Vermont

Household chores and world events.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The last day of 2023, I let the fire in my wood stove extinguish, and I take my stove apart. The stove has been spitting ash and spark through a damper, a chore I’m driven to by sheer necessity.

I unscrew the stovepipe and the back heat shield and plate, and carefully remove the two honeycomb metal filters that are choked with fine ash. It’s a messy job, and I’m a messy woman. My curious cat walks through the cinders and leaves dirty paw prints on my white enamel kitchen sink.

When I’ve put the stove together again, I find the driest kindling I can in my barn and build a small fire and slowly heat the stove again, kneeling before the glass where the flames ripple, listening to public radio hash over the year. I add wood, study the flames, murmur to my cat who is seriously invested in this warmth and the doubtless impending feline nap.

I’d once torn a photograph from a New Yorker issue and thumbtacked it near my desk of Marina Oswald, taken the morning after her husband Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for assassinating President Kennedy. Her face twisted unhappily, she’s pinning cloth diapers on a line. So it goes: the necessity of domestic life as the great events of the world unfold.

My stove burns merrily. I bake spanakopita and invite a few dear ones who bring chocolate. This morning, January. A drift of snowflakes. The lean winter light.

The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.

— Issa

Real Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Much as I pushed the hippie thing in my younger years, I’ve often sneered (albeit silently) at the tea drinkers, save for my pregnancy years. I’ve always been much more of a knock-back-a-couple-of-espressos woman. But this sodden late afternoon finds me leaning against my woodpile in the dreary rain, sipping steaming tea, remembering my girlhood love of The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, and scorned Sylvia Plath.

As for the photo above, our Christmas adventures involved inspection of the July flood’s toll on the rail trail’s bridges. Christmas Day, we followed the former railroad bed deep into the woods, where this enormous culvert was skillfully and laboriously constructed a few generations ago. For reasons that need no elaboration, this seems a fitting photo for the trailing end of 2023. Unless you know by word-of-mouth or friend, you could walk through these woods and never see this beauty. Which would be a kind of loss.

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions or wishes, so easily broken. But here’s a small one: less of the superficial hashtag life. Hold scorching tea. Share a secret marvel with a stranger. Adhere to the tangible.

And last — I was lucky yesterday to be invited with Vermont Almanac editor Patrick White on Brad Ferland’s radio program Vermont Viewpoint on WDEV. It’s always a joy to participate in radio — especially with my friend Brad and talking about Vermont and writing.

Hope you’re all dry and warm….

The Long Night Moon.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In the year’s tail-end days, the neighbors’ children sled down their short hill, hats off, snowsuits unzipped in the warm afternoon. I wander over with a tin of sweets and chat for a bit about sledding conditions, getting the low-down on the mixture of slush and ice. The full moon rises silently, December’s Long Night Moon. Various blues layer the sky, the hues that remind me of the sea in my land-locked geography.

During the in-between pieces of holiday and work, I’m slowly savoring The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti, an Italian novel about deep friendship and love of great mountains. A main character, Bruno, speaks about rebuilding a tumbled-in Alpine house: “Look, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. If you try to think too far ahead with this kind of work, it’ll drive you nuts.” Likewise: writing a book, parenting, living a life.

The neighbors’ children offer me a handful of wet snow, chock-full with dirt and last year’s sunflower seed hulls.

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.