Break That Cliche: Writing Lesson from the Kids

May 13, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My ten-year-old came downstairs the other morning dressed in shorts although it was only 39 degrees. No. I immediately said. But it might warm up, she insisted.

In this afternoon’s rain, the kids have headed down the road to the neighbors’ trampoline because it’s fun in the rain, apparently, even in a cold May rain.

These Vermont kids, like the unfurling leaves in my apple trees, are vigorously unstoppable with their own flowing sap. At ten and eleven, the world is as new to them as this magnificently unfolding spring. Lacking rigid expectations, why not leap in the rain? – Although I did notice the girls had the foresight to pull on extra pairs of socks.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.

– Federico Garcia Lorca

Vermont dusk

Prayer for A Little More Kindness

May 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest kids shared their work and ended singing a country western song together. I’m no particular fan of country western, but listening to these small kids sing, I realized this song was really a hymn, a prayer for children to retain their sweet and noble natures.

The share had begun with stories the children had written, envisioning their grownup lives, but the song took the children’s stories to a different dimension, mixing qualities of the heart with their written projects. Maybe some of these kids will never remember this song, but my guess is more than a few someday, in the midst of their own unexpected (and hopefully marvelous) adult lives, will remember singing in their kindergarten classroom with real fondness.

Am I still kind? Humble? Do I yet have the better part of who I am? Then again, maybe this song is really an adult prayer.

…When it’s hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Always stay humble and kind
Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you…

– Tim McGraw, “Humble and Kind”

Photo by Molly S.

Commune Scene

May 11, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Green, green, green! Last night, reading about Vermont’s commune scene in the 1970s, I had to laugh about hippies coming to Vermont in the glory of summer, and then finding winter a different reality altogether. In a Vermont spring, every day, the black earth yields violet, buttery gold, emerald green.

Working in the garden in the late afternoon, I can fully imagine the hippie joy at this green paradise. Come the snowy season, though, and the idealism must have quickly faded. Having written a book about Vermont and youthful idealism, having given my own blood to this black and sometimes cold earth, on a day like today, Vermont is well worth enduring the stay. Today, I can pass on the Huck Finn advice.

(The back-to-the-landers of the 1970s) were acting, in part, on a characteristically American assumption that if things get bad where we are – too hectic, too dangerous, too messy – we can simply decamp to a new frontier and start again, that all we need to begin a new venture or even create a new society is a new piece of land.

– Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

Woodbury, Vermont

Weeding

May 8, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I’ve barely begun planting the garden, wilderness has taken hold of this ground. This afternoon, with my weeding tool and hands, I dug in hard. The younger daughter came to see if asparagus tips had emerged, then wandered away. On this Saturday afternoon, I listened to the frogs rocking out in the hidden woodland pond.

Maybe this reclamation via weeding should be a battle. But it’s not. Surrounded by woods, the wilderness spreads into my garden through an infinity of ways, in a weed I can’t name, a wildflower I’ve never seen. Every year, my obscure patch of this earth surges with life – the geese winging overhead, the peepers’ chorus, ten thousand variations of green that shift and mutate daily. Not so long ago, I planted a garden with my baby cooing sweetly, laid on her back on a blanket spread beneath an apple tree, her bare toes stretching out toward the sun. This earth is so much larger then me and mine, and that knowledge is as steady as the tool in my hand, a knowledge to take comfort in.

When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.

– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

my garden/Woodbury, Vermont

This Old House

May 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

For years, I’ve been buying my daughters creemees in the summer and admiring a small, terribly neglected house across the road. With an exterior of stained glass windows and ornate eaves, I imagine the inside has extraordinary woodwork. Surrounded by too many power lines, lived in by a series of renters, the house appears unkempt and ill-loved, the modern world grown up around it.

As a writer, I’ve looked at innumerable houses, and this little house seems hard-pressed for a good future, too near the road as it is, too near a river that floods, too not wanted… and yet, I’d love to walk through these rooms. I’d love to know who once lived here. With that riverbed soil, I imagine someone tended a burgeoning garden.

The grammar of shape is innately understood. Unlike speech, it is visible in plants and animals everywhere. The intuitive design process gives access to that knowledge. You do not work at design, you play at it.

– Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing

Hardwick, Vermont

Old Receipts & Agriculture

May 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Unraveling a long trail of receipts today, I realized how poorly that paper trail tells our story. How can an equipment receipt for nine thousand dollars illustrate what those nine thousand dollars really cost our family? How many gallons of syrup I poured, steaming, from a three-gallon stainless steel pail into a giant barrel? With a baby on my back, I was always steeled to keep those tiny fingers from the golden flow of scalding maple syrup. How many of my fellow female sugarmakers, sweaty and beleaguered, have labored in sugarhouses, filled with curling smoke and steam, little ones on their backs?

How can any living, creative endeavor at all be measured in those figures?

This + this = that?

Certainly, our children cannot. A puzzle piece, neither more, nor less.