writing

Summer Evening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One simple and incredibly marvelous piece of our summer so far has been making a ring of rocks into a fire pit. The small daughter has naturally seized on this as a daily s’more opportunity. With the fairly regular rain, we’ve put up my old farmers market tent, and now we seem to be moving more and more outside. Dinner? I stir fried peas and garlic scapes and carried the skillet outside, while the girls roasted sausages. Sadly, our chocolate s’more supplies are depleted. The other morning I twisted my ankle leaping off the porch and spent the bulk of the day with my laptop outside. Since I couldn’t walk, that pretty much eliminated chores, which – while as a long-term scenario is hugely unappealing – for a July day really was an odd kind of opportunity. In summer, I’d rather live outside than in, and the smoke dispels some of the opulent bug life….

Whereas he baled hay. I baled sentences into paragraphs of prose. The meadows revealed themselves as pages, and the barn itself became the equivalent of the book where it all goes, to feed the mind and soul.

– Julia Shipley

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Writing and Sowing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I found that plowing land, traversing rows of vegetables, mowing, traveling back and forth from barn to house – this shuttling is akin to writing, the body a pen, the land an endless tablet. I learned that the words within us, under our gambrel skulls, are waiting to be let out to pasture.

– Julia Shipley, Adam’s Mark

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July

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Here’s the thing about Thoreau and gardening:  Thoreauvian time is distinctly non-linear, perceiving the world through cyclical seasons.  Walden is written as a single-year cycle, with multiple circles within.  As gardeners, we must all, on some level, embrace the world in variations of rebirth, growth, and demise.

Today, my garden bursts in profusion:  white currants, greens, rogue chamomile mixed in with the bee balm.  A woodchuck we saw running by…..

This is the season of a ten-year-old girl picking peas, of dinner cooked over an outside fire, of rain on the sunhat left on the grass while we played an evening game at the neighbors’ house.  Their four-year-old daughter showed us her garden, while her younger brother ran in excited figure eights.  Walking home tonight,  my daughter’s hand in mine, fireworks from Cabot and Morrisville lit up the night sky over our mountain, while fireflies blinked around us.  Our heels struck the dirt road, our guide home in the thick country dark, the frogs peeping and the owls calling, this season of Vermont July.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men…  At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable by us because unfathomable.

– Thoreau

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A Little Levity Now…..

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While writing an essay on Thoreau and a sense of place in contemporary Vermont literature, I’ve reread Donald Hall’s “Why I Hate Vermont.”  Having spent a chunk of my childhood in Hall’s New Hampshire, I can only laugh at this essay.  It’s wickedly funny (and his claim about the trout is actually true).

In Vermont deer are required to have shots.  In Vermont people keep flocks of spayed sheep to decorate their lawns.  In Vermont when inchling trout are released into streams, a state law requires that they be preboned and stuffed with wild rice delicately flavored with garlic and thyme…. In Vermont, in 1999, the license plate slogan was Eat Three Nutritious Meals a Day.  In legislative committee this slogan edged out Experience Mozart.

– Donald Hall

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The more serious side of Vermont…..

Daughter, Words

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter and I had a long drive through Vermont today.  Don’t laugh — I know Vermont’s a small state, but the roads bend all around these mountains.  She’ll be at an art program for two weeks.  Driving, we listened to a CD my dad had made, a sixties mix of music for a class he’d taught.  As we followed a swollen river, my daughter suddenly asked, “What music is this?”

“The blues.”

She listened, then said, “I hate the blues.”

I laughed.  Old spirituals?  Who could listen to those?  Things picked up for her with the Beatles, but she kept flipping the case around in her hand.  The name Lead Belly?  What the heck?  Like the line in a Carver short story, my daughter is a long tall drink of water. She’s funny and smart, and lovely and prickly in all kinds of ways.  Driving through that rainstorm, in this summer of so much downfall, I felt my own version of the blues hammering down on me; perhaps it’s the place in my life right now, in these tempestuous forties, but so many people I know are singing the blues.  Looking at my daughter from the edges of my eyes, I didn’t bother to remark that someday she will be riding her own vehement blues, through that particularly human experience of grief, and unfulfilled longing, and desire all churned up in a maelstrom.  But not too much I couldn’t help wishing; enough of the blues to render the sweet genuinely savory, but not so much to twist and distort my girl, this fine and good young woman.

All the way there, we talked, talked, talked.  On the return trip, I followed the Mad River Valley, and then crossed over the mountains in a misty rain, with only my poor self for company.  Not until I was nearing home did the rain cut back and the clouds lightened to mere rags of mist.  I took a slightly different road, along Stagecoach Road, where the farm fields spread green as giant sheets of emeralds, with great pockets of black mud. On my way to work, I will be back soon enough, tracing this path around Elmore Mountain, noticing whether the fields have dried, remembering the masses of apple blossoms this May and looking for signs of fruit fattening.  But all the while, I will be wondering what stories my daughter is gathering and how she will eagerly tell me, You really won’t believe this! Until then, how much I will miss her laughter.

the world … was not enough for (my mother) without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea–none of it
was enough, for her, without me.

— Sharon Olds

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Love Letter to Walden Pond

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just before noon today, I arrived at my daughter’s soccer camp a few minutes early and picked up Walden where I had left off, at “The Ponds” chapter.  As it was the last day of camp, the session went late, and I sat on the grass, watching the kids circled on the grass around their coach, saying something I could not hear at all, only the laughter in their voices.  From where I sat, I saw the mound of Buffalo Mountain, a dark blue against the lighter hue of a cloudless sky.  This summer’s been a stellar one for butterflies, and even in this chiefly grassy stretch they were busy, the honey bees working, too, on the clover.

Thinking over these pages, I realized this chapter is a lyrical love letter to Walden Pond, an homage to her loveliness, this common pond, the miraculous universe reflected in this patch of water.

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.

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