#Vermontsummer

This Annual Fête

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

When I was just out of graduate school, I taught middle school kids for two years in a program where another tutor rubbed me wrong. She was forty and supremely confident; she and her husband had made what was likely a ton of money on Wall Street and now lived in Vermont. She laughed that they had spent $100K renovating a bathroom — more than I later paid for a house and 100 acres.

At the Memorial Day Parade, I met her family, with their two little boys. I was childless then, and longing for a baby. She had a dog on a leash. One son had contracted E. coli.  The deal was, she said, I told him we would get a dog if he didn’t die. So, we got a dog.

Part of me wishes I could ruefully look back at my younger, snarlier self (who cares how much someone spends on a bathroom, anyway?) with humor and lightness. But really, the crotchety side of me is immediately recognizable — if anything, ground deeper, more articulate, wiser for the wear.

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Ides of August, Buying Gas

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Stopping to buy gas late in the evening, I walk into D&L and immediately stop: the familiar clerk is mopping the floor. It’s so muggy, even long past dark, that he holds the back of his wrist to his sweating forehead.

Go ahead, he tells me. Walk on it. And he crosses the wet tile floor himself.

We talk a little about this hot, sultry summer, now winding down. Already, I’m waking in the dark, turning on the light over the kitchen sink to feed the mewling cats.

In this liquor and gas station on the edge of town, the clerks are sharp-eyed, scanning the crowd, but this evening, it’s just him and I. He leans on his mop handle, nearly finished with his day’s shift, nearly closing time.

I mention that six months from now, in lightless January, I’m going to be complaining to him about the subzero cold.

He laughs out loud. Oh, boy, I can’t wait.

Outside, the gas station lights are an illuminated bubble in the surrounding darkness. Most people sleep at night in this little town. I’m sure there’s mothers and fathers awake with crying babies, the heartsick or troubled who wander their dim rooms, drug users or simply those who are sleepless. The crickets whirr their song, this still night, with not even any passing-through traffic. August: season of t-shirts and sandals, and, this morning, rain sweetly falling.

The Chinese junk
not stopping
moving on through the mist

— Buson

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A Postcard From Vermont…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. might include a redwing blackbird suddenly rising from the stream behind the post office as you emerge from the weed-lined path with your brass key. The bird’s feathers hold the hue of burned-out embers.

Or a crumpled Bud Lite can propped neatly against the cinder blocks of the building’s foundation.

Or maybe cows crossing the road as you’re waiting behind a trash truck, the girls tossing cherry pits out the open windows.

Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.

— Anne Sexton

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Hardwick, Vermont

These Unbroken Days

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Nearly July, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had sun — an apt metaphor for life, I suppose.

Early this morning when the sun spread its inimitable crimson across the horizon, and the cats stepped on my hands, reminding me gently of their hunger, I lay listening to the birds and thinking how wrong I was to envision my life as pieces — work for these hours, sandwich in volleyball, the endless litany of email, handfuls of garlic scapes I picked from the garden, hanging laundry on the line.

Our lives — my daughters’ and mine, the others around us — flow as one stream, sometimes turbulent, sometimes sweet as a June rose petal.

I’m folding up the laptop for a few days, in this summer melody.

 According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed…. while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world…

— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders

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/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

To water or not to water?

The Vermont gardener question.

With my sandy soil, I’m watering — a showery hymn to growth.

One of the hottest and driest places I’ve ever been is Utah’s Hovenweep. A few years ago, my daughters and I spent one eternally long August afternoon beneath an aluminum picnic shelter, watching the sky. Thunderheads moved majestically slowly, then veered away, taking their rain — if they ever shed it — elsewhere.

Here in Vermont, we’re hardly parched. And yet, water, water…..

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust…
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

— Marge Piercy, “To Be of Use”

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Why Love Teens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my older daughter was a teen and invited over a posse of girls, I was always amazed by just the size of the girls — so much young female energy and just so much talk! They eat like crazy — and then eat like crazy again — but they’re just so darn enthusiastic, just so darn happy to be testing out the world.

Last night at our house, the six young teens, buoyed by a balmy early summer evening, slept outside. Why not? Under the stars, I could see my breath.

On the same day, the neighbors’ celebrated their four-year-old’s birthday. In the afternoon, he began riding a bicycle with training wheels. When my teens eat and eat, when I’m mired down in the complexities of living with teens, I remind myself that those sweet sippy cup days have now passed me by.

Tired, the girls struggled in bedraggled in the morning, hungry for waffles.

I emerge
from the museum
at dusk —
the blue Nile
floods over.

— Fumi Saitō

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