Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 153

How the Water Flows…. Or Doesn’t

A number of years ago, The New Yorker published a photograph of Marina Oswald the morning after Kennedy’s assassination. She was pinning diapers to dry on a clothesline. Last night, I was remembering this photo while solving my washing machine’s leaking cold water. While my mothering energy often heads toward the future – what will my older daughter do after high school graduation? will I make it to my younger daughter’s concert? – the nitty-gritty of daily life is really the grease in family wheels.

Case in point: my washing machine. Leaking hoses have now led to a clogged water filter (or so I believe….) Some days, family life seems one problem-solving exercise after another. This problem, in the scope of things, will crest and diminish. Via google, I’ll remedy the situation or find someone who will. More fodder for the creative grist mill; an aspect of modern family life I’ll master; one more piece of know-how my fingers have dirtied their nails upon.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

– Alice Walker

 

Folly

History’s legend claims the Roman emperor Caligula so loved his horse Incitatus that the animal was housed in a stable of marble, dined from an ivory manger, and dozed beneath blankets dyed a precious and beautiful purple. History also testifies to famines suffered by the citizens of the Roman empire. Now that our white house will soon shelter a man whom Holden Caulfield would have likely called a “prize horse’s ass,” we might want to brush up on some of those spicier historical stories.

In my own very minor public service on a local school board, always absent at the board table is the kindergartener who’s wearing a worn-out pair of shoes with laces he can’t tie – and yet every decision made considers that child. It’s folly to forget the little ones… and what’s the other word again? Full of hubris.

Here’s a line I gleaned from the library conference I attended yesterday:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched back to everything else in the universe.

– John Muir

twilight, heading home, Elmore, Vermont

Open the Door

Visiting the University of Vermont today with four high school senior girls and one sixth grader, our tour guide informed us he grew up in Brooklyn and had hardly been outside before he enrolled at UVM. My gaggle of girls and I looked at each other in disbelief. The poor soul.

We may not have represented the highest SAT scores in the room, but at least the girls know the importance of matching footwear with the weather.

Here’s a few lines from the novel I’m reading, suitable for craft of fiction advice:

Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphorically unstable idea: too general, too big….

– Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

Burlington, Vermont

 

Burrowing Into the Shell

In the afterword of her late husband’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, Lucy Kalanithi writes about retreating into the meat of her marriage after his cancer diagnosis, seeking succor. In different ways, I see my own children gathering strength from friendships, art, running – all creative, growing activities, rather than comfort in destructive habits. Early this morning, I found myself pulling the predawn darkness around me, the familiar patterns of wood stove kindling, coffee grinding, and reading.

I was also thinking of my brother and his insistence that free will and responsibility are central human tenets. Or, I might rephrase, small lights as a way out of the darkness.

“…Have you done anything good? Anything beautiful? Have you created anything? Music? Art? Have you made anything better? Even in a small way? A small light in this dark world? Have you even been happy?”

She throws the lit nub of the cigarette out the window. “You should ask yourself what the hell you think you’re here for.”

– Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

Burlington, Vermont

Antidote

A substance taken or given to counteract a particular poison.

Ingredients of today’s antidote:  discussing a local school board plan while those mysterious blue flies re-emerged from frost-trodden greenery in the unexpected balminess, the tiny creatures hovering in the balmy air, trimmed with daffy fuzz like bits of milkweed. Oatmeal raisin cookies.

 It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Woodbury, Vermont

A Sharp-Edged Sword

In my novel, I’ve taken a line from my daughter and woven it into a teenager’s dialogue: “What the flip?” the adolescent says, over and over, a tepid variation of an obscenity. At a tense junction, the girl uses obscenities, hammering her dialogue like a weapon.

In our house, we have a phrase that language can be both tool and weapon. To my great satisfaction and joy, I’ve honed my literary skills as tools of beauty and hopefully some measure of illumination – but I’ve also witnessed myself parsing writing in the sharpest and most cutting of ways, with keen intent. Truth is, I can use language as either, but striking out has never brought me any pride.

On this eve of this election, may what musters as democracy in our country emerge as tool, and lessen our divisions.

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.

 

– Rebecca Solnit

 

Settling In

Years ago, when I sold syrup at the Stowe Farmers Market with my toddler, she spilled water down her dress, and I hung the wet one over the back of a wooden folding chair to dry. Later that day, a customer appraised my booth and noted, You’ve really set up house here.

I had. With a blanket spread on the grass, a jumble of toys and three-year-old art supplies, snacks and the perpetual baby dolls and that drying laundry and likely my camera and notebook, the gypsy blood in me came out those market days and I came prepared.

If you’re raising kids, why not settle in?

In these dim November days, the trampoline is taken down for the season. The neighbor boy arrived to our delighted laughter on his unicycle this afternoon, and the kids have spread out before the wood stove making origami chairs. Warmth, sustenance, art supplies: ingredients for a Sunday near-to-snowing afternoon.

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

The Town at Night

Driving through Hardwick, Vermont, last night, beneath a crescent moon, the 11-year-olds in the backseat playing a word game and clapping, the 17-year-old  dreaming thoughtfully at the wheel, I marveled at how good Hardwick looks in the dark, the handful of streets lit up, the Town House’s double doors open for a musical, foyer chandelier shining welcomingly.

Run-down Hardwick, with its perpetually empty storefronts, the town of two auto parts stores, five gas stations with cheap greasy food, one food co-0p with pricy produce, and one thrift store. Reservoir of cheap beer and highly-taxed cigarettes and way too many scratch-off tickets. A town of more well-heeled days, called theirs now by those who have moved in with plenty of money or education or both, while those who have lived here for generations frequently are scant on both.

I left the Town House before the finale, standing outside in the cold. Freakishly, a structural fire burned behind the Town House, bright flames turning billowing smoke and steam bright red, split through with blue police lights. The cold gnawed at my feet. Overhead, clusters of stars and that curl of moon pushed through the streetlights and hazy atmosphere. From the closed doors, I heard a girl’s clear song, her voice graceful as a heron in flight, slowly winging its way through the sky.

Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the children. Only the governesses.

The Sound of Music, 1965

Hardwick, Vermont

Some Warmth

Yesterday burst into a late Indian summer, the early morning balmy, the air alive with the scent of thawing frost. A day like that stretches on and on. Working in the library, I propped the door open, and a little girl went in and out, her small hand outstretched, patiently waiting for tiny blue flies to land on her fingers. The flies had a scruffy bit like a seed carrier. Waiting for her father, she stapled together a book of colored paper, and wrote a story about a rabbit and her fly friends.

As the dusk descended, in a gorgeously gradual fall twilight, my daughter and her friends played outside, pumping on swings beneath a crescent moon and single twinkling star that gleamed with a faint amber hue. A teacher worked late in the school garden, the long strips of dark earth tilled up, sweet rich soil for garlic, my most favorite of the garden’s savoriness.

Today, those tiny blue flies have vanished. Here but for a single day, they filled our world with a snow globe variation of Indian summer, a reminder of unexpected good things.

Here’s one sentence from what I read this morning:

… from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, a light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up  his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting.

– Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

 

 

Feather Pens

Last night, in a wild windstorm, we were lucky to have the lights go out. My teenager and I had – painstakingly – filled out her college financial aid papers, and, at the very end, I could not electronically sign and submit. The younger daughter lay on the rug asking what’s wrong?

Frustrated, I snapped that, in a real world, I could just take a pen and sign my name. But not in a virtual world where the synchronicity of username and password didn’t jive.

With relief, darkness unexpectedly enfolded us. I closed my laptop, and we lay on the rug before the woodstove’s glowing glass door, the firelight flickering over us. The wind whooshed around our wooden house. Lacking light, we played my old stand-by, 20 Questions, traveling in our imagination to Portland, Maine, and then remembering sweet potato tempura we had eaten in a Japanese restaurant in that city. We discovered an interestingly ontological conundrum: was my brother’s dog Mona a thing? A live thing? She’s not a person, not a place….

By candlelight, we brushed our teeth and, rather than read by flashlight, I went to sleep far earlier than usual.

This morning, I’m reunited with my laptop, in work I genuinely love; however, while I do live in the world where papers are signed with clicks of my keyboard, I also reminded my girls that their ancestor signed his John Alden on the Mayflower Compact with a scratchy quill. And the implications of that document have long lingered…..

IN The Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation…

– Mayflower Compact 1620

Hardwick, Vermont