Vermont

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

Vermont.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

VTDigger‘s reporting about Burlington, Vermont.

Everything Is Made Of Labor 

The inchworm’s trajectory: 

pulse of impulse. The worm 

is tender. It won’t live 

long. Its green glows. 

It found a place to go. 

Arrange us with meaning,

the words plead. Find the thread 

through the dark.

— Farnaz Fatemi

Two Bald Eagles.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

After losing Yahtzee twice and then again to make a third, I’m in the passenger seat, heaing north for no particular reason at all. I’ve forgotten the library books I meant to return, and my bend of mind is that it makes no real difference at all.

Just out of town, I spy two bald eagles on the reservoir, hunched on the beginnings of winter’s ice, unmistakable with their dark bodies, the white of their heads. We drive around a bend, disappearing up the road that’s so narrow and tight there’s no good place to stop. By the time the road widens, I know the way back is impassable through thickets. And so we go on. Talking, talking.

The eagles are perhaps the best of holiday metaphors, utterly outside the realm of any camera lens. (Please, my family might beg, could you lay off the insistence of seeing the world in metaphors?)

This, then: two mighty raptors, the season’s early ice, the rising moon. The evening now is cold enough that the moon sprinkles frostily. I dump the compost in the bin and crunch back over the scattered snow, hungry for the embers in my stove.

Yet once being born there is no turning back.

— Hayao Miyazaki

Thanksgiving Poem.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

— Mary Oliver

On Not Speaking the Language of Cat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

My cat Acer, above, exemplifies not only feline beauty but a steady reminder that I do not speak Cat, that I live in a world rich with beings going above their own wise lives, despite the lack of an opposable thumb.

For anyone who’s never lived where the days constrict in November and December, here’s a snapshot: I’m home at four and our house is satisfyingly warm as my daughter, home on college break, fed the fire. In the dusk that drifts down, my neighbor and I walk to the town library, which seems a natural destination. When we return, we stand in the light from the windows of her house, remarking about the dark.

We talk about little things that seem irrelevant — our children and Thanksgiving and my asparagus bed gone to weed — these things that stitch our lives whole. The air holds just the right amount of cold, nothing too fierce but sharp enough to whet desire for my warm house, the wood smoke trailing from my chimney. In its wordless language, the half-moon rises through the pines around my neighbor’s house, luminous in the black sky where the stars appear one by one, and then suddenly the Big Dipper glows. The horizon is a thin crimson line, and then that, too, winks down into the night.

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts