Vermont

One More Reason to Like Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Vermont’s Congressional delegation came to our local high school yesterday, Hazen Union in Hardwick – Bernie Sanders with his mighty vehemence and voice, Leahy with his longevity, and Welch with his even-handed thoughtfulness. Welch joked that Vermont’s delegation could meet in an elevator – and does.

But Bernie was the one who got the packed gymnasium cheering loudest. He began with acknowledging that these are tough times, strange days indeed, but, nonetheless, he said, I woke up feeling pretty good this morning. To his loyal crowd of fellow citizens, this boundless optimism shone: the steadfast belief in goodwill, the persistent faith in a moral universe.

All of us share this world for a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focussed on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the decency of all human beings.

– Barack Obama

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Morning March Music

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I unlocked the elementary school yesterday morning when the day was yet in that black-turning-blue phase of dawn. I was there to get the coffee going for that venerable New England tradition, pie breakfast. Allow me to brag for a moment about my town. With a population of 902 (including newborns), nearly 200 pies appeared in the school kitchen, carefully wrapped, many warm from home ovens.

Pie Breakfast is a hustling sweet-and-savory morning, bursting with conversation, live music, laughter, lots of kids. The most welcome melody I heard, though, was the red-wing blackbirds in the white pines below the library. My booksale volunteers and I stood on the icy pavement in the brilliant March sunlight, surrounded by two feet of sparkling snow, listening to the first harbinger of migration’s return, the promise of spring, the full-throated song of mating.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all…

– Emily Dickinson

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Snow Child

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

It’s an Ezra Jack Keats kind of snowy day (or days) in Vermont. If you’re not out foolishly driving around (and not many are), the snow is spiraling down exquisitely. After hours of tedious work inside, while the snow swirled against the windows, I walked along our unplowed road. Pausing on my way to meet my neighbor, I remembered those winters when my firstborn was a toddler, and winters really were one months-long housebound snowstorm.

Every day, I pulled my chattery child along the road on a runner sled. Always, at the same place she would beg me to lumber through the deep snow into the woods and pluck a few miniature hemlock pinecones from a low hanging branch.

Years later, unboxing this red snowsuit for her younger sister, I discovered tiny pinecones in every pocket.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

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My Familiar

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The past two mornings, a large fisher cat has slunk through my snow-covered garden, scoped out the compost, and wandered back into the woods, with that odd, weasel-esque serpentine back motion. The creature is dark as a rain-sodden forest floor.

My house is for sale now, and strangers have been wandering in and out. Do they admire the blue I’ve painted the windows? Are they as annoyed with the unfinished trim and stair treads as I am, or are they starry-eyed, as I would have been, years ago?

I’ve told none of them of this wild creature wandering in and out, my own particular secret, the wildness I’ll carry with me, no matter where we go.

The truth felt stranger than the myth.

Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: the Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

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fitting reading, these days

Early January, at Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the morning, driving along the Lamoille River and its flanking snow-buried farm fields, my daughter and I note the river’s ice buckled across its serpentine surface and speculate about its thickness. With this year’s early insulating snow, the fire department posts warnings about treacherously thin ice.

These days are long, beginning in darkness and ending in darkness, arcing over the eye of grayish light in the middle. Last night, our windows filled with spinning snowflakes, while my teenager and I held onto the day, talking, talking, our words swirling around each other, sharing our worlds.

Later, as the wind howled over the house, I read from my library book Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times – irresistible title.

Poetry is like the sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellow shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.

Jaan Kaplinksi, “‘Once I Got a Postcard…..'”

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North Calais, Vermont

Magical Realm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the kids and I drove into Barre, Vermont, this afternoon, the little boy in the back seat said,  I really don’t like Barre.

I’m with the kid, I’m reluctant to say, for reasons no doubt wholly different than the boy’s. We were headed to The Nutcracker, in the gracious Barre Opera House. On the way there, I drove behind the county courthouse, repository of windowless hallways and claustrophobic rooms, countless tears of human misery.

But I trusted ballet could rewrite my experience of that city, and the magical dance did not let me down. At the performance’s very end, high up in the balcony, I realized  – in what should be a, well, duh, moment – that ballet was all about the transformative might of imagination.

All the way home – and here’s yet another driving story, yet another journey – we drove on icy roads through the smokey blue-black twilight, and then arrived in our own home town with full darkness ringed all around, velvety and deep, and the village lights twinkling white. The town itself might have been the opera house stage, lit-up and beautifully arrayed for the holidays.

When I was twenty, I worked nights for a summer. I loved driving at night as a young woman; the darkness around my two Volkswagen beetle headlights felt ripe with possibility, and I believed myself invincible with youth. In an odd juxtaposition, nearly thirty years later, possibilities stretch out even more infinitely before me. Although I now know the illusion of invincibility, I think I’ve traded that for something deeper and far more valuable in those sparkling lights.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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