Hardwick Sign of Spring #3

March 31, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A dozen turkey vultures circled overhead, spiraling on wind currents, silently following us on a walk. They’re back, my daughter noted.

A day of serious wet: cold rain, rivers running high with melt-off, black mud thawing.

We walked in no particular hurry, talking, my daughter awkward in her sister’s too-large boots, pausing to study the vultures circling low, their wing feathers black against the clouds. As our path turned, the circling birds followed us.

I’m fascinated by the landscape around us of junco and robin, hawk and vulture, vegetable garden and cemetery. My daughter zipped her jacket against the raw spring. Those vultures are following us, she said. Creepy.

To pretend that all is right with the world when it is not, to use art as a pair of rose-colored glasses to distort the reality of the world, to paint over the agonies of our time, is to misuse art. Any light and life, joy and ecstasy we can derive from art in our time must be paid for with the admission that this joy and goodness comes to us out of the barbarous darkness all around us.

— David Budbill in Yvonne Daley, Vermont Writers: a State of Mind

Hardwick, VT, Sign of Spring #2

March 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sign of spring, I suppose, is small-talking with the other parents on a slushy soccer field, watching our kids in a nordic ski relay. Sure, that’s spring in Vermont, borne with the usual good-humor of nordic ski families, and well compensated by an eclectic and unbelievably delicious potluck. At how many potlucks do you find a wedge of homemade sheep’s milk blue cheese?

But a more heartening sign is breaking out the lawn chairs for afternoon in plein air studying. Note snow.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

— Rumi

Barre, VT, Courthouse

March 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A retired Barre police officer sat beside me while I was waiting outside a courtroom in the Washington County Criminal Court, and he mentioned he thought he knew my former husband. He suggested that clearly I didn’t know my former husband all that well, and he told me some wrongdoings he knew my former spouse had committed. I protested that the man he referred to wasn’t my former husband.

The officer persisted. Listening, I began to wonder how much I knew about anyone, really, in the end. In my bag, I had a copy of Janet Malcolm’s biography of Sylvia Path, The Silent Woman, which I had read with enormous interest many years ago, right before I was married. In this book, Ted Hughes is quoted as writing, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.”

I knew when I entered that courtroom, again, as I had before, that I would need to relinquish some of the darkest facts of my life. Just the facts, ma’am, and yet the facts seem so much. The reality is, of course, none of us own the facts of our lives. We’re hardly discrete entities, spreading into each others’ lives messily as we do.

Just the facts. Granite photos, the trio of a judicial panel, bailiff, what must be an endless of stream of adults coming and going through the security at the door. Outside, robins sang in the maples behind the courthouse. I’d been there so frequently, I knew the way out of the one-way streets.

A $5 Rainbow-Bright Kickball

March 25, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My cheerful kids returned yesterday with a bright pink blow-up beach ball they found on a back road. The older daughter, driving, had pulled over, so the 12-year-old and her friend ran back along the ice-rutted road for the garish pink ball. At home, they mended the gash with silver duct tape.

Vermont’s March palette lies heavy on variations of white — the pureness of fresh snow, the near-gray of thawed ice refrozen with dirt particles — dark green pine, the black of gravel roads where the town crew has strewn sand, the crimson patches on redwing blackbirds.

Full of spring energy with the lengthy daylight after dinner, the girls and I walked around the neighborhood. The younger splashed through a puddle and noted she stepped over the moon’s reflection. I bought the girls a $5 kickball, striped in rainbow colors. Deep into twilight, so cold we kept blowing on our bare hands, the girls and I played four-square, that brilliantly-colored ball bouncing through the thickening dusk.

And then the girls took the ball inside and played in her bedroom, confusing the cats.

Here’s the artwork from the newest issue of Taproot, with an essay I wrote about our house. The artist’s creation is a remarkable likeness, both in architecture and emotion, although the blossom season hasn’t yet returned…..

TaprootHEAL-16_preview

Young Woman Traveling

March 22, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rising in the middle of the night is synonymous for me with journeying: catch a plane to visit a family member in need or set off on a long road trip, like our exquisitely beautiful drive out of Prince Edward Island last summer as the dawn gradually rose, and my 12-year-old and I listened to Canadian radio while the two others slept curled on each other in the backseat.

Once upon a time that miles-long bridge would have terrified me: last summer it hardly seemed long enough, suspended over all that ocean.

Now my older daughter, starting her womanhood journey, rises in the dark and returns long after dark, fascinated by her classes and job, brimming with an enthusiasm she lacked all through adolescence. When she leaves, I open my laptop for my day’s work, but I wonder, Where will her life lead?

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.

— Gloria Steinem

Way Past the Ides of March

March 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I read The Long Winter to my six-year-old when I was pregnant with my second daughter, lying down at 4 in the afternoon, too tired for anything else but reading. She was entranced — although not enamored. Twist hay into fuel? Grim.

Like so many kids, I loved those books, with the childhood stories of vanity cakes and rag dolls, the excitement of Christmas ponies and a family who lived in a dugout. I’m reading Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires — the adult story around the Wilder family revealed as loss, loss, loss…. How glad I am for our warm house, the morning sunlight in our kitchen with the cats sleeping at my feet. We’re on the far side of winter today.

15 degrees today, with brilliant sunlight: I flung open the doors and windows, whooshing out the winter air in our house, throwing blankets over the porch railings and leaning over the snowbanks, listening to robins.

Here’s illustrator Garth Williams: