Vermont

Dreaming

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Often after the new year, the cold hammers down in Vermont, like a nail gun, sealing the human world except for well-bundled expeditions. The coldest I’ve seen is 40 below zero; mist moved ghost-like over the river, creeping over the icy banks like a strange memory.

This year, what small amount of snow we have is often soft, and the air during the day often thaws and carries the scent of water.

It’s an illusion, I know, to imagine that anything but a long, long winter lies ahead of us. But still, yesterday when I left work, I mentioned to a coworker that it was nearly five and day still lingered.

For a just a moment, we stood there with car keys in our hands, reveling at the light.

Winter rain—
The field stubble
Has blackened.

— Basho

May, 2020

Things May Start….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

So long, 2020.

2020 might not have been the brightest year on record, but then, say, 1944 might not have been all that rosy, either.

2020 became the year when our house finally became a home. Three years ago, I sold our former house and moved with my daughters. We moved, I realized only later, only out of desperation, to leave a bad scenario for what I hope would be a better life.

2020 showed me that this story — while uniquely ours — is also the human story, of movement and longing, of fear and hope. We’ve now claimed ownership of this house — us three females and our two house cats — through countless meals and nights and early mornings, through arguing about things petty and not-so-petty. We claimed ownership all those spring days when I leaned against the kitchen counter, listening to the governor and wondering what the heck was happening; through my daughter setting up high school in front of the wood stove, through the slow dawning when I realized my employment was no longer viable, and I would need to adapt.

I did. We did.

During this hard year, the ancient moon rose and set over our metal roof, over our neighbor boys’ sandbox, the road sloping down our hill and out into the world, our village, our sweet state of Vermont, the veritable globe.

I’m reading Lauren Redniss’ Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American Midwest — a book both terrible and beautiful. Redniss writes:

If you go back to the beginning,
everything was dark.
You start from nothing.
Things start to come to light.

Hello, 2021.

Little Bright Bits

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

A friend and I have a habit of emailing back and forth requesting send me something good. We’ve been doing this so long now that I can’t remember when we started, although I’m nearly 100% certain this began in a long Vermont winter.

Generally, we offer little bright bits — a book to share or a decent recipe. Yesterday, she emails about the rising full moon. Drivers along the County Road pulled over and took photos.

Little bits that are maybe not slight at all.

After dinner, my daughters and I bundled up against the sharp cold and went walking in the silvery moonlight. We hadn’t dressed warmly enough and shivered by the time we returned. Chattering, my girls were exuberant that winter had finally arrived in all its radiant beauty.

That gleaming round moon, the sparkling snow, a warm house: solid strands of our web.

  Barn’s burnt down 

     Now I can see 

     the moon! 

— Mizuta Masahide

Photo by Molly S./Hardwick, Vermont

Ships Passing in the Night

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Way back in the last century, when I first moved to Vermont as a young woman, my then-boyfriend and I drove in the middle of one night to Boston. We passed through tiny Massachusetts town after town, shuttered up and dark for the night. As our old Toyota hurried through, I wondered who lived there. At two in the morning, hardly anyone but a parent with a crying baby is awake.

Walking downtown last night, while my daughters wash our dinner dishes, I marvel how the pandemic seems to have placed us in a very long 2 a.m. In the dark, I pass a single masked person. Treading carefully on the ice, we each half-raise a hand, a human version of ships passing in the night.

This morning, my neighbors’ lights are off. Last year, with their youngest, their house lights glowed at all hours. Now, at 6 a.m., the house remains shrouded in the darkness of sleep. And so it goes, I remind myself, night always yields to dawn.

Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.

— Yoko Ono

Strange Bed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

The forecast for this Vermont Christmas is 100% rain, which pretty much sums up the year 2020.

From work, I take home a donated cat bed, lined with a downy fuzz and nearly new. When I set it on our living room floor, our cats approach with caution, sniffing, and then begin growling, doubtlessly sensing some former occupant.

A dog? Or simply some stranger?

All evening, our pampered house cats pace around the bed, suspicious. But, in the morning, I see our tabby Acer curled up in the bed’s center, sleeping, paws over shut eyes, tail tucked beneath his chin.

And so it: 2020 and on into 2021. Wherever each of you are, dear readers, I hope you take some comfort in this strange bed of where we are, as our planet slowly turns back toward the light, again.

Cutting with the ax,
I was surprised at the scent.
The winter trees.

— Buson

Hardwick, Vermont

Starlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

At 5:30, my daughter picks me up from work in complete darkness. I turn off the lights and gather the bag of giant pillows someone donated to the town’s free closet. I intend to wash these nearly brand-new things and use them as winter reading places before the wood stove.

All day, I seem to have moved through this strange miasma of timelessness — in a realm where time or month (everything save the year, 2020) is merged into the Time of the Pandemic. A woman stops in and, after town business, remarks about the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, how on planet earth we’re spinning through much larger cosmological forces that we might imagine.

In dark, my daughter drives faster than I would have, speeding along that back road through the forest, and then the road crests a hill and fields open up on either side. Farmhouses are outlined with colored Christmas lights, and overhead, all that sky.

My daughter points to where the even darker line of mountains marks the horizon. There, Jupiter and Saturn are immediately obvious, making their slow and steady celestial way across the heavens.

Our conversation winds back and forth between us, mundane snippets of this or that. I imagine our headlights swooshing through the dark, as the two of us rush home in all that darkness, to the youngest sister at home, cooking sausage and potatoes, the kitchen warm and redolent with baking squash and maple syrup.

Afterwards, we go out for a walk in the deepening cold, under the brilliantly beautiful starlight, until eventually the cold drives us back under our warm roof again.

Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

— T. E. Hulme