Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 147
February 17, 2017
What the Heck is Figurative Language, Anyway?
On my drive to work, I wind through a spidery maze of dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais before I hit the paved County Road and sail into Montpelier. The drive, while long, is exquisitely lovely, changing from fall’s florescence to this winter’s sparkling white. Just after I hit the main road, I always glance at a red farmhouse to my right where whoever lives there has stacked firewood in a round pile, fanning out from a center. I always look to see if they’ve started to burn that wood yet.
So far, not yet. I’m guessing there’s a stash behind the rambling farmhouse, and those folks haven’t wanted to dig into this craftily-stacked wood.
Yesterday, driving on slushy and messy roads, a crow flew before my windshield right at that house, flying so near I could see its shiny eye, orange drape of tongue, a white chunk of breakfast in its mouth.
I once garnered those things as a sign of something, but yesterday it occurred to me that maybe the crow was merely hungry, flying in a hurry back home to eat.
Sign enough?
Surely.
I kept driving into the accumulating snowfall.
….Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles
but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.
So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.
Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy….
Sherman Alexie, “Crow Testament”
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February 15, 2017
Where We Are Now
Falling snow is the main feature of these days, so marvelously beautiful no one complains. Usually by this time of winter, grousing is general, but we’ve had so little snow this year –almost none the winter before – and this snow is exquisitely lacy.
Tomorrow morning, with a long drive ahead of me, I might be crabbing a different song, but now, tonight, stepping out into the warm, snow-suffused twilight after work, it’s all good. Pile up; shroud this world in loveliness.
Secret truths… are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets… if you’re going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your deepest, most private truth.
Claire Fuller, Swimming Lessons
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Woodbury, Vermont
February 14, 2017
Ah, Winter
Every winter, I shovel a path from the woodshed to the back entry, and another from the kitchen door to the compost pile, a hand-cut maze around my house. The snow in northern Vermont falls so amply my daughters, when toddlers, were sometimes completely concealed in these paths. I could hear a little girl laughing, running with baby steps in snow boots, invisible to my eye.
Yesterday, the 11-year-old and her friend, still wearing pajamas, opened the door and oooohhhhed at the snow. They shoveled a steep slide off the kitchen roof, and then made another from the sugarhouse roof.
In the afternoon, sun emerged and light snow drifted down outside the public library windows. The library filled with just the right amount of people, the children busy with crafts, the adults companionable, drinking coffee and working. At five, I walked outside into what must be the best of Vermont winter: drifting bits of perfect snowflake shot through with sunlight, mixed with the blueness of twilight.
But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment….
William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl
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February 12, 2017
Empty Rooms
I haven’t bought a house in twenty years, and I’ve never sold one. In my teens and twenties, I lived in all kinds of places, from a tipi to a trailer to a string of apartments, but my daughters have lived in this rural house their whole lives.
House hunting in Vermont’s February means walking through empty houses with the heat off and the windows frosted: an exercise in imagination. The younger daughter sizes up where she would put her bike and trampoline, how her bunk bed might fit in a room. I crouch down and study plumbing, pick at linoleum with my car keys to see what wood lies beneath. Like approaching a piece of writing, I gnaw over mechanics – plumbing, roof, how to heat, affordability – but I’m also listening to the house. Does it sing to us beneath the layers of other people’s living? Where will the moonlight shine in? Can these rooms fill with our living?
My older daughter argues. Later, I realize she outdid me at what I was doing: she and her camera sought out beauty.
Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.
Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
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window frost in Hardwick/photo by Molly S.
February 10, 2017
Lost and Found
Yesterday I found myself in a blinding snowstorm at the Barre courthouse, asking for copies of papers I had lost.
The woman behind the counter asked with disbelief, You lost them? I answered her, Yes, thinking, Lady, if you knew my carelessness…
Those papers have joined the trail of lost keys, cats, single earrings, half pairs of socks, a useful serving spoon, my original marriage license.
The woman disappeared into the building’s depths while I waited in the hall. Then, by chance, I met a friend I hadn’t seen since my early twenties, long ago. In those moments, I had that odd sense of finding my youthful self, as we traded stories about where we are now, in what I hope is merely the middle of long lives.
The woman returned with my papers, my friend headed upstairs, and I went back out into the snowstorm.
…we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.
Kathryn Schulz, “When Things Go Missing”
February 9, 2017
Voting
Less than a hundred years ago, the 19th amendment to the US constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920.
Yesterday, my newly-turned 18-year-old daughter registered to vote for the first time. Not that long ago, on town meeting day, this girl played under long tables in the back of the town hall, burrowing beneath a giant pile of winter coats. This year, she’ll weigh in for herself on numerous votes that day, on town business ranging from electing select and school board members to setting the year’s tax rate.
Like her first day of kindergarten, I couldn’t resist snapping a photo. She politely acquiesced before heading off on her busy way.
The amendment reads simply:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
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Town Clerk’s Office, Woodbury, Vermont
February 7, 2017
Lying
I laughed at the utter aptness of the Oxford Dictionary word of the year for 2016 – post-truth – but the word (and this time) reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory of writing, his “theory of omission.”
Years ago, when I began writing fiction, I also began reading differently, too, wondering what made terrific dialogue snap, but I also began listening in a very different way, too, and gradually realized our everyday speech often contains variations of lies, intentional or not. Lying by omission slides around in our speech, a somewhat slippery critter.
What’s the story? I sometimes ask my daughters. What’s happening under the surface of our language? Maybe there’s two, three, four stories winding together? Think complexly. Don’t assume.
Perhaps because our political world is so intensely polarized these days, the stories of greed and bigotry and outright desire for power push toward the surface. My suspicion is that this post-truth is apter than I realize, this nearly maniacal intent to create chaos and confusion, to obscure the real threads of the story beneath non sequiturs and outright blaring nonsense. History is one long story of the success of dominance, over and over. Why not chose confusion of speech as the weapon du jour?
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
– George Orwell, 1984[image error]
February 5, 2017
Slouching out of the Teen Years
This morning the February light shone with that clear and pure quality, as if it might endlessly extend, as far cry from December’s cramped miserliness.
Three nights running now, I found myself after midnight slouching on the couch with my daughter, talking, talking. If there’s any theme to my life and my writing these days, it should include both conversation and crackling woodstove. Domesticity.
I realized last night this young woman and I have entirely emerged from her teenage years. That’s it. All that angst folded up, as if in a fist. Our conversation is sometimes deep running, and sometimes merely about the daily pieces of our lives – who’s picking up the little sister, forward me that email, what do you think about tacos for dinner tomorrow – the day-to-day stuff that comprises our lives. Breathe deep.
Here’s a line from early morning novel reading, one of Obama’s recommendations.
He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.
– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
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February 4, 2017
Coltsfoot Dreams
February 4 always marks the return of light to me, and, from my windows, the skies are clear today. February 4, 18 years ago, was my first day as a mother. My baby had been born in the deep of night, shortly before midnight, and the 4th was filled with radiance.
What’s 18 years over the span of millennia? Not even a heartbeat, perhaps, but for us, these years have been mightily full. Her younger sister and friends made tissue paper flowers and decorated the house with balloons and streamers, for this young woman who spent much of her childhood drawing or photographing blossoms.
It seemed fitting, then, that she returned from her birthday dinner with an exquisite bouquet from her boyfriend. The mistakes I’ve made as a parent could fill six novels. Yet here’s my tall beautiful daughter, her hands full of flowers, stepping into a world we’re offering her rife with political chaos, shot through with what should be acknowledged as unbridled vice, on a planet severely ailing.
And yet: flowers. The 11-year-olds and I stayed up late last night in front of the wood stove. Perhaps for no other reason than to delay bedtime, they began knitting with me. Kids and flowers: wily and beautiful.
February means spring isn’t that far in the offing, and spring means coltsfoot, those tiny gold blossoms thrusting up through the hardest and ugliest of roadsides, claiming their territory.
Our life here on earth:
to what shall we compare it?
Is it not like a rowboat
departing at daybreak,
leaving no trace of us in its wake?
― Takaha Shugyo
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February 2, 2017
Early February, Return of Light
Just about 17 years ago, my daughter had her first birthday, and even the parents ate pasta elbows with our fingers. We were entering the snot-strewn realm of parenting toddlers; standards had literally sunk onto the floor.
One father who was at that birthday party dropped off his daughter today, and we reminisced for a moment in my sunny, snow-covered driveway. His daughter had figured the math of their short drive from home to school, and how many hours that entailed. He had told his daughter that it meant so much more time they had together – all those years, through snow and slush, humid fall days, through happy days and miserable ones – while she grew up.
As a mother, I’ve learned how to bake a decent birthday cake, pull together a kid craft project from a handful of paper, a piece of yarn and a scissors, and listen, listen. Or maybe I just need a nap.
…I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
From “The Language of the Brag” by Sharon Olds
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