Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 154

The Barbed Past

Hefting rotted stumps in fall clean-up today, I tripped on a surprising strand of rusted barbed wire and tore my pants. What crude past is this, surfacing near my well-trod woodpile path?

Whoever strung this barbed wire is no doubt long since passed from the living.

Here’s the past again  – tangible in my hand and elusive with its story – or so the cliché goes. But this last week, I received an email that explained a great deal of my life, all the way back to my very earliest childhood, that gloaming of early memory. Like a tangled wire that has been straightened and trued, I saw a clear thread of my own life shiningly clear.

And yet, time is a strange thing. Ten years ago, I might not have understand what an illumination these words are; I kept the letter to myself. Someday, perhaps, I’ll pass it along to my own children. In the meantime, I’m likely to snip away at that barbed wire, so no one else trips on that particular debris of the past.

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Non-Academic Grit

In my twenties, I made a decision which changed the course of my adult life: I left the academic world and threw in my (considerably small) fortune in agriculture. My former husband and I sugared for nearly twenty years, on a small family-scale, and, while he was a carpenter and I worked various jobs (census taker, book seller), the bulk of income I brought in was through the Stowe Farmers Market. I made more money at that farmers market than I ever have anywhere else.

Yesterday, my teenager daughter skipped high school and stayed home to help load some of the heaviest things from the sugarhouse into a buyer’s truck. Are you kidding me? she asked. I’m not going school and missing out. The buyer was a New Hampshire family with their 26-year-old son and sleepy dog, and they arrived in a wet snow with such good cheer and humor in our unheated sugarhouse that they convinced another gentleman who arrived to write me a check for a sap tank.

The man and his son and my daughter with her honed tractor skills (“I’ve been driving this tractor since I was 10,” she explained) loaded up the heavy stuff while his wife and I talked about novels and farmers markets and, oddly, sex.

Afterwards, eating apples with my teenager, I raved about how terrific sugarmakers are, with their can-do because must-do attitude. She answered me, “You sugarmakers are all nuts, mom.”

I didn’t bother to point out that she’s one of us, too, with her graceful physical strength, her gritty determination to accomplish what needs to be done, and – even more so – her sizing up of priorities: why sit in a classroom doing hated trigonometry when you might put your hands and back to work and accomplish something useful?

Before she left, the woman told me they had taken a ten-year hiatus from sugaring and then commenced again. You will, too, she assured me.

My daughter eyed me. No, she said.

One of the things I loved best about sugaring was leaving the house’s confines at the end of the winter and moving, essentially, down to the sugarhouse and outside. Yesterday, my feet freezing on the cold cement floor, smelling the pervasive scent of fresh snow and remembering the blackbirds who nested in the white pines and sang every April, seeing the chalk drawings my daughters made on the rough-board sugarhouse walls and the huge rope swing hung outside the door, I assured my daughter, I’d do it differently, the second time… even better…. How could we not make sweet syrup?

She looked at me and shook her head.

And yet, I can trust she’ll lend her hands, again.

Here’s a few lines from the Van Gogh letters I’ve been reading.

You will no doubt tell me, the moment may well arrive when one regrets becoming a painter. And what could I then reply on my own behalf? They who have such regrets are those who neglect solid study in the beginning and race hurry-scurry to be top of the heap. Well, the men of the day are men of just one day, but whoever has enough faith and love to take pleasure in precisely what others find dull, namely the study of anatomy, perspective & proportion, will stay the course and mature slowly but surely.

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Photo by Molly S.

 

 

And Then This…

Yesterday, the heavily overcast sky hung low, sullen with the threat of snow. The day lay cold and gray. In this dismal time of year, even the most valiant of Vermont admirers must wonder what holds us to this piece of earth.

In the night, emerging from the school’s basement library after a lengthy school board meeting, one of us marveled it did snow, after all. In the school’s sharp floodlights, the snow sparkled, and I remembered in a flash that the saving grace of winter is its beauty. Even in the darkness, I saw how the snow promised a brightening of the next day.

In Hardwick, I met my daughters, the town nearly closed up for the evening. The younger girl, giddy with staying out late, scooped up a handful of the wet white stuff and kept giggling, What is this? before she answered herself: Christmas coming. She pressed her face near the snow, dreaming.

It is January, and there are crows

like black flowers on the snow…

– Mary Oliver,”Crows”

Photo by Molly S.

 

Early Evenings

Just when it seems like the gray may finally be settling in for months, it’s tamarack season. On my way to pay the yearly property taxes today, I realized those trees were rich gold. Then that amber, too, will pass, and I’ll forget about that autumn splendor, until next year. I’m not a fan of that phrase “it’s all good,” because nothing is all good, but this autumn has been radiantly gorgeous.

Someone remarked me the other day that there’s so little time in our lives, but late fall holds a profusion of time. Night closes in early these afternoons, and our after dinner strolls along the road have ceased for now. The children sprawl before the wood stove. Our house smells of slightly overripe apples, and around us glow the last vestiges of this fall.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

– Vincent Van Gogh

Woodbury Village, Vermont

 

Transit

Despite the snow, marigolds are blooming in my cobbled-together greenhouse, their scent still a sharp tang. I carried a handful with me this afternoon to my Woodbury library job. With the light ending early this days, it’s the Vermont reading season.

My bookseller friends at the Galaxy scored me an Advance Copy of Rachel Cusk’s new book, Transit, a novel title I love: what else is our lives but transitioning from one moment to another, so constant, perhaps, we’re hardly aware of the unbroken undulation and flux of our lives. Transit, transit. Going about my day, I murmur that word.

Around me, the natural world mirrors this movement: golden leaves shower from trees, the sunflowers have laid down and pressed their wide faces into the ground, the river is slate gray, cooling down and readying itself for the coming of ice.

I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.

– Rachel Cusk, Transit

October, Woodbury, Vermont

October Snow…

…. is not my favorite. Too wet, too scant, and the hydrangea suffers.

With enthusiasm, though, the children have dug into paper crafts and apple pie baking. My contribution to the household is vacuuming the ratty living room rug, spreading out my papers, and working in front of the wood stove. My brother sends a request for a knitted winter hat.

Our house, tall and narrow, reminds me of a clipper ship sailing through uncharted waters, resilient through gusty wind, its largely inaccessible cupola a crow’s nest. Overnight, while we were sleeping, the seasons turned. We are now gliding into the outer edges of the snowy season, and the children seek mittens. I’ll search for sage beneath that white for sausage and potato pie.

It is not down on any map; true places never are.

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or The Whale

West Woodbury, Vermont

Family Life

One of the more revealing titles of my recent reading is Akhil Sharma’s Family Life,  a novel hardly of the slick parenting magazine fare I leaf through in that dentist office I so frequently visit these days. A slim, fierce, terrific book.

This morning, reading another book about family life – Margot Livesey’s Mercury  – this line jumps out at me: “The human brain often juxtaposes the sublime and the trivial.”

The line encapsulates the book, true, but also domestic life.

Parenting often seems an endless routine of gathering twisted toddler socks from beneath the kitchen table. When my girls were teeny-tiny, I often muttered to myself during unbroken days a line from Shirley Jackson: “All day long, I go around picking up things.” The tooth-brushing trivial.

And yet, embedded like gems in the midst of sandbox squabbling, there’s marvelous moments: braiding my daughter’s hair, inhaling the familiar, salty scent of her scalp, listening to her stories.

The blue vase on the sideboard was from the Song dynasty, eleventh or early twelfth century. How had it survived nearly eight hundred years when I could barely survive forty? I was in that state between waking and sleeping, neither fully inhabiting my body nor entirely absent, when I heard footsteps. The mattress dipped.

– Margot Livesey, Mercury

 

 

 

Two Bears

Driving down our curvy back road the other morning, a young black bear loped before my car, coal-dark against the morning’s gold leaves woven through with mist. The creature faced us, then, in no particular rush, disappeared over the edge of the steep road. Behind me, a pickup rushed up in my mirror, missing the scene.

Midday, the kids were out of school. When I returned at dinnertime – full dark already in these shortening days – my older daughter told me the younger girl had lain on her back with her enormous teddy bear all afternoon, staring at the sky. She was fine, the teenager relayed. She just wanted to lie there for a while before we put the trampoline away for the winter.

Two young creatures – the bear cub and my child – at ease in the glowing woods.

….didn’t October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool’s gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted?…

– Maggie Dietz, “November”

 

Truth? in Dialogue

My teenager came home today excited about a major disagreement in her senior high school English class. Is it okay to lie? Is it acceptable to lie to prevent harming someone? Or absolutely, categorically never?

What do you do? I asked her.

The truth is, when you write dialogue in fiction (or when you listen, really listen) to how people use language, you quickly realize the lines of truth are blurry – in fact, remarkably unclear.

At seventeen, my daughter sees herself as mistress of her own fate, and while I certainly don’t want to unsteady my girl, I encourage her to keep her hands steady on the wheel. Listen, I urge: that unbelievably difficult challenge I butt up against, over and over. Listen.

I’m reading Margot Livesey’s Mercury in these early, dark mornings. Here’s a few lines from a previous novel:

If someone tells you a lie, they’re not telling you the truth, but they are telling you something. It just takes longer to figure out what.

– Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street

This eternally warm, long and lovely autumn, Woodbury, Vermont

Treasures

In the middle of last night, wind blew in a scattering of rainshowers. Without turning on any lights, I stood on the kitchen porch, amazed at the midnight balminess. The apple tree shed a few yellow leaves.

My teenager had left a screwgun on the deck, a piece of unfinished cleanup from putting up the storm windows. I lifted the heavy tool and held it in both hands, remembering when this girl was a baby and a screwgun like this one had fallen out of the back of our pickup. We’d loaned the screwgun to a relative in Montpelier, who must have merely slid the tool in the back of the truck. When I returned home, the case was missing.

With my baby in the truck cab beside me, I drove those miles back to the capital city, looking all along the road, but didn’t find the blue plastic box. I remember weeping over what was a very expensive tool for us then, and how badly I felt at its loss, caused by my own carelessness. That tool, in the early days of my husband’s carpentry business, meant so much to us then – or perhaps it was more the potential, the life ahead, that tool promised.

In the end, a neighbor found the screwgun and returned it to me.

Seventeen years later, how many thousands of dollars worth of tools have now passed through our hands, used hard, their finite lives consumed. I thought of all that with the gentle autumn rain falling, and how happy our neighbor was, returning to us what we considered our lost fortune.

Poverty’s child –

he starts to grind the rice,

and gazes at the moon.

– Bashō

garlic planting, Woodbury, Vermont