writing

The Saving Grace of Winter is Beauty

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

These December days are so cold the air is smoky with a mist that can’t melt. Daylight is scant.

Walking up Main Street in Greensboro, my boot heels kicking clumps of road salt, I detour to the public beach, scene of so many summer hours of pleasure.

In the otherwise empty parking lot, two pickup trucks are parked side by side, drivers’ windows rolled down, a cloud of cigarette smoke motionless between them.

December narrows us down and opens us up; we relish the pleasure of our warm, well-lit houses, the bowl of steaming noodles, our cats and our library books. And yet the cold appears to ripple endlessly, infinitely beyond the frozen lake and mountains. The winter night sky dwarfs us. We’re but tiny stars ourselves, on this icy landscape.

Day by day we’re spinning towards the solstice.

Winter solitude–
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

— Bashō

Caspian Lake, Greensboro

Driving Lessons

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The dress my daughter wore in the photo below was a thrift-store find. A soft flannel, the dress was her favorite those years she was two and three. She wore the dress until it was above her knees. I can still remember how her bare knees fit perfectly into the palm of my hands, her skin suntanned long into the fall, often lightly scratched or bruised from playing.

At fifteen, now, she feels light-years beyond those days.

Here’s a piece I wrote about this summer when she and I switched places in the car, beginning, “This fall, my 15-year-old daughter Gabriela was at the wheel of my Subaru when I panicked….”

Photo by Diane Grenkow

Rich

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Snow drifts down this morning, officially or not marking the beginning of winter. As always, the cats and I are the first awake in our house, the cats hungry for a bowl of food and then sprawling on the rug, satisfied, happy with the prospect of another day.

The first snowfall perhaps belongs in the realm of childhood, the magical enchantment of waking and realizing the overnight world has silently transformed into white. No one in our house is in the Land of Little any longer, joyous at the prospect of a zillionth reading of The Snowy Day.

Nonetheless — and despite the months ahead of Vermont snow — these moments of gust and flake and the wind chimes singing, the daughters sleeping, the cats purring, are, for the moment, sweet and silent.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural….

— Louis MacNeice

Adequate Materials

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I was in labor with my first daughter, at some point I glanced at a clock and realized I was in trouble. That was the only rational moment I remember from that entire labor; everything else is nearly wordless in my memory.

In those final hours, in the pauses between straining to push her into this world, I imagined the peace of a summer forest, the leaves sun-dappled. She was born in wintery February, but I drew on that memory, gathering much needed strength, as I imagined digging my fingers into the black soil, fingering pebbles of quartz and shards of slate.

So, too, now, as we’re entering the dark month of December, I look at my youngest daughter — my teenager — who is learning to endure the closure of school, the upsidedownness of her world. How invaluable, suddenly, appears a game of Yahtzee, a batch of cookies, a cat before the fire, hot coffee and conversation.

It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Scars, Somewhere in November, 2020

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Every morning, a hard frost sugarcoats our world.

Before the snow falls in earnest, my daughter drives, logging in hours and experience with her driver’s permit. We head out one way and take a different road back home.

Inadvertently, wandering, we end up on a road in Elmore that I haven’t traveled in years. While she and her sister talk, I remember the last time I had traveled that road was with my mother and the girls, who were so much younger then. The forest drops away on either side of the backroad. Farm fields, shaved down to corn stubble, surround us.

The girls’ father was away then, visiting his father who was recovering from a heart attack. When he returned, I believed we had a new beginning, a jumpstart to what we were doing as a family. Now, with my youngest in the driver’s seat of our Subaru, I have a sudden realization that there’s never any beginning, never any fresh start, the world always unfolding and transforming — from harrowed up fields to spring shoots to the fatness of August’s harvest.

This girl — all of her, stoic and disciplined and sometimes radiantly joyful — is becoming a young adult in these strange pandemic days. I imagine she’ll carry these months (maybe years?) forever with her, sewn into her soul like a scar.

The road winds around the rural hospital where both my daughters were born by caesarian, leaving my own body with indelible scars. I wouldn’t trade those scars for the world.

Photo of Teapot by Diane Grenkow

Sunset, Skunk, State Police

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Before I leave work yesterday afternoon, I stack piles of papers labeled with stickies in my scrawled handwriting — a roadmap for myself for the next day’s work.

Outside, the sunset is crazy beautiful.

I drive home, listening to VPR. The governor has sent the state police to lodging establishments, in an attempt to crack down on quarantine requirements. My brother, in New Hampshire, appears to be sealed off from us, in a sea of Covid.

At home, my 15-year-old dreads the thought of another lock-down, like last spring. But it’s not April 2020 in Hardwick, Vermont. In November, unlike in April, Covid is among us, in the schools, among people we know.

In the evening, my friend and I walk around town in the dark. The long bar in Positive Pie is empty, save for the barkeep at the far end, his head bent over his phone. At the high school, we walk down a wooden flight of stairs to the soccer field that a group of volunteers recently built. In the field’s center, we gaze up at all those stars, the Milky Way arched over the firmament.

Back at my house, we stand in the driveway, talking, talking, in the unusually warm November evening. A skunk ambles around the neighbors’ house — a normality I can embrace — although, after a few moments, I back up and head into my house for the night, where my daughters are planning to make tiramisu for Thanksgiving.

I wish I could invite all of you…..

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” 


― John Steinbeck

Photo by Gabriela