Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 160

The Jungle Between Us

Although in Vermont it’s a beautiful August right now, in winter the snow piles awfully darn high, and when I had little kids, we were often snow-bound for days. When I was pregnant with my second child, I read every bit of many New Yorker issues, all the way down to the ads. It was one long winter. In an essay years ago by James Wood, he wrote wondering who read his book reviews, and I wanted to answer: me! They’re my personal literature course.

It’s such a pleasure to get reading material in the mail. This issue of The New Yorker has an article about an isolated Amazonian tribe. It’s a story of two tribes with a shared history, and the two different paths they chose. One came nearly out of the forest, the other retreated more deeply within. It’s fascinating journalism, and a perfect metaphor for how profoundly we don’t understand those nearest to us. 

This word compassion comes up over and over this summer in my life. What does a quality of heart mean? Perhaps compassion demands a measure of acceptance that we’ll never truly know another, that the immensity of jungle permeates much of human life.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

– Mahatma Gandhi

Greensboro, Vermont

The Stars

I first fell in love not with Vermont’s pastoral landscape but its nightsky. I grew up in a New Hampshire village, so the New England terrain was intimately familiar to me, but the constellations were dimmed by the town’s lights and curtailed by roofs and wires. When I was eighteen, I moved to rural Vermont, and the first night there, I lay in bed, staring out the uncurtained window at all those stars. Uncountable. I was beyond smitten.

In America, a country of such material excess, the whole force of the culture often seems to push for more, more, more. Of course, I understand as much as anyone the mathematics of economics, of raising children and hard work and a driving need for stability; none of that necessarily excludes our human need for the stars. Shouldn’t we encourage our teenagers to envision their adult lives as productive within the real context of earth beneath the soles of your feet, stars arced over your head?

Early August in northern Vermont: the children are tanned and healthy, the asparagus has shot taller than any 11-year-old, our pockets sag with lake pebbles, and the cucumbers are crisp and profuse on the vine. That’s something.

On the white poppy,

a butterfly’s torn wing

is a keepsake

– Matsuo Basho

 

Knowing

When my daughter was five, she took Red Cross swimming lessons at Caspian Lake in Greensboro, and at the end of the two-week session, her coach guided the little kids to the deeper waters where they could then stretch down with their bare feet and touch a large flat rock named Big Yellow.

For my younger daughter, this is the summer of Big Yellow, a time of swimming with her friends to this nether region, flipping over in this gorgeously cool and clean lake, diving down with goggles, and surfacing with handfuls of smooth lake pebbles.

For generations, kids and adults have known this place in the lake through name and through experience. Watching the girls this late afternoon, I reminded myself again that knowing is both language and action. The name is essential, but so are the water-logged fingertips digging into the sandy lake bottom. As a writer, I often take that combination into the less sparkling areas of adult living; as a mother – and a woman – I’m taking my turn in these pristinely August Vermont waters.

But what is the way forward? I know what it isn’t. It’s not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It’s not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It’s not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It’s not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart – reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.

– Laurence Gonzalez, Everyday Survival (a book well worth the read…..)

 

Book Group

For years, my daughters and I have been eating peppermint stick ice cream at Cassie’s Corner in Greensboro, Vermont, while admiring an immense red barn just across the side road. Who lives there, we wondered?

This sun-filled afternoon, I was lucky to sit with a group of women who had all read my novel and asked stellar questions. What a gift for a writer. Often, I imagine myself straddling the outside ledge of a cupola, my fingers hardly holding a grip, my toes clenching a ballpoint pen, while I fervently ponder plot and backstory and spy on passersby. The truth is, maybe I just need to get out more.

Many doors have opened to me via Hidden View, but to sit with a group of smart women, talking about craft and literature, is an especially savory bit of summer. Who knew open barn door would reveal such a stunning view of the lake  – and couple that with conversation? – terrific.

One has to be just a little crazy to write a … novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

– John Gardner

Round Church in Richmond, Vermont

 

Singing Season

We’ve reached the point in the summer where the crickets’ song is gaining the upper hand, slowly rising in volume and intensity and the songbirds’ melody dwindles, and then, eventually, the crickets fade, too.

End of July is lush and full; end of July is swimming season.

In the last week, we’ve swum in four lakes. Beneath our bare feet, the sand varied from pebbles to smooth as wet dust; the water murky or clear from our shoulders to our toes. Ever present are the Vermont mountains, from Craftsbury’s smaller hills to the sheer cliffs of Willoughby.

Sonorous is the word for this season; let it ring.

Here’s what I’m reading these days:

But there was something there, something imperfect, something sharp and bent and rusty, that tore into him somehow, that made him believe the human condition was one great and mournful but still achingly beautiful cry.

– John Gregory Brown, A Thousand Miles From Nowhere

Lake Eligo, Craftsbury, Vermont

Solitude and Writing

When I first became a mother in rural Vermont, I discovered the odd solitude-that-was-not-solitude that arises from nearly always being with a young child. Now my daughters are older, and I’m fortunate to have writing work, so deep solitude again makes a consistent mark in my days. Hence, reading at events like Bookstock are a particular pleasure, with time to chat about books and lives. I have no idea what, say, hedge fund managers shoot the breeze about, but my experience with Vermont writers is generally unmitigated humor, rich inner lives with often rocky terrain, and a rush of talking, talking, like we’re all odd aunties let out of the attic for an afternoon.

Later, past dark, home again, my daughters and their cousins decided to set off a Chinese lantern the girls had been saving. In the neighbors’ field, beneath the beaming constellations, my teenager and I held the tissue-thin lantern between us as it filled with heat and smoke from a small fire. When we released it, the red lantern and its flame rushed up into the night, carried away by a breeze and its own heat.

In the darkness, my 11-year-old slid her hand into mine, afraid of the night and yet entranced, looking up at the heavens.

Hazy moonlight —

someone is standing

among the pear trees.

– Yosa Buson

Woodstock, Vermont

The Kingdom’s Rocky Peaks

Hiking the peaks in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, it’s easy to see how glaciers and rock and time have shaped the northern landscape where my family lives, once-upon-a-time channeling immense grooves into the earth and strewing the territory with boulders. Clear, deep lakes – tantalizing for swimming – lie in these cuts.

Maybe it takes the sweeping vista of a mountaintop view over immense valleys, coupled with the immediacy of childhood, to place time in that perspective of distance juxtaposed against the immediacy of the here-and-now: our world was shaped and formed by ancient movements, and yet we go about our day-to-day lives as though the past was merely story, an anecdote over lunch’s cheese and mesclun sandwiches.

Yesterday, my 11-year-old, dutifully and non-too-cheerfully starting out on yet another hike, came around a wooded bend to the base of an immense boulder where she gasped with pleasure. Scrambling up the rock, she found herself stranded at a steep pitch on crumbling lichen. Afraid, she edged to the trail again, summited, then later feared again, seeing stormy clouds rolling in from a distant horizon, foreboding lightning and thunder.

I can’t help but think that’s an encapsulation of time: the radiant pleasure of a child swimming in a lake and discovering one tiny shell on the sandy bottom and the real presence of an electrical storm moving in. All that in one day: and then the journey back home again.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

– Cormac McCarthy

Lake Willoughby, Vermont

 

Nick Names

Driving home with the kids today, we started naming each other, the cousins riffing on the nicknames I have for my daughters. Affectionately, the kids named each member of our family, all after foods.

What’s in a name? More than a word, these names are ways to possess each other, lovingly lay claim. Like a lasso, this language loops over a beloved: Mine. Willingly accepted, the nickname claims: yours.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

– Rebecca Solnit

The Ties That Clinch

A few years ago, when my sister’s kids and my kids started spending more time together every summer – beyond a few days’ visit – we hit a point one summer when all three of younger kids were either mad or crying. We split them up into different cars, and then went hiking. By the end of the day, they were laughing again. And while no one favors kids crying, it was clear the cousins had hit a new level in their relationship. They  had spent enough time together to honestly disagree; simultaneously, they had spent enough time together to cherish each others’ company, and wholeheartedly make-up.

Like all families, we share the same stories exclusive to us. Remember when Yasu dumped ketchup on his head and laughed hysterically? Remember the summer Gigi and Kaz spent hours sorting tic-tacs? Remember the Summer of Gum, when Trident was the New Cool Thing? Remember when Aunt Brett…. well, I won’t incriminate myself.

Stories are too often trivialized as lightness, mere anecdote or amusement. But aren’t the stories of ourselves and our beloveds an integral way of knowing ourselves and our place in the world? Not to mention…. often entirely fun.

Number 10 Pond, Calais, Vermont

 

On the Road

Every now and then, I find myself (generally with my kids) in some space of time, either waiting for this particular thing or that, often under duress, and generally beside some road.

Is this just American life? That so much of it takes place beside the paved (or in Vermont the dirt) road? These spaces of time usually catch me by surprise. Today, with no knitting, the library books left at home, unwilling to enter any store and shop, I lay on the medium’s grass, beneath scraggly southern pines I had never noticed before, although I’ve driven by this part of Vermont – Tafts Corner – for years.

I had the oddest memory being four-years-old. Traveling with my family, my sister and I had run on a lawn one evening beneath a sprinkler. A desert child then, the grass was a fragrant anomaly, a curiosity beneath small bare feet.

Driving back home this afternoon, I kept looking at the spiny ridges of Mt. Mansfield, longing to be off this asphalt road, footloose, following the song of the hermit thrush.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

– Mark Twain

Williston, Vermont