Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Thaw, Finally

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Right at the equinox this year, spring cracks winter’s back in Vermont. The pavement buckles into frost heaves. The dirt roads mush and muddy. Sunday, I find the season’s first coltsfoot, the tiny gems of gold.

A Vermont spring is either a heartbeat — bang, done — or weeks of freeze and thaw, thaw and freeze. Although the days have hit 60 degrees, the nights are still cold, and our wood stove keeps our house warm.

Last evening, we walked by a sugarhouse, its cupola open and steam billowing. The air was tinged with the sweetness of maple, the slight rotting of thawing mud. Instinctively, my upper arms ached. Walking behind my daughters, listening to their chatter, my arms remembered those years when we sugared, and how my arms and gloved hands bent into the woodpile.

Spring is all those things: the radiance of the strengthening sun, the beauty of wildflowers, and how, when the earth thaws, our winter debris of ash pile and last year’s kale stalks emerge.

The bush warbler.
The rain wouldn’t let up.
The travel clothes.

— Mizuhara Shuoshi

School Tour

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A fellow school board member and I take a tour of the high school. I haven’t actually walked the halls in a year. The high school is very, very, very clean. Like, crazy clean, especially for a fifty-year old building.

In the gymnasium, I remember all those basketball games, the graduations, the Congressional delegation visit….

Afterwards, we stand outside in the sunlight, masks on, talking and talking, looking at back at this school that has meant so many things, to so many people, in so many ways the heart of the community — now, of course, for vaccine clinics.

School board positions are not hotly contested in our world, but in this sunlight, after a tour with so much history and so much more to come, I feel oddly so lucky to have this elected seat. The pandemic has flipped the tables in so many ways. It’s impossible not to think that the world is changing right now, all around us. As I leave, my fellow board member wonders how change will come, if we’ll all be hugging each other in the co-op, if things might get really weird.

Weird, I say, I can deal with. I walk home to where my daughter is baking a birthday cake for her sister’s friend. The house smells of sugar, and the cats are sprawled in a patch of sunlight, where flour is spread on the floor. How good to be here. Part of all this.

Hands at Work

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I’m working at home on a Friday afternoon when an email pops into my inbox from the librarian in town. He writes my interlibrary loan book is in, and would I like to come get it?

Indeed, I would. I pick up the book, wrapped nicely in a white paper bag, with my first name, Brett, written in black marker. I stand there in the sunshine, holding this book like some kind of present.

By randomness, I chose this book — Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter.

Go read it, too. The book embraces the hammer and chalk line, the beauty of wood, the functionality and satisfaction of making things with your hands, all antidotes to this virtual world. Even more, the book embraces being a woman and a working woman.

Me, the Mother, Grimacing

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Sunday morning, my daughter drives on icy roads to meet a friend to ski. In the passenger seat, I grimace. There’s no more polite way to reveal my actions: I’m grimacing. My daughter — perfectly capable, but my God, she’s 15, driving on icy roads.

She intends to be driving thus for decades to come, without me, of course, grimacing away in the passenger seat.

We head over the mountain and down along the river where the roads improve. Driving, she talks to me, as if the steering wheel has loosened her natural reticence. She laughs and confides, there’s just so much you don’t need to know.

Oh, my Queen of Economy. Wise and experienced beyond your years.

On the way home, we stop for coffee, and I drive while she eats and talks and plays country music that, good lord again, I’m becoming quite fond of.

Who knows will happen next year, this summer, this spring, this very week — goodness, even this afternoon with so much yet spread out before us? For this moment, here we are.

On the way home, I pull over, hand her the keys, and knock off the grimacing.

Coyotes feed themselves on gaunt dreams of spring. 

— David Budbill, “March”

East Burke, Vermont

Walking Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Aren’t we all thinking about this Covid anniversary? A year into the pandemic?

Time’s such a tricky thing. I’ve lived through moments that seemed like an eternity — such as the terrible experience when my baby had an allergic reaction and ceased breathing. Those were endless moments before she gasped again, her tiny chest taking in air. Conversely, my second pregnancy appeared to stretch out far beyond the standard nine months….

One year into the pandemic realm, I’m at the point where I’ve accepted: Live here now.

In a conversation with someone today via Zoom, I’m asked what I’m doing in September.

September, on one hand, is not so far off. On the other hand, I’m hoping there’s a lot of living between here and there. (Plus, I can hardly envision what I’m doing next month.)

This makes me think of my younger, more hippie days, reading Ram Dass.

We’re all just walking each other home.

 

Cardinals — crimson and soft brown

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Two cardinals perch in our mock orange bush, a brilliant flash of feather and beak, meeting and mating, much to the joy of our cats, who want to eat these these little creatures.

Around our Vermont house is yet an oasis of snow and ice, not a single sign of grass yet apparent. In the front yard, the rhododendron emerges stubbornly. I’m here! I’m here!

On this early morning that promises warmth, lines from poet Marie Howe.


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…

We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you. 

— Marie Howe, from “What The Living Do”