Vermont

Use What’s At Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We are no longer in the gardening season, no longer in the season of growth and warm days, of the earth turning green. October heralds the season of decay, of stillness and quiet, broken not by songbirds but the geese winging their way south. Weeding once, with someone else, he suggested laying the handfuls of weeds over the living ones, as a smothering mulch. Use what’s at hand.

That phrase comes back to me, in this season of pulling up a garden, ending one thing, and entering this other season. It’s a way of looking at the world where one thing morphs into another, where this as plague becomes that as assistance. It’s a way of looking at compost as life, at your weakness as truly your strength.

I thought I knew about all that (loss) when my first wife, Jackie, died of cancer… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in love; I’m not sure I believe in anything. But, looking at these radiant canvasses (of Vermeer)–unreachable yet familiar–reminds me. The rapturous inner life of each woman and the infinitesimally detailed and self-contained life of the street are each imagined as an undiscovered heaven on earth…

–– Michael White, Travels in Vermeer

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Photo by Molly S.

Shine On

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The before-school mornings have now turned intractably toward dark, the air nippy at the bus stop. My older daughter argues against going to school. The truth is, I hated high school, I hated middle school, I hated elementary school, I probably even hated nursery school, the whole she-bang of schooling until I hit college. I remember insufferable boredom, staring through the windows in third grade at azure autumn skies, and wanting to be in the woods. I longed for the smell of dead leaves against my face. I’m sympathetic and yet, apparently, not that sympathetic. Still, I often stew about this daughter all day.

Driving along Route 15, as it follows the Lamoille River, I glanced up where sunlight crashed through a jumble of clouds, gray and black and white, as though the weather were confused, too. The light descended in immense heavenly shafts. Woodbury Mountain was scattershot with gold patches, intermingled gray where the foliage has already passed. Sprawled along the river was the transfer station, that pestilent site radiantly bathed in October light.

This afternoon, my daughter was glowing when I met her at the high school. She had been charged with a particularly difficult task, and there was no way she was getting out of this assignment. She sensed a real challenge, but one she could tackle, too, with no escape hatch, no back door possibility of complaining enough to me so I’d cut her slack and let her off the hook.

Buckling in for the drive home, she relayed with real joy a compliment she had been given. I, she said, am a shining star.

(My daughter) was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go.

— Justin Cronin, “My Daughter and God”

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October. Woodbury, Vermont

Fall Hiking

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In this yellow autumn, the girls and I hiked down through Sterling Gorge, a short hike above water tumbling through the narrow cut of rocks. At the trail’s bottom, the stream evened out, and sunlight dappled through leaves. The hike down had been chilly and somewhat dark, shadowed by hemlocks, but the spit of gravelly sand along the stream was light-filled. I had woken that morning feeling as though I had fallen down a flight of stairs, the bones in my back and hips mere pieces strung together with the jangling cord of my vertebrae.

I lay on a fallen birch log and watched sunlight flash in shapes over the running stream, thinking how we’re all just bits and pieces of bodies, water, sparkling sunlight, gritty sand, my own bones and flesh and flowing blood, ever moving, shapeshifting, evolving, turning from this to that.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

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Woodbury, Vermont

The Fallow Season

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After work today, I walked around the farm fields at the bottom of our road, a carpooling place from years ago. I have a photo of my younger daughter when she was three, running with a friend over enormous white-plastic-wrapped bales of hay, in sheer summertime joy. The field’s fallow now, a great swath of black earth opened up, studded with thistles and stones, emptied of visible life. Even the cartwheeling crows have abandoned these fields. The summer’s radiance has been driven over by the denser hues of gray and black, autumn’s burst of foliage nothing but a splash before winter hammers its solid pins in.

I, for one, welcome in the fallow season, craving a chunk of stillness, wishing the frothy madness of the world (from local gossip to national news) to keep at bay for a bit – or at least a weekend.

Walking with my neighbor this afternoon, we speculated that a brown shape in the dirt road ahead of us was a cluster of fallen leaves, but as we approached, the shape lifted with small wings, and then flew nearby: a wood thrush, quietly keeping us company, swooping nearby and then flickering away into the woods, among the falling leaves.

Wild creatures have the confidence
to realise it’s time for rest.
Nature regards man as a jest,
and doubts his mental competence.
All nature knows it’s for the best
to realise its time for rest.

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Kate Brook Road fields/Hardwick, Vermont

— Ivor Hogg

Early Fall Mornings, Before High School

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Early mornings, it’s dark now, the rain hammering on the lid of the LP gas tank outside the bedroom window. My older daughter slumps at the kitchen table and complains about the dark, the cold elbowing in, summer now fully escorted out the door.

As gently as I can, I tell her, It’s nothing personal.

I took that nothing personal line from her, the very line I’m turning back as mirror on her. After one angry tirade at me, she said very genuinely, It’s nothing personal, mom. I’m just telling you. Don’t be upset.

And so, with a real feeling of lightness, I said to her, That’s just the way the world is.

And our day went well.

To have to carry your own corn far–
who likes it?
To follow the black bear through the thicket–
who likes it?
To hunt without profit, to return weary without anything–
who likes it?
You have to carry your own corn far.
You have to follow the black bear.
You have to hunt to no profit…

“Song of Speaks-Fluently,” in Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America

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Bridge Over the Abyss, With Baby

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Today, in a grassy field, with sunlight everywhere and school children running around, another parent told me about a long bridge he had frequently crossed as a young man, and how at times he had been afraid of that bridge. Today was so quintessentially Vermont, with a hike through the woods behind the school, little kids and big kids, just fifty in all. The grass was warm, and my daughter and I ate wild apples we had picked the evening before.

The parent’s description was entirely metaphorical – he had now progressed far enough into his life, over that halfway point, that he felt darn certain if the Subaru went over the bridge, he and the kids would pull through.

Listening, I remembered when my older daughter was one, a baby chewing on a stuffed rabbit, and I was driving down the Vermont interstate to visit my parents in New Hampshire. I was driving a beat-up red Toyota pickup too big for me, and I wasn’t able to fasten the safety belt as I sat so far forward to reach the clutch. At highway speed, I approached a long bridge spanning the White River. By chance, I happened to see the bridge in just a certain way, at great speed, and I saw how enormously high was the bridge over the river far down below in the valley.

I had a sudden fear that I absolutely could not traverse such the narrow path over that abyss. I slowed and saw a highway worker along the shoulder, and I had an abrupt impulse to stop and beg this man – a complete stranger – to drive myself and my baby across that bridge.

I didn’t, of course. Somehow I knew I would have to get myself and my baby from here to there, in whatever rattletrap I was driving. Since then, I’ve driven both daughters over many bridges, through all kinds of snowstorms, and once through a terrible ice storm, and I’ve always ferried them safely home.

But like my parent companion today, I often see that abyss beneath us, an intimation of our own morality, and yet I press on. As I drove over that bridge on my fearful day, however, I slowed more than perhaps was prudent on an interstate, and I steeled myself to peer over the guard rails. Far down, in the same tenor of autumn sunlight I sat in today, the bend of river glowed like gems.

Albert Camus wrote a novel, The Stranger, in which his character, Meursault, is condemned to death. Three days before his execution, he is able for the first time in his life to touch the blue sky. He is in his cell. He is looking at the ceiling. He discovers a square of blue sky appearing through the skylight. Strangely enough, a man forty years of age is able to see the blue sky for the first time. Of course, he had looked at the stars and the blue sky more than once before, but this time it was for real. We might not know how to touch the blue sky in such a profound way. The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life.

–– Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love

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Tomatoes on the Way Out/Photo by Molly S.