Dusky December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Vermont December is not the season of picking garden zinnias or gathering wildflowers.

December is the season of intentionality: wear a hat and mittens everywhere, dry your boots before the wood stove when you return, drive carefully on the slippery roads.

As the holidays edge in, I keep on with my daily routines of tending the fire, going to work, checking in with my daughters about who’s cooking dinner. On the more submerged level, our lives go on, too. My youngest dreams of her future. I read about the bad year 536. In these early winter days, I return to my original love affair with reading — novels. Fiction reminds me, over and over, in an infinite number of ways, why we love this world.

The pandemic has taken plenty from us — much more from so many people than my little family. But it’s also given us this tiny quiet space, too, like the breath at the beginning of each day, just before dawn. In this space, I see my path could bend many ways. Don’t, I caution myself, write a mad letter to the former in-laws. Instead, leave Christmas gifts of homemade soap on the neighbors’ front steps.

“The best way out is always through.” 

― Robert Frost

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

Starlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

At 5:30, my daughter picks me up from work in complete darkness. I turn off the lights and gather the bag of giant pillows someone donated to the town’s free closet. I intend to wash these nearly brand-new things and use them as winter reading places before the wood stove.

All day, I seem to have moved through this strange miasma of timelessness — in a realm where time or month (everything save the year, 2020) is merged into the Time of the Pandemic. A woman stops in and, after town business, remarks about the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, how on planet earth we’re spinning through much larger cosmological forces that we might imagine.

In dark, my daughter drives faster than I would have, speeding along that back road through the forest, and then the road crests a hill and fields open up on either side. Farmhouses are outlined with colored Christmas lights, and overhead, all that sky.

My daughter points to where the even darker line of mountains marks the horizon. There, Jupiter and Saturn are immediately obvious, making their slow and steady celestial way across the heavens.

Our conversation winds back and forth between us, mundane snippets of this or that. I imagine our headlights swooshing through the dark, as the two of us rush home in all that darkness, to the youngest sister at home, cooking sausage and potatoes, the kitchen warm and redolent with baking squash and maple syrup.

Afterwards, we go out for a walk in the deepening cold, under the brilliantly beautiful starlight, until eventually the cold drives us back under our warm roof again.

Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

— T. E. Hulme

Sunday Rescue

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I’m reading on the couch Sunday afternoon when my daughter calls from her cell phone.

She’s walking on a nearby trail system and met a woman who lost her dog. The woman gave my daughter her cell phone number, in hopes that my daughter might find her dog.

My daughter says excitedly, I found the dog!

Good going, I say.

The dog, however, keeps rolling around on its back and begging for rubs. The dog won’t walk. What do I do?

Good lord, I think. I close my book.

The afternoon is rapidly heading towards dark. I take the leftover soup from the refrigerator and set it on the woodstove to begin heating. My younger daughter, excited to be doing something, knocks off her homework and offers to drive, nothing that her sister needs assistance.

As we head through the village in the twilight, I say, Hey, look at you. At fifteen, you’re already on your first dog rescue mission.

She asks, You’ve done this before?

Nope….

It’s dark by the time we find the elderly woman, wearing a mask, in her car in the dark by the side of the road, talking on her cell phone with my daughter.

I tell the woman my daughter is in the field, on the other side of the ruins of an old house, marked by maple trees. My youngest goes ahead, and I walk with the woman, lifting strands of electric fence that have been turned off for the season. In a break in the parting clouds, the sunset appears briefly as a dark bruise in the sky, before the night swallows it up. It’s balmy yet, for December; but it is early winter, and I know our house will be warm when we return.

My oldest — who cares not at all for dogs — has remained with the dog. At home, she washes away the scent of dog under her cat’s serious scrutiny.

Her sister says, You kept the dog’s person from getting lost, too…

A Year Ago

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

…. A year ago, the date was looming near where I had that wretched dental procedure. On the 21st, as the oral surgeon brought a scalpel near my face, he said nicely, You might want to close your eyes for this.

This December, after weeks of virtual schooling — whatever that may be — I knock off work Friday afternoon, so the 15-year-old can drive. My oldest asked us to bring coffee. She steps out behind the doctors’ office where she works, dressed in scrubs, with a stethoscope around her neck.

Then she heads back in, jazzed for the afternoon challenge of of families and fears, from earaches to coronavirus.

In the village, my youngest parks behind the famous Stowe church, and we walk along the bike path. The path winds along the river, not at all iced over yet. We pass a few dog walkers. Behind a restaurant, the scent of dinner cooking follows us as we walk in the thin December sunlight. The savory smell reminds me of when I lived in Brattleboro, so many years ago, above a Korean restaurant.

The smell is delicious, and it follows us for a long way across a field. Stowe reminds us of those summers and falls when we sold maple syrup and ice cream at the farmers market. As we walk, my youngest tells me what she remembers of the market. These are good memories, and we share snippets of the vendors we knew in those years.

Back at the Subaru, it’s nearly four, and the sun is sinking towards the mountains’ horizon. We’ve been gone from Hardwick just a few hours and filled these hours with coffee, a scattering of snow beneath our boots, the sky overhead, the smell of dinner, and the narrow December sunlight between our words.

Carefully, she backs out of the parking space and heads for Route 100. She reminds me my brother told her to enjoy the small victories.

She pauses at the stop sign and looks at me. This is a big victory, she says.

December, 2020.

“Leisure”

By William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows...

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