Spring in the Body

March 22, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day inside, a flock of geese flies north over my head while I’m at a gas station, standing in a few sprinkles of rain, breathing the damp, soon-to-snow air.

North.

The birds flap steadily. I’m too near the interstate and Route 100, crazy with commuter traffic, to listen for honking. But for that immeasurable moment, it’s just me and the geese — none of what so often consumes me: the steady thrum of work, the wild sprawl of my family’s emotions, the incessant chatter of my own thoughts.

River valley, snow-crested mountains, those little tepid raindrops falling on my face, wet breeze, myself: the collective body of us beckon spring. The geese wing over the river, imperturbably.

This dewdrop world
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

— Issa

Photo by Molly B.

Here You Go. Love The Planet We’re Leaving You

March 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My 13-year-old took part in last Friday’s Youth Climate Strike — coincidentally one of the warmest days in veritable weeks in Vermont. Since I usually work at home on Fridays, I folded up my laptop around noon and walked downtown. I met the photographer for the local paper in front of the diner, and we joked around for a bit until the students walked down from the high school.

The principal had called the parents the night before and given the heads up that this wasn’t a school event, but he let us know when the kids planned to leave. He walked down with the kids, too, and a number of teachers came, too. The Buffalo Mountain Co-op staff came out to cheer on the kids.

The kids lined up on the suspension bridge over the Lamoille River. I stood talking with my daughter’s humanities teacher and reading the kids’ signs. My favorite: The dinosaurs thought they had more time, too. The day was impeccably sunny. Some of the kids came with an intensity to talk about the climate; others simply to escape the school, take a walk, and get some vitamin D. Then the kids headed back up the hill, chatting, happy.

I can’t help but wonder: 36 years from now, when my younger daughter is my age, will she remember this day? And what will the world be like then? Contrary to the often pessimistic bend of my nature, I’m forcing myself to envision a brilliantly beautiful day, clamorous with youth, optimism, and ebullient joy in a fine March day, a gift in Vermont.

Hardwick, Vermont, middle and high school students

Sign of Spring: Honda Takes Flight

March 13, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A pale blue Honda Civic, circa 1985, parked along Route 14 not far from our house, has flown that nest.

The Honda had quite the winter, parked between an apartment building and the busy highway. The car was completely buried by snow at least twice. The back window was left cracked open. Someone removed the hood and then replaced it, repeatedly. One sunny afternoon, a young man washed its rear window with steaming hot water from a kitchen garbage can.

People have moved in and out of those apartments all winter, by pickup and U-Haul. Now, the Honda.

Craigslisted? Simply ready to roll?

While winter and road salt have eaten into Vermont, here’s an old Honda, hopping back on the road — or so I’m believing.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

— From “The Pasture,” Robert Frost

House town offices, snowy Sunday morning

Birthday Blessings

March 7, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, I stepped out of my library with a child to look at the sky. He was glad he had returned a stack of library books, a kind of clearing of his child conscience. In my clogs, I leaned against the building, a squall fattening in this valley, tucked up against Woodbury Mountain. What a winter this has been. Snowbanks dominate Hardwick like a pop-up mountain range.

Later, a friend and I leafed through a Vermont guide to wildflowers. Remember spring beauties? Remember trilliums?

Early March is my father’s birthday and, two days later, my mother’s. In their 80s now — old but not very old, not even close to very old — my parents who lived through WWII, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s resignation, and the eternity of the Reagan-Bush regime, through having careers and raising children, teaching and writing books and caring for the infirm and the dying, through decades of friends, through all the everydayness of living — and now through the particularly heartless regime of Trump — here’s Hayden Carruth’s birthday poem for love of a woman and love of living.

“Birthday Cake”

by Hayden Carruth

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past.
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Making Sense?

March 5, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

At dusk, after washing the dishes, my daughter agrees to go on a walk with me — she is clearly good-humoring me. It’s cold, and I sense she doesn’t care all that much about the gorgeous blue horizon.

Plus, she’s 13. Having once been 13 myself — albeit in the last century — I know 13-year-olds cannot wear hats.

Walking, she asks me why is this necessary? I offer my usual lines — that it’s pleasant to walk in the evening, that a little cold and adversity build character (my dad’s line). I remind her of my amazing wealth of character.

So, she says, you have character because you froze your ass off?

Put that way, I admit that perhaps not all the pieces of my thinking always hinge together perfectly. Or perhaps they do….

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

― Basho

February Yields To March

March 3, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The snow lies so deeply around our house I might be wrong about that slender path, first through the transplanted hydrangeas from Susan and then along the milkweed behind the garden. Down the hill, through the wild tangle of pine and boxelder, I see a single porch light every night. Come spring, I imagine, I’ll walk in my boots through the melting snow, stand at the edge of the forest, and see whose light that is.