Quarantining

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Every morning when I wake in the dark, I think, I’m not sick, a revelation that begins the day. Although I’m not headed out of the house, for any number of days, I’m up especially early these days, thinking of Salinger’s Zooey telling Franny not to fritter away the best part of the day, buddy.

It’s all jumbled up here, even more than the past year. I am so grateful my daughter isn’t sick, that she’s counting down her quarantine days not with pleasure, but with her trademark resolution, her will do, but I’m plotting my summer plans….

For me, it’s wait and watch, a negative test followed by another test, results in 36-72 hours. Over us hovers the thought: which way will this go?

I set up work on the kitchen table, then move to the back porch in the afternoon. My daughter disappears on a long walk through the woods. At the tail end of winter, we haven’t pulled any outdoor furniture from the barn yet, so I sweep the boards and lean against what remains of the railing broken by falling ice.

In the late afternoon, I’m painting the interior windows of my upstairs office when I see the town librarian walking up my road with two books she’s leaving for me. I holler down, Thank you! We talk for a moment through my screen, and then she’s on her way again.

Like the rest of the world, I keep listening to the trial in Minnesota. My daughter appears and leans in the doorway, watching me. I tell her I’m going to savor this quarantine with her, that we’ll be talking about it someday, years hence, when she has twins and a baby and I show up to change diapers.

That’s wonderful, she tells me, and you have paint on your elbow.

Thank you so much, my readers, for writing in. It means the world to me.

Kitchen office, complete with (working) cat and borrowed tortilla press.

Phone Conversation

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 23 Comments

Sunday afternoon finds me talking to the Vermont Department of Health contact tracer about my daughter’s positive Covid test. My results, he determines, haven’t rolled in yet.

I’m at the dining room table, chipping wax off a candlestick, doodling on a piece of paper. He asks where she’s been, and I answer honestly, school, home, and the woods.

Through the window, I see a cold rain falling. He tells me about the potential for what seems to me an incredibly long quarantine period for myself, if I don’t test positive. If I do, well, that’s a different kettle of fish so to speak, he says.

What you’re saying, I clarify, is that there’s no good options here.

He pauses.

I apologize immediately. The good thing has already happened. Covid has washed right over my daughter with the lightest touch. My other daughter is vaccinated.

I answer all his questions. Then I ask, Wait and watch?

It’s maddening, he says, but yes. That’s where you are.

The wind bends the pear tree in our front yard. We’ve endured plenty. Our house is warm, stocked with firewood and food. And so it goes.

Sing, Robins

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I lingered on our porch yesterday evening, gathering a few pieces of firewood. It’s warm enough now that the fire could stay out, but somehow letting the hearth go cold in March just doesn’t seem right.

There’s that worn-out cliche that the laughter of babies is one of the best sounds on this planet — and it’s not a cliche, because baby laughter is really dear.

But so is the songs of robins.

We’re back again in these melodies. Around us, mud and thaw pushing up the debris that’s hidden under the snow all winter. Pieces of cardboard and empty yogurt containers, the runny mess of my ash pile, my youngest’s holey (or is that holy) pink socks where she tossed them over the porch railings in a burst of spring enthusiasm.

Oh, robins, mud your nests, lay your eggs, raise your newborns. We need you!

Open a window. Rain falling
on good land is good for melancholy.

— Jody Gladding

Hardwick, Vermont

Thaw, Finally

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Right at the equinox this year, spring cracks winter’s back in Vermont. The pavement buckles into frost heaves. The dirt roads mush and muddy. Sunday, I find the season’s first coltsfoot, the tiny gems of gold.

A Vermont spring is either a heartbeat — bang, done — or weeks of freeze and thaw, thaw and freeze. Although the days have hit 60 degrees, the nights are still cold, and our wood stove keeps our house warm.

Last evening, we walked by a sugarhouse, its cupola open and steam billowing. The air was tinged with the sweetness of maple, the slight rotting of thawing mud. Instinctively, my upper arms ached. Walking behind my daughters, listening to their chatter, my arms remembered those years when we sugared, and how my arms and gloved hands bent into the woodpile.

Spring is all those things: the radiance of the strengthening sun, the beauty of wildflowers, and how, when the earth thaws, our winter debris of ash pile and last year’s kale stalks emerge.

The bush warbler.
The rain wouldn’t let up.
The travel clothes.

— Mizuhara Shuoshi

School Tour

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A fellow school board member and I take a tour of the high school. I haven’t actually walked the halls in a year. The high school is very, very, very clean. Like, crazy clean, especially for a fifty-year old building.

In the gymnasium, I remember all those basketball games, the graduations, the Congressional delegation visit….

Afterwards, we stand outside in the sunlight, masks on, talking and talking, looking at back at this school that has meant so many things, to so many people, in so many ways the heart of the community — now, of course, for vaccine clinics.

School board positions are not hotly contested in our world, but in this sunlight, after a tour with so much history and so much more to come, I feel oddly so lucky to have this elected seat. The pandemic has flipped the tables in so many ways. It’s impossible not to think that the world is changing right now, all around us. As I leave, my fellow board member wonders how change will come, if we’ll all be hugging each other in the co-op, if things might get really weird.

Weird, I say, I can deal with. I walk home to where my daughter is baking a birthday cake for her sister’s friend. The house smells of sugar, and the cats are sprawled in a patch of sunlight, where flour is spread on the floor. How good to be here. Part of all this.

Hands at Work

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I’m working at home on a Friday afternoon when an email pops into my inbox from the librarian in town. He writes my interlibrary loan book is in, and would I like to come get it?

Indeed, I would. I pick up the book, wrapped nicely in a white paper bag, with my first name, Brett, written in black marker. I stand there in the sunshine, holding this book like some kind of present.

By randomness, I chose this book — Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter.

Go read it, too. The book embraces the hammer and chalk line, the beauty of wood, the functionality and satisfaction of making things with your hands, all antidotes to this virtual world. Even more, the book embraces being a woman and a working woman.