Woodbury Elementary School

The Footprint of Where You Live

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I live in a Vermont town which has very little pavement. Route 14 heads north-south right through the village’s tiny center. In the village, a small amount of pavement fronts the post office, volunteer fire station, and the currently-closed general store. The elementary school has a square in the dooryard, none in the playground or dirt parking lot. Our town is wood, field, and a great deal of water in lakes, ponds, running streams.

The schoolkids took a field trip to Barre, and I met them in the morning, standing beside their one school bus, in a sunny but cold morning, eating apples on cracked asphalt. I laughed.

If you’re a kid, does it matter that your school garden’s footprint is larger than your pavement’s print? Does it matter as adult that you have both winter boots and mud boots? That your horizon is framed by trees and not rooftops?

I tend to think, whether we notice or not, where the soles of our feet walk matters.

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

– Mary Oliver

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Burlington, Vermont

Children & Flies: Biosphere Companions

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A rainy March day yielded existential questions regarding flies in my fifth-grade daughter’s day. At supper, she chatted about catching a fly in the minutes before the first class and another hidden in a friend’s desk all day, allegedly feasting on granola bars.

The Woodbury schoolhouse is 200-years-old, with filled with all kinds of corners and crannies, high ceilings and gorgeous windows: delightful habitat for flies. I asked if she thought the flies might be back tomorrow. She didn’t know. Tomorrow, she guessed, their companions could be wasps or ladybugs. In third grade, the children kept a keen eye on a mouse hole concealed behind the teacher’s desk. It’s not long until the birds begin nesting in the trees around the school, and the snapping turtles emerge from the wetland to bury their eggs in the ball field.

At the end, while I was laughing, my daughter said simply and matter-of-factly, “We are all in the biosphere.”

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

– Issa

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Woodbury, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Revision: Re-Envisioning

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

This Wednesday morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest ones – the kindergarteners and first graders – shared some of their work. Their teacher had encouraged the kids to work on revision, with a method I found so familiar I might have written it myself: be specific, persevere, don’t be mean. The children showed their school – fifty students and a handful of teachers and parents – a science experiment, snowflakes they made, a girl’s story she had written four times. Excited about the holidays, the little girls wore sparkly dresses.

I didn’t encounter the revision word until high school. Revision was a hated word, a punishment, a sign of slacking or incompetence. Not until I hit the second half of college did revision become deeply engrained in me.

In graduate school,  I had a professor who told me, Revision is our life. Widen your lens: re-envision. Perhaps that’s why I found this morning so particularly interesting: at such a young age to begin looking at your doings, not in a spirit of despair or judgement, but in creativeness openness. That may be a long stretch for a five-or-six-year-old kid, but good habits took me an embarrassingly long period to learn.

For what it’s worth, Shelagh Shapiro (author of a fine Vermont novel The Shape of the Sky) interviewed me for her Write The Book Radio program (listen here). Listening to the podcast driving home last night, I thought, Slow learner. Which, perhaps, was why I enjoyed the little kids this morning. And the young authoress today did her own illustrations, as well.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

– Bernard Malamud

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Montpelier, Vermont

 

 

Windstorm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These autumn days hold the dim shortness I remember from this time of year as a child in New England, but the air this afternoon lay almost balmy, redolent with wet earth, like spring. Driving to meet my children at school, a sudden wind blew up violently, throwing dry leaves in the air, bits of twig, the abrupt rain nearly sideways against the windshield. The clouds spun darkly.

Looking up through the glass at crows tossing in the unsteady air currents, suddenly I realized the heart of the book I’m writing is about light and shadow. I pulled over at an ugly patch of Hardwick  – a mini-storage – and ran to the center of the parking lot. The rain bit at my eyes, and the wind spun in a gyre with shreds of trees and plastic debris. I closed my eyes and thought of those Salinger stories I had been reading last night; I imagined each of those stories in their own entity – with Teddy and Esme and the Laughing Man – circling around.

Just as abruptly, the wind ceased. I stood for just a moment more, thinking of those stories, as full as any story could possibly be, with layers of shadow and light, story beneath story.

Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

–– Salinger, “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”

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Woodbury Elementary School, Vermont, late October