Vermont

Your own darkness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

An old friend from years ago sends me a message. She’s persistent, wearing down through my imposed or self-imposed hermitage, whatever this thing is I’m doing, and I drive myself out on muddy roads. She has such a lovely little girl, I’m smitten immediately. I sit down on the floor and chat up the child, and eventually remember my good friend and how much I enjoy her world. She’s funny, with boundless good will and cleverness, in a life that’s had her share of lemons.

End of March, nearly Easter, my perennials spike up further every day. How the earth desires green. I’m far enough along now in my own life that I know the cupboard of my mortal life will always hold certain grooves and scars, its beaten shape, the way the material in my life has shaped me. Aren’t we all that way, though? Maybe this is why spring is the dearest of seasons, that from mud and ice emerge tender shoots, the improbable made manifest every year.

Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

— James Wright

Kindness of strangers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

If there’s a sadder building in Vermont than the county courthouse in Barre, I don’t know where that might be. Over the last nine years, I’ve been here again and again and again and again. On Friday, I arrive again, stepping through the metal detectors and removing my knitted hat to show my barrette. My errand is to leave a handful of copies. I wait behind a man in an orange jacket at the counter who cannot understand what the clerk is saying. She repeats her instructions. Another clerk calls to me. I ask my questions, repeat back her answers to confirm. The man beside me weeps.

The last time I was here, I waited in a room of women waiting to be heard by a judge. In those days, I had survived those court appearances and the craziness of my life by imagining myself a mother wolf. I slunk in, took what I needed, and ran. All morning, the room gradually emptied, until only myself and one other woman remained. She was young enough to be my daughter. The bailiff appeared and said it was the judge’s lunchtime, and we could return in two weeks. Wolf, I stood up, all 4’9″ of rage, and said I wasn’t leaving. The bailiff muttered and disappeared behind the wooden door.

The woman’s name was before mine on the court’s list. She offered to let me go before her. You have a child, she said, and I don’t. I didn’t one single strand of this woman’s story. The judge delayed his lunchtime.

On this Friday afternoon, six years later, when I return to this courthouse I had promised myself never to enter again in this lifetime, I carry the memory of this stranger’s kindness.

Outside, at my car, I can’t find my keys, and so I return again, back through security, back to the window where the man is yet weeping, the clerk repeating the same impossible words. Then I realize my keys were in my hand; I hadn’t looked.

Here’s a poem very much in this sentiment, emailed from my father. Listening to the audio is highly recommended.

Necessary Birdsongs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
Lake Champlain

Mid-March, the unlovely muddy Vermont: I bend beneath the snarled rose bushes, seeking green nubs pushing through the wet earth. By June, this world will be verdant, lush, those old roses a tangle of green, tiny blossoms each a delicate bouquet of pale pink. These roses, planted by someone doubtlessly long passed over into the other world, ruggedly fence my house, their flowers such a dear sweet fragrance.

In this brown world, I wander to the places where, in springs past, I’ve heard the early songs of redwing blackbirds. Yesterday, I hear these birds, not the full chorus yet, but the warm-up crew. We are well before the yard clean-up and gardening season. The town roads are rutted, hard to travel, and the summer folks have not yet returned. Hidden in this clump of cedars, the blackbirds steadily, without any fuss, go about their blackbird lives. Not so many weeks away, marsh marigolds will blanket these wetlands — dazzling yellow, killer green — but for now, the dun palette of silvery cedar, umber earth, the birdsong melodies yanking us along to spring.

Like the creation of the cosmos out of chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I stopped in a wood stove/chimney sweep shop in Montpelier, looking for a replacement length of insulation for my stove.

I’d bought the stove in 2020, in that strange period when some businesses had reopened; Vermont’s mask mandate was brand-new. I was looking to install a metal asbestos chimney in my 100-year-old house, determined to heat this house with wood and not rely on oil. I was new to wearing a mask. My teenager waited in the car.

Four years later, on a rainy morning, I stop in and two men are warming themselves at glowing stoves. I ask my question about the catalytic combustors and insulation wrap. One man reaches in a stove and pulls out a honeycomb piece. He asks me if I’ve taken my stove apart. Yes, I answer, and I’ve put it back together — not once or twice, but regularly.

The store is on the retail strip between Montpelier and Barre, and the greasy scent of the never-closed McDonald’s pumps through the damp air. On that same 2020 trip, I texted a staff member of the state’s Department of Libraries about hand sanitizer. The department was closed, of course, and I never met this woman, who left me sanitizer and children’s books. We wrote back and forth to each other, and then she vanished elsewhere into a job, or so I guessed, a different phase of her life.

This morning, my daughters and I park at the edge of town and follow the running water: tracking uphill from river to streams. The mushy snow melts in the rain. Three geese fly overhead, clamoring. There’s that famous line from ol’ Henry David Thoreau: the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age. On this March morning, the silty waters running high and fierce, Thoreau’s chaos line returns to me. My old familiar, chaos, the companion sometimes in my pocket, sometimes in my face.

Then, this: the evenings are beginning to stretch with light, rich with the scent of wet earth. Last night, my daughter and I pull on our jackets again and head out into the damp world, in hopes of red-winged blackbirds. A no go, yet. But halfway through, I interrupt her and say, “Robin.”

And again, “Robin.”

“Dear March—Come in—”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

I stand outside eating a cheese sandwich stuffed with a handful of the lettuce I bought for my cat Acer. The trees across the road shake furiously in a wind as if outraged. What’s your complaint, I wonder.

Such a strange winter: a handful of skiing days, no ice skating, the hard cold a distant memory. The yuck of this winter has been the lack of sunlight, the sodden clouds that have lingered from last year’s rainy summer through January’s gloom. We kvetch. My own antidote is the early morning, my insistence that writing, that order and beauty, are a transformative might. There’s nothing new in that approach; it’s the ancient path of seeking luminosity, of Rumi’s words that the wound is where the light comes in.

In March, of course, sudden sunlight in your living room is apt to reveal the dirty cat hair clusters balled beneath your couch, the cobwebs trailing from the ceiling corner, drenched in dust. Make of it what you will.

Oh March, my long-time friend, giver of fine weather, betrayer with your miserable cold snowstorms. In the lengthening days, the sun returns like a long-ago lover. My friend the sun and I take long walks, my sunny friend whispering in my ear that brighter lovelier days are already here.

A few lines from Emily Dickinson:

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

Vermont Town Meeting Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Here’s Vermont Town Meeting Day in a nutshell: lousy coffee for a buck, the cash box in the hands of sweet kids who are raising money for field trips the school board quit funding years ago.

My father calls Town Meeting Day the purest form of democracy. And democracy, hoo boy, what a fascinating creature this is.

On this Town Meeting Day in Greensboro, the moderator drank water from a Daffy Duck glass that he said he’d used for the past thirty town meetings (not a tall tale). Knitting and side conversations, Presidential primary voting, school budget voting, knitting and more knitting, talk about housing and logging and, inevitably, taxes and delinquent taxes.

Late afternoon, a cold drizzle fell. On the playground, the kids had left a bucket of stick stew. I had about a hundred things yet to do that afternoon, but I squatted beneath the white pine and checked out the lean-to the kids had built from branches that had fallen in a winter storm. As we head into this election year, let’s remember the kids keep the world real. Savor some spring stick stew.

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

— Abbie Hoffman