Vermont Democracy

January 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Outside the town clerk’s office, a little after 8 last night, I’m talking with an another adult while the kids jump around in what feels like balminess at 14 above zero when I suddenly shout out, Look at the moon!

Ringed by a rainbow, the luminous half-moon hangs over the town clerk’s building — a former one-room schoolhouse.

Our friends head home one way, my daughter and I the other.

Woodbury, Vermont, with its population less than a 1,000 souls, has a 3-person selectboard. I’m there as the town librarian. Most of the school board is there. Members of the public. The worry is to how to retain the tiny elementary school the state seems intent to close.

The kids are not in the meeting. They’re hanging out at the clerk’s main desk, reading graphic novels, and raiding the clerk’s candy jar. They’re giggling about kid stuff that’s important to kids.

I want the kids know this version of democracy — a group of people wearing fleece and hand-knit sweaters, jammed into a tiny room, our knees bumping, some of us liking each other and some maybe not at all, but all of talking, thinking things through — what’s the wisest course of action? how do we tend the common good?

It’s the first snowfall —
When it melts again we’ll see
Dewdrops on the grass.

— Buson

Some Novels I Might Have Sadly Missed

January 13, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In a box of books my sister shipped to me years ago, I found a copy of Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up. In those pre-internet days, I didn’t realize this little gritty novel had garnered its own classic cult following. When I recommended the book to someone else who was reading Crime and Punishment, he laughed and said that would have been a good title for Dostoyevsky’s book, too.

From the fifty-cent bin in a library book sale, I pick up Joshua Mohr’s Some Things That Meant The World To Me. My 19-year-old lifts the book from the kitchen tale and mentions the cover is from “Wheel of Fortune,” which makes me ask how she’s so intimate with that game show.

My daughter reminds me she works in a nursing home.

She asks about the ink splatters on the cover below the “Wheel of Fortune” lettering — the half of the cover that made sense to me. Rorschach test I tell her, and offer a brief explanation.

I’d probably fail that test, she says, not perturbed in the least.

She bundles up, heading out for a ski. 11 below zero.

We’re all writing about the same things, we’re all trying to evoke emotion. How are you going to find a new image, a new way to say it that your audience hasn’t experienced before? If a character comes in and just blurts out, “I’m sad,” it’s a pretty bad way for a story to start. But, if I describe a woman in Dolores Park at three-o-clock in the morning, drinking tequila out of the bottle while sitting there hunched up, and suddenly the sprinklers come on. She doesn’t even move. She just continues to drink tequila. The reader comes out of that scene understanding she’s sad by putting the pieces together.

—Joshua Mohr

Photo by Molly S.

Got Wool?

January 12, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I was 19, my mother gave me a heavy wool, intricately cabled sweater she had spent years knitting and I was certain I would never wear. I was living with my then-boyfriend in the coldest place I ever lived — and anyone who knows me knows that means something. The beautiful old farmhouse was at the end of dirt road in southern Vermont. In one half of the house lived a single mother and her young daughter (I cringe now to think of what abysmal neighbors we were to her), and my friends and I housesat the other half.

The house was heated by a wood furnace. It was December, and the wood supply we had been left was nearly depleted. I certainly knew nothing about heating with wood. I was greener than the wood we burned.

I wore that sweater for the entire month I stayed there. I slept in it. I wore the sweater so hard and for so many years that only pieces of it remained when I moved from my last house.

What taught me to love scratchy wool? Cold Vermont.

5 below zero this morning….. Could be much colder. ‘Tis the knitting season.

Use It Up. Wear It Out. Make It Do. Or Do Without.

— Calvin Coolidge

Icy Reminiscences

February 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This February reminds me, yet again, of how rapidly our world changes: nearly 70º degrees yesterday, with my daughter reading on the back porch and eating a turkey sandwich, to this nearly colorless day, where the younger daughter and I slide over the ice around our house, tacking to the neighbors’ bare patch of ground beneath her pines.

Early today, I drove to Greensboro, pausing in my few spare moments to walk on the frozen beach at Caspian Lake, a soul-spot for my girls and me.

Scene of innumerable sand castles, swimming lessons, watermelon slices, of cold, wonderfully clear water, and the legendary wind that rushes black thunderheads across the water.

Sure, some of days parenting young children I’ll let go from my memory without a tinge of sadness, but I’d keep every one of those beach days. Every last one.

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels.

— Rebecca Solnit

Greensboro, Vermont

Teaser of Spring

February 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Home early from work, I walked to the post office with my daughter, in what Vermonters know as sugaring weather. Streams ran down hillside streets. Birds sang in bare-branched treetops.

This is the first winter I have lived in town in many years, and I’d forgotten how the melting snow recedes, leaving a pointillistic, 3D mosaic of dirt. With her bare fingers, my daughter picked up little bits of snow and tossed them at my knees, and we made a game of kicking those icy bits ahead of us, walking, as she offered me a few little bits of middle school life.

Passing the elementary school with its mountainous banks plowed to the edges of the parking lot, I remembered my own elementary school, where I walked on those ridge tops in an unbuttoned wool coat, mittens swinging from the knitted cord my mother made, tying the mittens tightly to the coat.

My daughter dug her fingers into a snowbank and threw a handful of ice, soft snow, and dirt over our heads.

Learning to trust the possible and to accept what arises, to welcome surprise and the ways of the Trickster, not to censor too quickly — all are lessons necessary for a writer…..Attentiveness may appear to be nothing at all, yet under its gaze, everything flowers. ‘Awakened,’ Dōgen wrote in a poem, ‘I hear the one true thing —/Black rain on the roof of the Fukakusa temple.’

— Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Montpelier, Vermont

Tales from Library Land

February 20, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was vacuuming tiny gold stars from the library’s rug yesterday, in the hour when the tired after school kids were getting picked up and before the adult readers appeared, I noticed the carpet, hard-worn when I arrived as the sole employee, was even more shabby. A splotch of yellow paint, snips of pink yarn, dog hair that perpetually sloughs off a few small patrons. The carpet has been used by all sizes of feet.

The walls are covered with kid art, colored paper chains hang from the ceiling, donations for the pie breakfast book sale line the walls.

Although I was so tired I considered lying down on the floor before the reading group, the adults arrived with incredible enthusiasm. The kids made popcorn and kicked a soccer ball in the other room, with a strange sound like someone banging her head against a wall I (futilely) tried to ignore.

I heated water for tea. What do goals mean in a lifetime, anyway?

Here’s one of mine: heat water for a thousand cups of tea in this one-room library.