Day Pilgrimage

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

While my daughters and I have skated for years on lakes, Lake Morey is groomed specifically for skaters. Last early Sunday, we packed up skates and snacks and drove south. At the far end of the lake, I realized this was exactly what I had been craving — all that sky overhead, the lake ringed by mountains, the promise of summer and swimming with rope swings tucked into tree branches for the winter. Beneath my silver blades, the ice was swept by humans but created by nature, stippled unevenly, split with cracks, utterly uneven.

We’re now in the final week of February. Maples are tapped for sugaring. The forecast predicts warming weather. The ice, I remind myself, won’t last.

Lake Morey, Vermont

Sunday Sweets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Skiing through the town forest yesterday, I ducked beneath sap lines. The sugarbush there is tapped and ready for the sap to run. I’m ready, too.

For years, our family sugared, and February began weeks that turned around the season and sap flow. We had no weekend. We had no days off. So now, on Sundays, I (mostly) fold up my laptop and lean into family.

One (small) silver lining of the pandemic is the pleasure of a single donut: peach, flower, poppy seed.

Ten degrees and sunny. Perfect for ice skating.

Here

I’m here —

the snow falling.

― Issa

Imagining Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Reading about Texas, I wince for these folks. We’re colder here, in Vermont, but we’re ready for the cold — at least the fortunate of us are. My daughter, at 15, wears thin canvas shoes to school. I watch her in the morning lace these up, knowing she’ll walk home through snow and sometimes sleet in these shoes, but the walk isn’t long. More importantly, the choice and consequences are hers. And who wants to clomp around a high school in winter boots?

We’re living now in the interminable zone of midwinter, where the promise of spring scorns us like a mirage. At the same time, inherently we’re living through a countdown to mid-March. I remember that cold afternoon I stood with my daughter in our kitchen, listening to the governor on the radio as he explained the shelter in place order. She was 14 then, and kept asking me what that meant. I had no idea then, but I could sense walls ascending around our house, as if rising from the earth.

One year later. It’s not my anniversary, it’s an anniversary for all of us. For what that’s worth.

Here’s a poem written for the love of summer….

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

— Ted Kooser, “So This is Nebraska”

Chance Encounter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Rain? Snow? Sleet? A mixture of all falls this morning.

Rounding a bend on a snow-covered dirt road in East Hardwick yesterday morning, I suddenly brake when hundreds of little black birds cover the road. There’s no one behind me, no one ahead of me, and I get out. A few birds flutter upward and perch on the electric wires, strewn already with these little creatures.

I’m at at farm, near a manure pit. Through the barn’s open sides, I see cows twisting their heads.

The birds don’t move. I don’t move. Then, eventually, because I’m a human and the birds are wild, I get back in my car and nudge forward slowly. Grudgingly — or maybe patiently — the birds part to the fields and the wires, and I move on.

Still February here.

On snowy afternoons there is a special blessedness in saying, oh it is too snowy to chop wood this afternoon. And the gray snow sifts down, and one takes off one’s boots and sits by the fire and is glad of the way wool socks smell; and a pie is baking in the oven, and the gray snow is sifting down.

— Elliott Merrick, Green Mountain Farm

Our Perpetual Holiday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

To practice night driving, my daughter and I set off after dinner, delivering a book and knitting needles to a friend. We’re laughing on the way there, and my daughter remarks, Why is it so dark?

I answer that I’m going to let that question lie.

At our friends’ house, we can see through the windows where the family is around the wood stove, talking, the walls painted yellow. I have a sudden flash of envy at the intactness of mother, father, two children, and then that passes quickly, too. At our house, warm and well-lit, with interior walls painted limoncello, we’re as intact as any family, too.

With my friend’s book in my lap, my daughter drives up the back roads, over ice and sand, through all that darkness. We reach the crest of hillside. There, as she drives and talks, I see across the valley to where a barn is lit in a long string of lights on the opposite hillside. Sporadic houses glow in the cold night, and not much more.

She drives down, then along the S curves along the river where I remember a terrible accident years ago. We stop and fill the gas tank. Beneath the bright gas station lights, it’s just us. I walk around the car, washing windows. In the driver’s seat, she watches me, and then I step back and bow. She shakes her head at me, amused.

Middle of February. Cold. A little chit in our collage.

Strangers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A stranger comes into my office and tells me about the guesthouse he might want to build in ten years or so. Then he stops and asks rhetorically, Who am I kidding? I don’t know what will happen this summer.

I say (through my mask), Really, what might happen next week?

There’s a moment before we both laugh. What else could we do?

Driving home, through this gorgeous Vermont scenery — white snow sprinkled on blue mountains, enormous red barns, pretty clapboard villages with church spires the highest manmade mark — I think how lucky I was to travel a lot as a kid and in my twenties. So much camping, so much washing of hair beneath spigots. And yet, everything is just weird. Maybe this will change by the summer; maybe not.

At dinner, my daughter tells me about an elderly couple who stopped their car while she was walking and asked for directions to the high school. She said they told her they were on their way to get vaccines, and they waved happily to her as they drove off.

Listening, for some reason I remember an old word from novels I read as a child: Godspeed.

Thinking of that couple, I thought, Godspeed. Thinking of all of us, I thought, Godspeed.

And here’s inspiring news of an ancient shell.