Thanks and All That

November 28, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s one (not particularly recommended) way to approach a holiday meal: a couple of years ago, I had a harvest lunch/Thanksgiving meal at my daughter’s nice elementary school. Afterward, an older student read a story aloud about, naturally, the original Thanksgiving. At the end, the child read the last page, an addendum likely tacked on, of historic American dates. That’s when I should have just quietly walked out. From there on, as the girl read in her clear, sweet voice, in that sunny room filled with such decent and well-meaning people, I sat there brooding, History is a brutal business.

And yet.

Last night, the too-warm winds of this too-warm November blowing grit in our eyes and mouths, my daughters and brother and I stood beneath the full moon in her radiant splendor. The moonlight flowed so rich and bright that it pooled in reflections around the house: in a pile of windows, a car’s hubcap, the neighbors’ house distantly through the leafless forest.

At times, I remind myself to assess my strengths, get a read on my bearings. There’s no quibbling history is a nasty and bloody story, but this same ethereal moon outdistances the human saga, this heavenly body present for those famous Pilgrims, and long, long, long before that, too.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

– Rebecca Solnit

Montpelier, Vermont/photo by Molly S.

Deja Vu

November 24, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My younger daughter told me a story last night of a dream she had years ago where a stranger appeared. Months later, she was studying someone she had just met, and she realized that man was the stranger. How was that? she asked. My dream was the past and the future….. She was mesmerized.

Today, the first of the snow, just a sprinkle, like a white variation of the cinnamon I spilled over my sweater at the co-op this afternoon. The first of the snow signals the settling in of the long, long season, and yet, the first flakes are always breathtaking, always brief and fleeting, and always stunningly lovely. It’s that same deja vu, back in the beginning of winter again, the days dim and short, the children bickering or not bickering, the hearth glowing….

The boy and the dog
Stand in stillness on the waiting road.
Night’s embrace cloaks them in darkness
no less than invisibility.
They face north
And feel the first cobweb kiss of snowflakes
Borne on feathered air.
He will always remember this;
The boy, with his dog,
Standing there.

Nomad Omnia

Photo by Molly S.

Earthworks

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Venturing into unfamiliar territory today, the girls and I unexpectedly found ourselves on Horn of the Moon Road, and then crossed the dam at Wrightsville Reservoir. One of the beauties of living in Vermont is there’s often no one else around, so we simply stopped, abandoned the car, and walked along the narrow road, each side sloping steeply, covered with rocks.

My older daughter and I reminisced about when the reservoir had been nearly drained empty, and, conversely, when the water level had risen so high that trash lingered in the treetops for months.

On this giant earthwork, we were amazed at the work man’s hands have done, so much sod and rock moving, the immense depths of concrete and steel. What a different view of water today. All summer, my daughters and I have swam and canoed in clear lakes and remote ponds, and then today: the rugged vision of men enacted on the land. Tonight, reading van Gogh’s inimitable letters, I remembered how much van Gogh taught me as a writer: to look, and look, and not to be afraid to take in everything. More pieces of the evolving puzzle.

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

— Vincent van Gogh

Montpelier, Vermont

November 2015

November 17, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont Public Radio and my teenager and so many questions, questions: what does this mean? Why did this happen? So many questions and I have no answers, merely: think of this bit of information, and that geography matters, history matters, that anger and desire and fury and bitterness matter.

I slid potatoes and squash in the oven and stepped outside for firewood. With the sun going down, the air had abruptly cooled. My younger daughter and the neighbor child were in the darkening woods, laughing. Overhead, the clouds parted over the crescent moon, and then concealed this heavenly beauty. Unseen, geese honked their mournful journey, away.

Between our two lives
there is also the life of
the cherry blossom.

— Basho

Sunday

November 16, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My children and I were never church-going people, although the enormous quantity of churches in Vermont mark our bearings. We’ve spent hours on ecumenical lawns, from the nursing and changing diapers days, to a safe place for toddlers to stretch their legs on the long syrup delivery routes I used to drive. Years ago, I was lost in Addison County, with a starving four-year-old in the backseat. I handed her the Gazetteer and told her to read the map. Hidden behind the upside Gazetteer, she informed me: Mommy, we’re lost. Go backwards.

We weren’t lost today, in our own little town, at the old church with its doors folded up like hands over a face. These old relics are beautiful and enduring, quietly going about their business, present for need, reflecting those admirable yankee qualities.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –
I keep it, staying at Home –
With a Bobolink for a Chorister –
And an Orchard, for a Dome –

— Emily Dickinson

South Woodbury, Vermont

The Gloaming

November 14, 2015November 14, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

At this point in my life, some things I can easily do – create a meal from a handful of ingredients and a hopeful smile. Here, I think, the making of this is enough. I can passably braid a child’s hair, weed a vegetable bed, paint a wall, read a novel, stack wood. All these, at varying points of my life, I put real thought and energy into accomplishing.

I’m sometimes tagged as a writer who has a “sense of place” – a phrase I’ve more or less taken for granted. Sure, I have a feel for Vermont, a love for my state, and I’ve shed my share of sweat and blood in agriculture. But the longer I remain in one place, the greater my love of this place deepens in complexity. My garden this year was infested with cabbage root maggots; the brassica seedlings I planted withered within a week of planting. A year ago, I had 80 kale plants; this year, none.

The dynamic, however, is one of the key beauties of this place. Working outside in the dusk, my daughter and I stacked wood this afternoon. The twilight inched in, shade by shade, taking its own sweet time. So much of American life exhorts homogeny: the same food chains, grocery and hardware stores, clothes and electronics, even the same education for our children. To love a place deeply demands knowing that place in all its vicissitudes, even the raw dark of rainy November or the frost that might have stomped in early and quashed your cucumbers. As my child and I lingered in the gloaming, I reminded myself that these in-between places are fertile, too, imbued with mystery.

“In the Gloaming” by Meta Orred