#Vermontautumn

Find

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My running route leads me into the woods behind the town’s community gardens, through a path flanked by frost-nipped goldenrod. A hundred years ago, the town’s granite industry spread over that field. Just before I cross a wooden bridge into the forest, I always pause at a historic sign marking where an industrial building once stood.

Really? I think. Only dog walkers and I, an occasional kid fishing, wander along there now.

My route follows the former railroad bed, its tracks ripped up for scrap metal in WWII. Yesterday, just over the bridge, I see the rain and erosion have revealed a chunk of granite, about the size of a library book, the number 12 marked on it.

Whose hands printed that? And with what indelible ink? I tried to pry the rock up and carry it away. The rock was determined to remain — for a while longer, at least.

An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.

— Anna Swir

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Scarlet and Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On my way to pick up my daughter from soccer practice, I leave early and take a walk behind the community gardens, where the wildness of Woodbury Mountain meets the edge of town.

All day, rain has drenched us, and the scent of broken leaf and dogshit and the hummusy, earthy fragrance of wet soil mixes. There’s no one here, in the woods where I’m sheltered somewhat from the downpour, walking among the giant pieces of granite — debris from the town’s former claim-to-fame industry — among the brushy goldenrod, asters, and burdock.

The thing about Vermont foliage — every year — is that I expect the season to be done, finished, dulled to gray, over, and suddenly the red appears. Silently, stunning, often brought out in its finest with a cold rain.

Every year, it’s the same nostalgic sensation — I’m a third-grader again, walking home from school, scuffling through knee-high piles of leaves, happy to be free from the classroom and play outside all afternoon. Every year, the season change is tinged with sadness at the passing of time, and yet, silently, fiercely, beautiful.

In a handful of seasons,
water and cold and dirt

get under the paint and it falls
from our houses like old bark.

— Kerrin McCadden

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If There Was Only One Leaf…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

This sunny, gorgeous weekend was a high school ritual completely unfamiliar to me — the fall rites of Homecoming. The girls’ varsity soccer team played first, followed by the boys. One boy — young man, really, on the cusp of adulthood — arrived with a couch in the back of his pickup. His teammates promptly carried it out and set up living room cheering quarters at the far end of the field.

Unlike the high school I attended (way back sometime in the 20th century), there’s no cheerleaders. The boys pull their weight in playing and cheering — and the girls do, too.

Near the end of this long afternoon of playing, a tiny girl in a polka-dot coat wandered over to keep my older daughter and I company. She picked up a crumpled leaf from the grass and handed it to me, full of wonder.

Happiness… even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

 

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Pregame visit with cat.

 

 

 

 

 

Coyote Calling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

October already, again, the fall has bent around again, and before long, snow will fall again. What will we do? The same things, I suppose, we always do. Boil beans and onions and chilis for soup, keep the house warm, lace up the ski boots and slide over the fields.

At our old house, further along in the autumn, we’d walk down to the bus stop in the dark. The girls and I would listen to coyotes howling in the hills. Here, in town, we’ve heard coyotes, but rarely. It’s foxes we see here.

My daughter returns home from school enchanted with learning French, dreaming of distant lands. She has her summer tan yet, her hair sun-bleached.  She’s dreaming of her driver’s license, of flying to Africa, stuffing her backpack and hiking the French Alps…..

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

— Tom Hennen

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Listening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Two parents once came up to me after a school board meeting and thanked me profusely. They felt so much better. At the time, I thought I hadn’t done anything. No decision had been made. But I had done something. I had simply let them talk; I listened; I empathized.

Recently, I emailed my former neighbors — rabidly, on the attack — and asked how dare they employ my ex-husband? How dare they pay him cash when he hasn’t paid child support in years? I expected my former neighbors to be defensive and angry, but, instead, the email I received back was kind and thoughtful and incredibly insightful. They’ll likely keep employing him, but at that point, I didn’t even care. Their empathy for me had opened up my heart to be empathetic for their plight, too.

What makes me remember this on a breezy autumn is maybe nothing but my own unhappiness about the adult world, both in general and in particular. Recently, I realized with the work I’m doing now, I could actually pack up and take a geographical cure from my immediate adult world, head somewhere else to work for the next four months. Like, perhaps, a desert cave.

Bad idea, I think. Those former neighbors and I have finally made our peace, and this one is likely to be lasting.

On a withered branch
A crow has alighted:
Nightfall in autumn

— Basho

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End of September

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To counteract this seasonal shift from summer to autumn’s short days, I take the cleaver to gardenstuff — a carrot, a leek, an onion, garlic, parsley — and stew them with lentils and salt. Lentils, once the bane of our household (not lentils, again?). The younger daughter, still in her sweaty soccer practice shirt, eats hungrily.

Her older sister takes a knife to apples, listens to Stephen Colbert, rolls out dough. Pie, at least: it’s autumn.

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