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Wolves in the Moonlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the deep of last night, I woke with a south wind rushing over the ridge behind our house. In my sleep, I’d been dreaming of howling wolves in the moonlight, and when I opened the balcony door to stave off the wolves from my household, a strange warmth blew in over the snow. In the moonlight, I saw only the bare sticks of blueberry bushes, the hydrangea with its papery blossoms, long since dead yet stubbornly hanging on. Persistent.

With the wind murmuring like the sea, I lay reading Anthony Doerr’s memoir about living in Rome with his wife and two infant sons. In that ancient city, he watched flocks of starlings rise and dive in enormous flocks, while he held a baby, the little one drinking milk. Afterward, the book closed, I lay thinking of the pigeons I’d studied not long ago, weaving in and out of a slate-shingled church steeple in Montpelier. I’d stood alone on the library steps, admiring the ribbons of flight, and then I simply closed my eyes and listened to the cooing.

Knowingly or not, we all stand there… reading the omens of the birds. The real question, the one that keeps me coming back to this railing, night after night, is Why do they bother to be so beautiful?

Starling, earthling. How little we understand, Nero had a starling that spoke Greek and Latin, Mozart kept a starling in a cage beside his piano.

–– Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

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Photo by Molly S./Lake Elmore, Vermont

Midwinter Lady Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Winter moon… in my novel, the Lovely Lady Moon appears from the beginning so frequently I think of her as a character, too. The other night, I lay reading in bed for the longest time, and then my brother started that texting thing again. He has this way of texting like no one else I know: as if he wraps his deepest, pithiest, and often funniest words in a rag, knots it up with twine and rock, and chucks it over the Connecticut River to me. Afterwards, I lay in the cold room under a thick wool blanket, staring through that uncurtained window, thinking of those words of my brother’s, his phrases of what had given him a sweet, rare joy that day.

I learned to follow the moon’s phases all those myriad March nights of sugaring, as I hurried back and forth from the house to the sugarhouse, over treacherous ice and sucking mud, beneath her radiance…. which channeled into all those nights I was awake with nursing or sick children, my eyes watching the moon as she rose and arced and descended through my slender view of the cosmos.

Those nights, in my rural house, I wondered about other women all over the planet who were awake with their babies, feeding and tending these tiny beings, their faces turned up to Lady Moon’s pristine presence – utterly familiar, uncrackably mysterious, infinitely beyond the touch of our hands. Steady as clockwork, infallible, she beams on: a beacon.

Bright Moon

                                                                after Buson  #843

Cold is the bright moon
All those trees
and this vast sky.

David Budbill, from AFTER THE HAIKU OF YOSA BUSON

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Photo by Molly S./West Woodbury, Vermont

The Better Part of a Day…Kid Land

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving to pick up my daughter at basketball practice today, I kept thinking about David Lipsky’s book about David Foster Wallace, and Infinite Jest, which I can’t wait to read. Am I nuts? When am I going to fit in a 1,000-page plus novel? And yet, David Foster Wallace is now my current favorite three-word combination.

At school,  pleasant and convivial as my fellow parents may be, the finer part of a day is not talk about how legislation winds down all the way into our kindergarten classes. So much of this adult world is talk, talk, while the deeper issues that lie in our lives are often poverty – material and spiritual.

After basketball practice, the girls discovered hidden doors under the stage and crawled deep into the dark underbelly of their school. I crouched before the open little door and listened to their voices, young and female, problem-solving, figuring out the lay of their land, navigating obstacles. This, I thought, is what the adult world needs: a way to the look at the familiar world and find a hidden door, to look at our own world in ways we’d never imagined, from deep down in its guts, to see what holds us together.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?

David Foster Wallace

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Hardwick, Vermont

Winter: the Whale’s Belly

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Our kitchen was forty-two degrees this morning. I leaned over the range and chipped a ridge in ice along the bottom of the window, and thought this is getting a little ridiculous. And I forgotten cream for the coffee. Often, in these morning – no Biblical scholar, not even a church-goer – I think of Jonah in the belly of his whale.

But then, home again from a basketball game, the wind blowing snow in our faces, my older daughter sang out, You can tell the light’s coming back! 

Indeed. Through translucent clouds, the day was yet bright, the moon a glowing gem tucked above the bare branches of maple trees. After a frozen day, the end was such a lovely place, with traces of snow falling, the white all around pure and white, and the light familiar and beckoning as that long-off spring.

...Winter is for women ----
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

– Sylvia Plath, "Wintering"
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Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont

Gnomon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was in high school, my father, sister, and I read Joyce’s short story, “The Sisters.” I was thinking of that story again today, in this kind of chilly and drab weather that intimates how I imagine Ireland. The opening paragraph is one of my most favorite in all literature. In the story’s opening lines are three words – paralysis, gnomon, simony – that are keys to understanding the story.

With my daughters today, we were talking about family, and patterns of behavior, and I began to wonder myself, What are the keys to understanding each of us? For one of my daughters, at the age of three, I would have used tricycle and rabbit as her own particular talisman; for my other child, the word sister.

We use language so easily, so freely, that we’re often careless with its power, misunderstanding and underestimating its capability, both for destruction and redemption – or as a key to see into deeper recesses of our inner lives.

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

– James Joyce

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Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont

 

Ides Of January

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Halfway through the middle of January, halfway through a school year.

With the bottoms of doors we don’t use in winter dampened shut with rolled rugs to stave out the drafts, and the curtains drawn tight every night against the cold glass, the back entryway filled with firewood, the living room floor strewn with bark chips, the winter (despite the little snow) is hammered solidly against our house. While the children are visiting grandparents this weekend, I’m determined to press through my own inside work piled unevenly on my desk, the couch, a chair beside the wood stove. Much of that is good news – my book is heading towards a second printing – and the winter is a steady time to work.

But yet this is the time of year I lust for those humid summer nights, the windows open, the tree frogs singing. On our dirt road this afternoon, my daughter, driving, nearly stopped the car when a flock of wild turkeys clambered out of the apple trees and surrounded us, running beside us with their skinny legs and awkward bodies. She was frustrated, wanting to hurry home and go for a run.

I unrolled the window and leaned out of the rolling car, my arm outstretched for the nearest bird, the breeze cold and hard in my face.

She started laughing. What are you doing?

Catching dinner. Steer a little to the right, will you? I nearly have this one.

Ides of January. Time to mix it up a little. Lots of winter left.

Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding cake.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

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West Woodbury, Vermont