Keeping the Roof Intact

January 15, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night, my daughters began shouting in the other room. In what I can best describe as my attitude of what fresh hell now? I asked what was up.

A raccoon was climbing up our cedar-shingled house in the dark. Which might fairly well explaining living with kids. Expect what you could never expect. Say you’re deep into an Elena Ferrante novel and you realize a mole has scurried out from behind a kitchen cabinet and is now in the sink, checking out an unwashed dinner skillet. Where is that on a day’s plan?

We trapped the mole and released it down the road (at the neighbors’ driveway), and the girls determined the raccoon tracks led into the sugarhouse and didn’t come out (fine).

The younger daughter and her friend ran into the house yesterday and grabbed ice skates. The roadside ditches were frozen perfectly for ice skating.

This afternoon is filled with sunlight and lemon meringue pie baking. How’s that for poetry?

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.

– Epictetus

Author-ity

January 14, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

With my sixth-grader’s basketball season’s schedule, I’ve been spending some working hours hidden on the elementary school’s back staircase, working at a child’s desk so old it has an inkwell hole. I love this old schoolhouse; dating to the first World War, the schoolhouse is not only solidly built, but beautifully as well, with interior windows, pressed tin ceilings, and detailed woodwork. Schools are built like prisons now, with none of this school’s elegance. Carefully kept up, the schoolhouse isn’t shabby at all, but is comfortably well-used and loved.

The other day, a teacher stopped to talk and then showed me two books her students had written and illustrated which made me laugh out loud. The kids’ books were just so darn good. What the teacher had done was allow the children unfettered freedom. I’ve found unbinding myself from the expectations of peers and the social framework around myself very difficult at times. Think how hard that is: to dig deeply into the unknown terrain of creativity – and then know how joyous that is, too.

The teacher told me about one little girl who said, I am the author of my book.

How powerful that knowledge is. Whether that child becomes a novelist or a welder, I think of that statement like a candle that girl may hold before her, a single flame, burning brightly.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

– Marcus Aurelius

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Put on Sunglasses

January 12, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Thaw. The wind screamed all night, breaking the deep cold’s back, strewing broken branches around our house, and even shattering a storm window. In return, we have a reprieve from the deep cold, and the earth – still buried beneath snow – exudes the fragrance of spring’s promise, albeit months yet in the coming.

That there’s promise in scent is remarkable in these monochrome winter days, when much of the talk seems about politics and what the future might bring. None of us know.

My teenager insisted on driving to school this morning on an icy road. I gave her two pieces of advice and let her go. How could I keep her now, at nearly 18-years-old? It’s been overcast for months in Vermont, and perhaps all over the country, and yet she and her friends insist on wearing sunglasses, these young women, so full of giddy promise.

Old man’s love affair;
in trying to forget it,
a winter rainfall.

– Buson

Sap line

Talented Kid

January 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Ever since the holidays, I’ve noticed the same boy riding a unicycle to the Main Street Middle School as I drive through Montpelier on my way to work in the mornings. The cycle is fat-wheeled, sensibly built for Vermont’s rugged terrain. I can see concentration tight on the boy’s face, as he cycles down the steep hill, wearing a helmet and a winter coat, pack on his back.

The boy is maybe eleven or twelve.

Although I don’t know this boy at all, I find myself looking for him on the sidewalk, admiring his tenacity as – at five degrees fahrenheit the other morning! – he pedals down that uneven, icy incline. I imagine him arriving at school, triumphantly cherry-cheeked, hoisting his one-wheeled steed over his shoulder. As I go into my own day, I wonder what kind of man he will become, this hearty, focused, child unicyclist.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.

– William Saroyan

A Fierce Heart

January 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Years ago, the house we lived in had an enormous King stove, about as ugly as could be with a rust-colored shield. When that stove threw off BTUs, its damper clicked like a mouse in a live trap, rattling.

I once owned a terrible round coal stove I used for wood. Its damper sometimes slipped loose, and I feared that stove would burn down the house. Eventually, that stove was donated to the scrap yard.

Now, cold as my house is around the edges, with too many doors, recycled and unweatherized windows, far-from-well-done insulation, my stove burns its mighty heart, truly keeping my girls and myself alive in these wintry nights. Of the few objects I hold most dear – my cast-iron skillet, laptop, garden shovel, knitting needles – this stove, its brass-handled door so familiar in my hand, is my dearest companion these days, place of succor.

Around our house lies sugary white, sprinkled with a wavering trail of black ash, but inside is glowing red and yellow, flames laced at the edges with blue.

….Oh, now I sing praises to a wood fire,
to the heat this smoky burning liberates,
the heat that keeps us warm all winter.
Oh, praise this primordial fire, praise heat
in its most basic form:
the blessed warmth that comes from
our old, wood burning, Round Oak stove.

– David Budbill, “Ode to Fire, Ode to Heat”

Photo by Molly S.

Ancient Arts

January 8, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh, Vermont community! Young and older women came out on a cold morning to my library for knitting lessons, with bags of yarn, needles, questions, and a lot of desire. At the end, a young woman who had capably learned the three key skills – cast-on, knit, purl – smiled and said she hadn’t believed she could ever learn to knit. But I so wanted to, she said.

One of the things I love most about knitting is its communal aspect. Begin knitting and the world of knitters will come to you, drawn to the creation your fingers are spinning from yarn. Write a book, and you remain in your own solitary interior world, but cast on some stitches, brew a pot of coffee, work and chat. Creative counterbalance.