Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Melody

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Remember Robert J. Lurtsema and Morning Pro Musica’s sweetly singing birds?

My family had an orange cat named Oliver who would swipe at the window when he heard this opening, searching for birds. We believed that cat brilliant, God rest his feline soul.

Mozart’s music has been gracing our early mornings, these first few days in March. I’ve been skimming through a biography of Wolfgang – until I stopped suddenly at this excerpt from a letter from Mozart himself.

I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that – young as I am – I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator.

Enough said.

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West Woodbury, Vermont

Gift-Bearing Guest

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Many months ago, I wrote in this blog about visiting a friend who was gravely ill. I’d known this friend for years, and, driving him home from a doctor’s appointment, he imagined raising chickens and pigs and lambs. I believed he was not long from death; I could see the nearness of his demise in his ochre skin. Today, he stopped by with pork, from three pigs he slaughtered on Monday. We exchanged stories about our kids, standing in my kitchen he helped build.

Those pigs represent a dream come true for my friend: more of this life.

He has the money problems he’s always had, but he copes with those challenges as he always has, making do, one way or another. The little bit of help I offered him I gave as freely as I’ve given anything in this life, with no thought of repayment. After he left, I opened up the cardboard box and found ham steaks, painstakingly packed, for the short distance from his house to mine.

Here’s a typewritten piece of Woodbury’s history I found in our little library’s stacks.

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Flipping the Lesson Inside Out

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As part of my on-going museum fascination, my daughters and I stopped by the Burlington library today to check out a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about human evolution. Pointing to one panel, I (no doubt, tediously) explained to my 11-year-old about the progression of homo sapiens’ brain development depicted by a series of illustrations.

My girl pointed to a nearby rack of magazines with a crazy-haired illustration of our nation’s current commander-in-chief and laughed. We’ve progressed?

Which pretty much ended my history lesson.

We walked down the street for coffee and little cupcakes.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

– Charles Darwin

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Photo by Molly S./Burlington, Vermont

Out!

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These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.

Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.

That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon-beholders.

– Matsuo Bashō

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Hardwick, Vermont

Largesse

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A full-throated sunny thaw yesterday. With laundry hung on the line, the younger daughter and I dropped off outgrown clothes at the Salvation Army where two volunteers pointed out blackbirds in maple branches spread over the back lot.

Wearing shorts and a white t-shirt, my daughter and I ate lunch outside on a bench, watching folks walk by in everything from summer skirts to zipped-up parkas. It’s that kind of season.

Later, my friend and I walked a dirt road into Hardwick, while the girls clambered over the chicken coop and threw snowballs at each other. The dirt roads ran with trickling channels of melting snow and thawing frost, catching glittering gold coins of sunlight.

There’s that old adage about traveling the world over to discover what you were looking for all those miles was in your own backyard. I’m grit-minded enough to acknowledge that yesterday an antique claw foot bathtub emerged upside down in our yard from melted snow. A ripped pair of outgrown jeans that fell from the clothesline last fall and froze beneath a snowbank bled bluely up through ice. The messiness of compost spreads near my garden. But our treasure is infinite, too.

I’m reading Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition now, a fascinating tale written by a Spanish conquistador. Again, the same story of desire and seeking, of gold and suffering. I can speculate how this short narrative will end…..

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.

– Christopher Columbus

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In the Back of the Closet

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All day long, streams have been running down our mountain; the road muddies and ruts, the crack in the cellar drips water, the doves coo. The urgency of thaw. Our world will freeze hard again, assuage, then clench with cold, pulling and loosening its long unhurried way into spring.

Patches of rain-sodden earth emit the hopeful scent of life releasing and breathing again. Surely, we’ll find coltsfoot in March this year.

Inside, boxing up ripped and myriad-stained coats, I find a leather jacket at the closet’s far back, stiff with disuse. No one lives in this house anymore who would fit into this jacket.

My sister and I, as teenagers, had a favorite phrase from TC Boyle’s The End of the World: “hard, soulless, and free.” A mother of a teenager myself now, I see how that line fits an adolescent, an emerging self needing a slick, fashionable shell to shield a tender heart.

All around us is the hardness of winter’s ice, and now simultaneously suffused with the streams running rapidly towards Lake Champlain, to where the rivers run north, to the distant sea.

I can’t help myself. I lift the cuffs of that jacket as though clenching the hands of the person who once wore that jacket, but that’s all; that’s it. I let the sleeves fall, and I step back out of the closet and shut the door. I’ll pass the jacket to someone else. Not today, but possibly tomorrow. If not tomorrow, surely before the thaw has bled itself out.

All night long, I sleep above the dripping in the cellar, from the cracks in the foundation poorly laid.

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

– TC Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

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