Vermont

Wood.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Friday, the fire in the wood stove gone cold, I shovel out the ash and discover two honeycomb boxes. I’ve been cleaning this stove for three years now, but I’ve never taken these pieces apart. The manual cautions me to be gentle. So I’m gentle.

The first essay I had published in a slick magazine, Taproot, was for their Wood issue. In those days, we burned countless cords of wood every year, for the few cords in our house to the many more to make maple syrup. Wood was far more verb than noun in our house; we did wood.

In my wooden house, whose floor joists in the basement still have ribbons of bark, on my maple floor, I empty ash and soot and creosote into a metal sap bucket. I kindle the fire with crumpled newsprint and ripped cardboard. The cats sprawl on the rug, satisfied as the heat suffuses our house again.

The late afternoon is raw and damp. So much snow has buried us in. I ski on a section of former railroad bed where I’ve never gone before, up a long slope fenced in by a cedar forest. There’s no one around, not a dog walker, not a snowmobiler, just me and the crows. At a crest, the valley below opens. I’m above a large dairy farm dug deeply by barns and fields and family generations into what had once been forest.

The sun has melted a section of trail to slush here. A cold wind blows down from the north. I stand here for a bit, stamping slush from a ski, then I turn, too, and head back through the forest.

Stone House.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

All night, wind howls around our house. I give up the charade of sleeping and pull out my library book. I’m in the final pages of Meredith Hall‘s memoir about growing up in New Hampshire, Without a Map, and I’m in no rush to end her story, close the cover, and return the book.

At my feet, my little cat lies awake, thinking cat thoughts, in a cat circadian rhythm of his own. The Ides of March howl in fiercely. All day, the wet snowstorm has swirled around us. My wet boots lie beneath the wood stove. Our house banked in by white and the ash bucket melting dirtily into the path where I’ve left to cool, its embers to burn out and die.

Somewhere in those hours before dawn, I shake flat the wood stove’s embers with the ash shovel and lay one, two, more pieces of wood on the flickering coals. In the dark house, the little cat follows me downstairs, curious about breakfast but not insistent.

I think of what I’ve read that day, about a stone house built nearby in the 1800s from a single boulder. A curious endeavor. Take this stone, cut it into pieces, and make a home. In the darkness, the wind rakes over our house, hurls over my snow-submerged garden plot, and whirls over the town cemetery.

“The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.” 

— Meredith Hall

Flattening the Road.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drive home in a pouring snow, remembering when we bought a Toyota pickup years ago, and I drove with four-wheel drive, how the road suddenly flattened out. I’m driving my daughter’s car. In Hardwick, I stop at the auto parts store. Her right wiper is torn. I’ve known the person my daughters call The Auto Parts Man for years. He opens the wiper packages on the counter and then puts on his coat and heads out in the snow and replaces my wipers, too.

It’s the last day of February, and he says he’d rather winter just quit. He laughs and shrugs.

Nonetheless, for the moment, my windshield is clear.

This hill
crossed with broken pines and maples
lumpy with the burial mounds of
uprooted hemlocks (hurricane
of ’38) out of their 
rotting hearts generations rise
trying once more to become
the forest

just beyond them  
tall enough to be called trees  
in their youth like aspen a bouquet  
of young beech is gathered

they still wear last summer’s leaves   
the lightest brown almost translucent  
how their stubbornness has decorated   
the winter woods

— Grace Paley

Verbal Valentine.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I’m drinking coffee in an empty corner of a coffee shop when two strangers meet up at the counter and strike up a conversation. They’re kidding the young man behind the counter who’s been sitting on the floor behind the counter, talking to a young woman. It’s a quiet morning, and their chatter has been gently full of laughter and wit.

One stranger buys the other a coffee — “and throw a shot of espresso into it” — and then his card jams and won’t work. The barista turns the card reader upside down (I mean, what else can you do with those things?) and then the other stranger pulls out cash. The men talk songwriting and growing up in North Carolina and the price of a cord of wood.

It’s a kind of Valentine’s bit of goodwill on a snowy morning that soon will turn to sun in Northern Vermont….

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.

— Basho

Falling.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The outside light flicks on early this morning, and my little cat Acer stares wide-eyed at a skunk making its snuffling and curious away around a flowerpot I left on the back step. Well before dawn, the cats are already fed, the kitchen warm, redolent with coffee, and here’s this wild creature, not in the least troubled by the two of us.

The skunk waddles on its way. Shortly afterwards, snow and chunks of ice rush down the house roof and crash on the porch, softened in the rising temperature. My cat runs. I wonder about the porch railing which snapped in prior years, but nothing appears broken. The design is poor — steep roof and wide porch and slender railings — and I let myself wonder just for a moment if this is some kind of hidden cosmic twist, a long-buried plan from when my former husband built this porch. I cut off that sentiment. This far along in life, I’m well-acquainted with the steepness of roofs and the precariousness of ice and snow and dynamic temperature. Gravity is not ruled by human desire.

At the other end of the day, I’m carrying in a few armloads of wood from the barn when another ice chunk falls, shaking the porch where I had tread a moment before. Through the glass door, my teen raises her hands — what’s happening? — Acer at her feet.

The cold’s drilling back in for the night. In the valley below, the village twinkles in the darkness. The wind whirls around the scent of woodsmoke. I step back, finally wary. The roof has cleared.

When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out….

— Hua Hsu, Stay True

History, Yellow Wallpaper, Gas Station.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On my way home, I stop to fuel my Subaru. A light snow falls, icy around the edges, barely sharp enough to tease my cheeks as I stand looking up. It’s after dark, and the people are coming and going in the convenience store with cups of coffee and bottles of wine and white paper cartons of fried food. The river curves behind the store and the attached garage, silently bending through town, water running beneath the frozen surface.

The evening before, my daughter asked me about The Yellow Wallpaper, the novella she’s reading for class. I remembered the free copy I picked up in high school, dirty and water-stained — a copy I probably snagged from my high school floor. This is the season of freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw, the long slow slog towards spring. In the late afternoons, skiing, the sunlight pushes through the forest. Some days, cold. Some days, warm. So it goes.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman