Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Out!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

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

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

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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Last Week of February

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Our days reflect this mixed-up weather: a jumble of crystalline perfect snow, excessive heat for February, and an unraveling disorientation. Where’s everyone going? Who’s coming and when?

Maybe it’s simply the place I am in my life, solidly in my forties, when long-term marriages of so many friends are cracking – some to fail, some certainly to mend and reknit, even more tightly – and that beastly presence of cancer rears in overlapping ripples of my intimate and not-so-near circles. The upshot, perhaps, is that we’re all in the same literal journey, living our lives in an infinitude of variations, all of us making some wise and some foolish decisions, chancing into ill-fortune or light-hearted luck.

This is midwinter, season of no greenery, no blossoms, no barefoot running over lake-dampened sand. No garden to gather a basket of greens for dinner. No sun-sweet Brandywines in my hand. No stash of cucumbers the kids have quartered and sprinkled with snipped dill and coarsely ground salt.

Midwinter is the season of the moon on the snow-buried garden, the stars icy against the night sky. Midwinter is the pondering season.

A reader essentially my whole life, I return to talismans of poetry, repeatedly. I read James Joyce first as a teenager, his Dubliners filled with rooms conversely both shadowy and light-filled. Over and over, I think of the ending of “The Dead,” with steadily falling snow, that image suffused with sadness and grief, yet also with an odd acceptance – even more, perhaps, a genuine comfort in the “generalness” of snow, the transience of all our lives, how each of us will rub up against hardship. A piece of this luck, certainly, and some of the outcome simple grace in how we navigate our lives.

He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce, “The Dead”

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Secret Chute

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

House hunting with my enthusiastic contingent, us adults stood in a dim basement yesterday, so cold we kept swaying from one foot to the other, trying to stay warm. Outside, the children tromped in the snowy yard, warmer in the sunlight than we were in the house.

In the basement, someone discovered a wooden chute, carefully nailed shut from the cement floor to the under boards of the dining room above. Intently curious, my friend pried off a board, and I peered up through the darkness where I saw a gleam of daylight through an ornate floor grate.

What the heck?

It made no sense to any of us, running through our logical possibilities.

In the end, blowing on my hands, I said, But it must have made sense to whoever built it. Look at the labor.

Upstairs, the children were laughing and throwing snowballs at each other, busy in their own meaningful kids’ work.

Whether I buy the house or not, we’ve spent serious time already, running palms over pipes, fingering up loose linoleum, rapping on old plaster, getting to know just a few mysteries of this old house.

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context.

Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic – and How to Get It Back

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West Woodbury, Vermont

What the Heck is Figurative Language, Anyway?

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On my drive to work, I wind through a spidery maze of dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais before I hit the paved County Road and sail into Montpelier. The drive, while long, is exquisitely lovely, changing from fall’s florescence to this winter’s sparkling white. Just after I hit the main road, I always glance at a red farmhouse to my right where whoever lives there has stacked firewood in a round pile, fanning out from a center. I always look to see if they’ve started to burn that wood yet.

So far, not yet. I’m guessing there’s a stash behind the rambling farmhouse, and those folks haven’t wanted to dig into this craftily-stacked wood.

Yesterday, driving on slushy and messy roads, a crow flew before my windshield right at that house, flying so near I could see its shiny eye, orange drape of tongue, a white chunk of breakfast in its mouth.

I once garnered those things as a sign of something, but yesterday it occurred to me that maybe the crow was merely hungry, flying in a hurry back home to eat.

Sign enough?

Surely.

I kept driving into the accumulating snowfall.

….Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles

but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.

So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.

Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy….

Sherman Alexie, “Crow Testament”

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