.” 

― Jane Hirshfield

A Thousand Things. Summer Moments.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

On my way home from work, I stop in to visit a small building just recently finished. Inside, the room smells of freshly cut cedar. The visit is a pleasure, with a building well-designed and completed. Its owners will take joy here, that’s nearly certain.

I’m at the far end of the lake, and so I take the long way home over dirt roads. I make one more stop, where someone I knew years ago has finally begun building a long-planned retirement house. Building is both fast and slow these days — a craze to build and a shortage of materials. There’s no one at this site, and I stand for bit, admiring the view of the Black River valley. I hope this place gives the owners their share of joy, too.

Where I work now is the town where I spent so much of my daughters’ childhood summer days, swimming and hiking. There was plenty of joy in all those things, too. The afternoon is redolent with humidity, exactly as I remember in my childhood.

In this steamy afternoon, I have a little pocket of time before an evening meeting. In my garden, I pick two zucchini, some lettuce that’s gone to sour, and a red coin onion. My garden grows as tall as my shoulders, more wild than not. A light rain patters down. I weed a little.

A thousand things I’ve done today. Or nearly a thousand. In this little moment, I let my own racing mind go. The snails have gotten into the lettuce. I lift one and then, gently, set it back down again.

Let it eat on, I think. I’ve plenty to spare. Don’t be greedy, I admonish myself.

Saturday. Stories.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In the classic scenario of Saturday plans waylaid, I end up driving here and there this morning, for errands that may or may not make any difference at all. That seems to be where we are these days — maybe, maybe not.

July has warmed, and I work on the back deck, in the shade of our table umbrella, drinking cold coffee.

An acquaintance I haven’t seen in a while stops by. We stand in the shade of my house, talking. He found my book in a yard shade and bought it. Then he tells me his own story of drinking and how he rose up against it. I’d known a few strands of this story, little bits, here and there, that he’d freely given me before. But his telling and my listening slips me back into that sacred space of stories. The telling. The listening. Nothing maybe about that at all.

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

— Graham Greene

Mid-July.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Rain falls again this morning, in this summer of such growth. Yesterday afternoon, between work and evening Selectboard meeting, I wandered in my garden, discovering calendula blooming in the zucchini. This morning, drinking coffee before I head off again, I add to my list. Oh, the list, and how it pales against this fragrant rain and those rose blossoms battling the Japanese beetles.

I’ve lived in New England for nearly all my life, and July is the month that renews my love of this place. Orange tiger lilies, pink cosmos, crimson currents.

All around me, the world stretches and tugs. My daughter grows up. The cats age. I work and spend. The planet spins inexorably on a course all of its own. But July is the month that reminds me the world is far, far larger than my own tiny house and acreage, my own dear family, that the world around me teems with life and thwarted longing and sometimes fulfillment, too.

The neighbors’ boys pedal up and down our dead-end street for hours, learning to ride their bikes, persistent as heck. Determined to master this skill.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention. 

― Jane Hirshfield

The Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments
Barr Hill, Greensboro, Vermont

I take a hurried walk on Nature Conservancy land in a slot of time between working hours and a planning commission meeting. I duck beneath the electric fence and wander up an old farm road and discover the most enchanting sight I’ve seen in a long time.

Bright blue forget-me-nots sprinkle the unmown road. Heifers graze in pasture on the other side of enormous sugar maples. The pasture glows amber in the late afternoon, humid light. It’s cool enough this afternoon that I’ve pulled on jeans beneath my dress, and my sandals have been switched for hiking boots. The woods are deep and lush.

This is Wallace Stegner land. He loved this Vermont town and lies buried in a town cemetery on the other side of the lake. As I walk, I’m reminded of his famous lines.

“We simply need that wild country available to us…. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

~ Wallace Stegner


This space of wildness wraps all around where I live, winding in and around these Vermont towns. Mighty — these trees and fields — but just as dear are these tiny blossoms, sprinkled all through the forest, far up in the woods where they disappear from sight.

Succor of Apple Trees.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Five years ago I sold a house with an old apple tree in the front yard. The house I bought had a young small apple tree that not even a child could climb. This morning, five years later, I climbed into the tree. The hot day is cool there, the leaves rippling in a breeze, the unripe apples hard knots.

A week of such national chaos. However your political affinities lie, the reversal of Roe V. Wade and the January 6 hearings inevitably trickle to all of us, shaking what seems like a national consciousness utterly unified, unmoored, adrift.

Hence, my apple tree. I’ll just leave this here.

“What seems real one moment is fiction the next and gone out of existence the moment after that. Nostalgia is the greatest enemy of truth, and change our only constancy.”

— David Budbill