#writing

Dumpling Quest.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

I stop into the Friday Hardwick Farmers Market to buy dumplings for my daughters. Waiting in line, I chat with an acquaintance from a nearby town who tells me his wife’s sister unexpectedly passed away in spring, and left a house full of things and no children to clean out the house. I’ve known this man and his wife for years. They’re amicable and pleasant, with a far more relaxed view towards the world than my own, seriously Type A, ‘get a plan’ attitude.’ I find them incredibly pleasant and refreshing.

He buys chicken curry and mentions to me that if I ever hear of free vinyl records, he’d be interested.

A chilly wind blows across the market field, and the vendor grabs his paper boxes. ‘Feels like September,’ he says. ‘Summer’s disappearing, and I haven’t even enjoyed it yet.’

I hand him ten dollar bill and step out into the sunlight. In the pavilion, a young woman sings while another fiddles. For a moment, time splinters, and I’m back at the Stowe Farmers Market where I sold our maple syrup for over a decade. For many of those years, I had a baby or small child on my back. Cloud shadows skitter over the field, and the wind blows dust into my eyes.

The dumpling man says, ‘Take more sauce,’ and I do.

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First there is a kind of shock at the level of comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about – depending on their views – the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government… People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.” 

— Sebastian Junger

Footloose.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nearing August, our Vermont summer is now tinged with strands of colder weather, the maples already beginning to redden in random patches. The sugar maple in Hardwick’s memorial park always tends to turn first.

The mornings are darker, too.

I knock into a friend in a parking lot who’s just returned from a drive out West. He relays that the interstates were filled with people traveling. Motel rooms were hard to come by. Strangers were unhelpful. Even the fish in the Rocky Mountain rivers where he had gone to fly fish weren’t biting he says mournfully. ‘I’m back to stay.’

In the dark mornings, before the sun rises, blood-red through smoke from distant wildfires, I read Sebastian Junger’s Freedom that I began reading in Burlington last weekend, while I waited for my daughters. I sat in the sunlight, remembering when I bought a William Vollman novel two decades ago, and read it in a tiny Toyota we had been given, while nursing my newborn.

At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with — and maybe even hate…. Values like fairness and human dignity [are] going to determine at least some of the rules of the game.”

— Sebastian Junger

Moon.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On her way out last night, my daughter calls back into the house, Come see the moon!

A full moon rises behind our barn — the July Buck Moon. The night is so luminescent I can easily see the lilies along the barn.

I suppose the moon reflects the faraway sun, but the moonlight glows so vibrantly, like living molten gold, that the moon this night seems particularly alive, so close I imagine reaching out and dipping my hands into the round bucket of its beauty.

I know, theoretically, our house on this planet is spinning, too, but from our patch of grass and stone walkway and garden and house, it appears the lovely moon will rise and sail over our house and us sleeping in our bedrooms all night along. A magical thought — one I take comfort from.

“And The Moon and the Stars and the World”

Long walks at night– 
that’s what good for the soul: 
peeking into windows 
watching tired housewives

— Charles Bukowski

Burton Island, Vermont

Cash. Wood. Still Lovely July.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In my bank account appears $250 from the IRS. I could spend this money six ways to Sunday. What I do is order more firewood. For years, the only expenses we had for firewood were chainsaws and fuel, property taxes, and the our own labor.

Living in town now, I buy firewood. There’s nothing else like the wet-sap scent of freshly cut and split wood. I buy from a man who lives in the next town over. When he delivers, we have an annual check-in about what’s happening, standing beside a great pile of split wood, talking about the weather or what’s happening in Washington or sweeter things, like his baby granddaughter.

The thing about burning wood is all the steps — tree, woodpile, glowing fire and happiness, ash that I spread in my garden.

Last night, as I turned off the lights and headed upstairs, I spied one of our cats lying on the rug before the wood stove, wistfully staring. It’s sultry July, and many days off (I hope) from kneeling before the wood stove.

Hardwick, Vermont

A Little Green.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

An acquaintance stops into work. I’m jammed to the point of frazzled with a list of what needs to be done, but I quit for a bit and shoot the breeze, ask what’s up in his world, and how his very large (by Vermont standards) business is faring.

We’re Vermonters, so our conversation naturally bends towards the weather. We’re dry — not New Mexico dry, where my parents live — but so dry in Vermont wells are going dry. Listening, I think how much of the summer is yet to come. Then he heads off to his day, and I head back into mine.

In the evening, I’m in a meeting at the town offices when the rain begins. The town offices are in a 100-year-old schoolhouse. It’s a well-made building of wood and walls of pressed-tin over, now shabby in places and in need of TLC, but endearing with history and craft. By then, the day has stretched out quite long for me, but I’m happy to be in this building, with jovial people who are doing their community part.

When I step outside in the dark, cold has moved in with the rain. But the rain falls steadily, at least for some amount of time. The next morning, the hillsides are vibrant green in a way I haven’t seen for some time.

We’re dry, but not as dry as we were before.

Poem for America.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I was pruning the rose bushes along our house, pressed up against the clapboards, when I had the strangest feeling that I had stepped into a snapshot collage of my life: thorn, blood, house, half-hidden, wet moss under my knees, a cat bird screeching in the lilacs. This morning, I’m wearing a bulky sweater. Oh, Vermont July, how I love you.

Every year, my daughters and I end up in some lengthy discussion about the Fourth of July. This year, as if jointly agreeing to avoid words, we ate ice cream and lit sparklers after dark. The fireflies blinked, in their own particular journeys.

Here’s a poem in its entirety from Tony Hoagland’s Twenty Poems That Could Save America:

Even if the geraniums are artificial

Just the same,

In the rear of the Italian café

Under the nimbus of electric light

They are red; no less red

For how they were made. Above

The mirror and the napkins

In the little white pots . . .

. . . In the semi-clean café

Where they have good

Lasagna . . . The red is a wonderful joy

Really, and so are the people

Who like and ignore it. In this place

They also have good bread.”

“The Geraniums” by Genevieve Taggard

Hardwick, Vermont