Vermont

Phone Chat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

To save some cash, I switch cell phone companies, and I realize,  while I’m on the phone with the representative, that she’s working at home when she talks to her dog.

Knowing this opens up our conversation, and I learn her husband likes to turn down the heat, they’ve been living in Phoenix for two years, and she sought out this job because she likes the company so much. I’m amazed, because I never considered working for a phone company an interesting career option. She insists the people are all just so darn nice. It’s a great job.

While she types in my info, she hums faintly. I hear a screen door squeak open, and her husband’s voice. We chat about the coronavirus, and what it’s like to work only from home, for week after week.

When she’s finished setting up my phones, she wishes me good luck and welcomes me to the company family. I feel weirdly delighted. I don’t even know this woman’s name.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve more or less resigned myself to a kind of lone wolf existence — raising kids and gleaning work hours — and much of the work I do requires solitude. But this coronavirus existence has made me realize how valuable are our slenderest connections.

When I hang up, I step over my daughters who are sprawled on the rug doing a workout in preparation for bikini season. The cat wanders between them, clearly confused, likely wondering, What now? I step out on the back porch. Snowflakes are twirling down. Summer? Hello? I wonder.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected… One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

― Rebecca Solnit

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Easter Sweets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

We leave a plate of tiny cupcakes for our friends on their porch steps. They step out to talk over the garden fence. Purple crocuses bloom beneath their picture window.

Standing there, I remember when my older daughter was two — all those times when she cried, leaving this house, and I strong-armed her into a carseat. Last week, she spent the better part of two days of a nursing home shift sitting with a woman who was dying. The woman had been born in Germany, before the Nazi party rolled tanks into Poland and began World War II.

And so our days continue. Spring into more spring, summer nothing but a promise ahead.

On a run yesterday morning, my daughters stopped to talk to an older man at his mailbox. He told my daughters the few inches of wet spring snow was a poor man’s fertilizer. When they return, they find me writing at the kitchen table, curious to know if I’ve ever heard that phrase before.

Indeed, I say. He’s right.

In the city fields
Contemplating cherry-trees…
Strangers are like friends

— Issa

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What’s Possible

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter mishears that Vermont’s governor extended the Stay Home, Stay Safe order to May 31, so when I read the order is actually May 15, the extension doesn’t look so bad. In the middle of March, that date would have appeared impossible.

What’s impossible and what’s not has changed enormously in the past few weeks.

In our little world, we walk and we talk. We walk alone. We walk together. The world as we know it might possibly be crumbling around us — 30% unemployment in our state that a month ago had the second lowest in the nation, a Main Street shuttered closed, people I’ve known for years suddenly foreign in masks — but the possible continues.

Every morning — snow or not — birdsong strengthens.

My daughters and I walk out to the ruins of the town pest house, built a hundred years ago in fear of smallpox. There, geese honk clamorously on the lake. From a white pine, two large birds swoop out from the highest branches. My youngest says simply, “Eagles.”

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Famous”

 

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April, First Blossoms

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Day by day, the weather warms in Vermont, gradually brights in the tiniest drops of green from last year’s brown. On my walk, I pass by a house with a whole garden bed of purple crocuses. Brilliant gardening, I think.

The kids have reappeared in yards and on porches. I pass two small brothers digging in the mud, enthusiastically leaning into the work, talking. Walking, I pass a few groups, but they’re all families — siblings, sometimes parents I hardly ever see, out walking, too. One small band of teenage boys roams on bicycles, and I sense my daughter’s resentment. Social distancing seems weird — I know this. We’re hardly in a war effort of knitting stockings for overseas soldiers, and yet its success relies on collective action.

It’s a strange lesson to learn at age 14, that as a kid you’re equally part of society, too. Frustrated with virtual high school, my daughter complains she’s not learning anything. But these lessons are deep and hard here, I think — lessons that will rut into her adult life.

Day by day, flower by flower.

…Be
careless of nothing.
See what you see.

— Philip Booth, “How to See Deer”

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What’s happening at our house

Where We Are

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

One week into April, golden coltsfoot flowers — dime-sized — push up through roadside gravel. Every day and then again in the evening, we walk and explore, searching for frog eggs, for ribbons of green shoots pushing up through the forest floor.

The isolation is hardest on my teenager, who gets up every morning, soldiers away at her schoolwork, goes for a long run.

Implicitly, she understands. There’s no attempt to discuss the end of isolation, of the emptied-out town, of her abandoned high school. In these sunny, radiantly spring days, we progress.

Isolation pulled us down — almost immediately — to what matters, and, really, nothing else. Each day, accomplish some work. Share a meal. Pet our cats. Knit a few rows.

Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

— Philip Booth, “First Lesson”

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What’s Here

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In a wet, raw snowfall, I lean against a maple tree behind the high school and talk on the phone. It’s mid-afternoon, and I don’t see a single person.

I’m clearing my head after a work conference with Skype. Skype, Zoom, google hangout — the whole thing — why bother? Vermont has completely shut down, as it appears most of the country and much of the world, too. During this hard time, much of this stuff just doesn’t matter, it seems to me, while other stuff does.

I’m worrying hard about what so many other people are — my job and income. How will my teenager survive isolation as a sole teenager in this house? But other worries — like what kind of parenting I’ve done — seem to have vanished utterly, as if knocked under an ocean wave.

My little family of my two daughters is tighter and closer than we’ve ever been, with both daughters stepping up immediately. We’re hardly alone in this. I hear from family after family, where family means something different now — deeper and richer.

It’s a strange world these days, where playgrounds are empty of children, and no one lingers in the post office, laughing and passing bits of news and gossip. We live in a world of masks and wary eyes now.

Nonetheless, in this upended world, there’s gems, sparkling and true.

I finish that phone call and lean against the tree trunk. The wet snow soaks my jeans and down jacket. I shiver for a while, and then eventually I head home. My daughter is baking a cake. Our deck of cards lies on the kitchen table.

Just around the corner,
there’s a rainbow in the sky,
So let’s have another cup of coffee,
and let’s have another piece of pie.

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