Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Teen Talk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

4 degrees this morning when my older daughter leaves for work. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw — classic New England weather. We’re now into the final descent into darkness. Evenings, we hang out — homework and reading — and often just talking. No one’s heading out for an evening run, a last long walk before nightfall, because these days nightfall is in the afternoon.

My older daughter reads aloud about what it’s like to live in the Arctic Circle.

My 14-year-old and I spend a day driving around in Burlington, doing errands and a little Christmas shopping and I buy her a toasted cheese and ham sandwich she loves. For the first time, I notice she’s watching the college students. Waiting in line for that sandwich, we’re surrounded by a very tall men’s athletic team. They’re buying enormous containers of juice and talking about what that night might turn into, and a friend of theirs who has taken a job as a horticulturist at a well-known college. What’s the difference, they muse, between horticulturist and agriculturist?

Only much later, talking with her older sister that night, do I realize how intently this quiet teen has taken in that talk, how she’s imagining the multiple possibilities for her young adult life, not so very far off.

At a stoplight, she asked me what it’s like to be a college student. I thought back to my six years in school — four as an undergraduate, two in graduate school. What’s six years in a life? A lot, or not so much. She waited for my answer. Finally, I said, It’s like nothing else.

Likewise, a year from now she’ll be driving me around, with her learner’s permit. About parenting? From toddler to teen? It’s like nothing else.

There are many times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you’d be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.

― Ayelet Waldman

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Maple

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

End of the day, in the gloaming, I’m running up the road. A little bit of snow is falling, and — dare I write this in December? — it’s just nice. That sweet, snowglobe kind of beauty.

In not so many minutes, I know I’ll need to get off this somewhat slippery and icy road before a pickup turns a bend a bit too quickly, its driver maybe distracted by the same things I am, the enchanting serenity of these maples, this field, the light funneling down over the horizon.

I know, too, as I start cooking dinner that I’ll listen to VPR. My listening, or not, has absolutely zero bearing on congressional hearings. I’ll be irked. And yet, I’ll listen, if for no other reason to participate in the dinner conversation at our house.

For for these few moments, though, I revel in the sky, the snow, the crows in the distance flying home, too.

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

― Derrick Jensen

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Hardwick, Vermont

The Mind of Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Poet Wallace Stevens wrote: One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.

In northern Vermont — thus far — the winter has been cold and dark and ice, scant on snow. When the sun is out, we lift our faces, as if our bare cheeks can gather the light like June’s strawberries in our hands.

The mind of winter is the Vermonter’s mind, for sure, for sure — slipping away in the swimming and gardening season, returning in late fall.

Each of us in my house is sunk into work and school in ways that seem particularly pleasant — at this time. Keep the house warm, the cats and kids fed, and walk under the stars at night.

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Barr Hill, Greensboro, Vermont

And So Begins… December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Sun in Vermont’s December? Sunday morning, we discovered perfect snowflakes scattered over the icy ground.

This final month of the year always seems more shut in, filled with post-holiday and pre-holiday and holiday, with snow piling (although more ice than snow here yet), with a warm house and knitting and those sleeping cats. What’s homier than curls of sleeping cats?

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.

― Dylan Thomas

 

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Note the washed-pale blue: save for sunrise and sunset, that’s about it for color.

Taxi Driver

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I’m at the gas station, in the far back, where the light is out, filling diesel cans by the light of my iPhone, when an older woman pulls up and starts talking to me.

Busy, busy, she was at work that day.

As she’s waiting for me to finish, and I’m crouched in the dark, I ask what she does for work. I’m thinking nurse’s assistant. I’m dead wrong. She’s a taxi driver. She’s taken people to Chicago, to Boston, and then everywhere around the state. To the grocery store, or south to Bennington. For years, she had been a long-distance semi driver, so the taxi gig is a kind of retirement, keep-her-busy kind of gig.

I’ve never met a taxi driver in rural Vermont, as common an occupation as that might be elsewhere.

Peat moss from Canada, she tells me. By this time, she’s taken my phone and lights my way. Blustery, she tells me. But that doesn’t stop her from wiping off my cans with her rag and lifting them into the back of my car, saying my hands must be cold.

I offer to hold the light for her, but she sends me on my way. She’s left the hatch of her vehicle open, so her side of the gas pump is relatively well-lit. She knows her way around a dark gas station; she knows what she’s doing.

Last of November. I drive home to where my daughters are heating Thanksgiving leftovers in the oven.

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One Day, Otherwise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A few drops of rain graced the very end of our walk yesterday afternoon. Later, our kitchen redolent with baking pies, rain hammered on the roof.

I hope all my readers have many, many things to celebrate. Oddly enough, on this day I’m mostly grateful to be in a place where I can be grateful. My life has not always been that way — or, more accurately perhaps, I’ve been pressed at times where I could think only from here to there, and not have the luxury of gratefulness. I know I’m not alone in that. Gratitude, it seems to me, needs not material or financial space (although those things certainly help), but the spiritual space to be simply in the here, the now.

One of the very loveliest gratitude poems is Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise. Here’s a few lines on this holiday morning.

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

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And, more happiness in a world with such dear creatures, my beloved hardworking cat.