Vermont

Where’s the Calvary?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 17 Comments

I stop by a friend’s house with some cookies, and we talk for a few moments on her back porch. Sunlight streams in through the windows, rare and cherished in December.

Driven more by the solstice than the calendar, this time of year is the time of reckoning: what’s happened, what’s lying fallow, what might emerge next year? 2023 was a year in my immediate world of wildfire smoke, of floods and more floods, of a social fabric thinning with half-truths and deception and irascibility. A year of people around me who suffered losses in ways that matter immeasurably.

The world we’ve created drives us to reduction, to categorizing our lives in an Instagram post, a hashtag. For anyone who’s even remotely following our personal or national stories, the facts align otherwise. History may likely prove that the precipice of 2024 was a still moment before a tsunami. A handful of years ago, on a sunny autumn afternoon, I faced a still point in my life when I realized the cavalry I’d relied upon to get me out of a marriage gone sour was not saddling up and heading my way. In what was really no joke, I sized up my assets, secured my perimeter, and penned myself a map to head out for new territory. I was, in fact, my own cavalry. Fresh horses arrived, thankfully, at key places. What surprised me the most was the generosity of strangers who, in passing, offered me small precious things like swallows of magic elixirs.

Here’s the thing: in my way of thinking, December is the holy month because of its deep darkness, utterly mysterious, profoundly unknowable, utterly unnegotiable, sometimes terrifying. It’s the season to open our hearts beyond that reduction. On her porch, the cold gnawed my hands holding those cookies. As we spoke, I thought of the songbirds that flock around this house in summer. We are the cavalry, in ways we often don’t rationalize or consider. Perhaps this is the dearest part of December: that in the darkness that transcends any human doing, our eyes are always searching for the moon and starlight, for luminosity. And the light is always there.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Heading towards the winter solstice, the days are cropped short. I ski in the woods. The next afternoon, after a spurt of warmth, I remove my skis to navigate around patches of tree roots, the exposed carpet of pine needles.

By 4:30, darkness envelopes us, velvety and broken only by our brief human endeavors of a line of twinkling holiday lights, streetlamps, parking lots lit up like precious jewels. Like a wild creature roused by these warm December nights, I prowl through the village and along the river.

Returning home one late afternoon, I pause beside Woodbury Lake. A crescent moon illuminates the blue-black sky, the outline of its orb a faint round: a promise of January’s full wolf moon. Twilight’s but a few moments, molten gold rapidly consumed by the unstoppable night.

I remind myself that December is the time of descent, that the darkness I eyed so warily in October is now my mellifluous friend. I’ve been here before, in so many seasons of my life — dissatisfied and cracked, heart-full, my eyes attuned to starlight. Living into December and the solstice and the winter stretching ahead means stepping into the world’s great vessel, full of so much.

Here’s an article about the world’s first seed bank forwarded to me by a reader.

Your place in the world.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

A rare mid-December day of sunlight, and the town seems festive, stirred by the truly false promise of spring. Not true, not true.

December’s a season of reckoning, of that inevitable look back across the months, to a year ago, to five, more. I’m old enough now that the seasons jumble into a Jacob’s Ladder of years: the Christmas of the hoar frost, the year a mouse drank from our Christmas tree stand, the 60 degree Christmas Eve my brother’s dog went swimming and gasped from the cold. The December snow fell every single day. That year, holed in the house with sick children, I wondered if I would go mad; I did not. All past, all somehow yet still with us. Heraclitus reminds us that the single constant in this life is change, and yet it’s still the same molecular stuff arranging and re-arranging, by the force of the universe and our sheer human will.

Oh December: you heartbreaker, you. Sleet and radiant sunlight in the span of a few days. Icicles drip. Chickadees whistle in the white pines. My wood chores finished, the compost bin dug out, I linger in the sun, leaning against the house, reading Paolo Cognetti:

You find your place in the world much less predictably than you’d imagine.

The sound of wind.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Seems a little early, pre-solstice and all, to be citing winter haiku, but the thing is, winter haiku is just so darn good. In so many ways, winter brings out the New Englander in each of us, as we ramble on about previous winters (the year back in the mid-90s when antifreeze froze, or the year school was cancelled was for three days straight). Or how to survive with savviness: long quilted coat, chop wood, frying pan on the sheets. When a few strands of sun tumbled out of the clouds this afternoon, I dashed outside to fill my eyes with light. Hope the weather’s keeping you more interested than inconvenienced…..

Winter solitude—

In a world of one color

The sound of wind.

— Bashō

Vermont Almanac.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My copy of the fourth Vermont Almanac arrives in my mailbox. Remember real mail? I remember exchanging long letters with friends for years. Email is fine and dandy, but email has no smell. I open the book in my kitchen and breathe in the scent of ink and paper. I was fortunate to write and edit a bit for this issue.

These days, on my moonlit evening walks, living in Vermont is often on my mind. So much has happened in my own life and in this dear state: a summer of rain and wildfire smoke, a flood, beloved Montpelier drowned, a rise in violent crime. And yet, I’m tugged more deeply into this state I’ve called home nearly all my adult life. Reading this hefty book, I’m reminded, again, of how yankee ingenuity is so often yankee generosity, too. While our nation (and much of the globe) as a whole is navigating unsettled and often stormy waters, I’m heartened by Vermonters’ ruggedness, tenderness, and, so often, outright humor. Who could imagine a world without these fine things?

Hope is no mere aspiration that things will turn out well. Hope instead takes our hand, shines a light ahead, and pushes us onward into the messiness and uncertainties of life.

— Bryan Pfeiffer, Vermont Almanac, Volume IV

Pocket Treasures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On this Sunday afternoon, my guest departs in the falling snow. When I head out for a walk, the cold has sunk in, deep enough that tendrils of snow cling to the grass and trees branches. The snow bends down last summer’s sunflowers in the garden. I leave my woodbox full, the cats sleeping, plates on the table. I intend only to return a handful of library books, but I head up the hill and around the high school and into the woods where the snow lies deeply and slows me down.

It’s December. Snow circles down, lovely and miraculous, this silent transformation.

Here’s a few lines for winter:

“Treasure what you find
already in your pocket, friend.”
― Ted Kooser