Vermont

Ode to Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Cleaning off my car windshield this morning, I had the impulse to remove my mitten and bury my hand in the fluffy, utterly white stuff. At zero degrees, with a stiff wind cutting my face, I didn’t.

Snow has finally really come to Vermont — and kept coming and coming. Winter’s a hassle — always — in the realm of driving, of keeping the house heated, the windows closed, of missing walking barefoot through the garden and woods.

But winter’s simply ineffably beautiful, too. Driving to work, a scarf wrapped around my neck, my heavy boots in the car, too, just in case I break down, I’m mesmerized beyond VPR’s impeachment news as I watch swirls of snow skitter over the pavement. Since I was a little girl and my parents drove me, I’ve watched snow and wind work their silent mystery over the highway. Winter.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky-
the moon seals it.

— Buson

IMG_7033

Calais, Vermont

Why Vermont?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The service we attended Sunday was for a beloved student in my daughter’s high school. A devastating, tragic death. Monday at dinner, her sister and I ask about the day. This is a rural high school, maybe 300 students in grades 7 through 12. The principal asked the whole school to crowd into the auditorium.

What did he think was going to happen? she asked me. We all cried. We all sobbed.

In particular, she told us about the teachers — the men, too, she emphasized. They cried.

There’s certainly less-than-desirable elements about living in rural Vermont: the winters can be nearly unendurably long. It’s an insanely expensive state to live in, particularly in a single income home.  But when the utter awfulness of tragedy rears — as it has before, and as it will undoubtedly do so again — these little communities circle the metaphorical wagons. These hard, hard experiences remind me why I live here, and why I can’t ever imagine leaving.

The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply…

— Wiliam Stafford

IMG_7032.jpg

Quiet Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pea soup with scraps of leftover ham bubbled on our stove all day — a weekday more like a Sunday. Walking through town, I met no one.

At the end of the holiday school break, I head out before dinner to empty the compost pail in the bin. Amazingly, the afternoon is light yet, not dim as the afternoons were not long before the holiday. I stand there for a moment, watching wet snowflakes twirl down, the snow and I heedless of any time.

A radiance rises from the snow-covered town cemetery just behind my garden, bright despite the granite stones.

More so than other years, this holiday my daughters and I seemed to have rounded that bend from the divorce. Maybe it’s nothing more than the distance of time and physical space. Maybe it’s simply that time doesn’t cure, but it does scab over. Oddly this season, I kept thinking of Mary Oliver’s line about her box of darkness, and how that, too, was a gift. Maybe that’s part of this whole holiday season, too: that light does, inevitably, come of darkness, always.

Happy wishes for another decade of living: 2020.

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.

— Mary Oliver

IMG_7025.jpg

Cusp

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

On the eve of another year, my daughters and I talk about that trite tradition — resolutions — and I think of these lines from Rilke:

Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near, your house lies where it begins,
whoever you are…
The world is immense…

Not so long ago, walking outside our house meant wandering down our dirt road and looking for pebbles or newts. While the big world has always been around us, how much mightier the possibilities seem now. And that, I suppose, sums up where we are now.
IMG_7007.jpg

December Thaw

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early Friday morning, finished with my few weekly minutes of food co-op working member hours, I stand at the window with an employee, watching the rain.

Rain in December. At home, my daughters are eating breakfast and complaining about the coal-colored day. Then yesterday, about the time I’m folding up my laptop and thinking of chopping a cabbage for dinner, my daughters return home, full of joy about a long run and exploring the edge of Lake Champlain.

End of December: I’d hung the laundered Christmas tablecloth on the clothesline to dry. December thaw in Vermont. Here’s a piece I wrote in State 14 about working for the census, long ago when I was a brand-new mama.

This cold winter night,
that old wooden-head buddha
would make a nice fire.

—Buson

IMG_8424.jpg