Warmth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I return home from work in the evening, one cat is stretched on the rug before the wood stove, the other lies on the coffee table, front paws draped over the table’s edge. It’s a scene of utter cat joy.

My daughters are laughing on the couch about something foreign to me — some kind of iPhone. I pull over a chair and sit down with a bowl of potatoes and vegetables and meat.

While they share a story about their negotiations over dinner dishes and compost and wood chores, I soak in the warmth of our living room.

All around us rages the virus, a rising irritability, utter uncertainty over the future. For years, I’ve relied on my ability to figure out a plan. Listening to my girls, I decide this is the heart of my plan: be like the cats. Drink in where we are now. Let that nourish us. And, for God’s sake, laugh at the jokes the kids tell.

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” 

— James Baldwin

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

The Right Thing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On a walk my daughters and I often take in the evening, we pass a house where a little black cat trots out to meet us. The cat’s tail is bony, its nose white as if dipped into a saucer of cream.

We always turn down that particular street, saying, Let’s go see the cat, and stop and pet this friendly creature.

In the dark last night, a car followed us, then stopped, as the cat sat in the street. When the cat didn’t move, my daughters and I turned and walked back, to encourage the cat to head along now. The driver pulled up and rolled down the window.

I didn’t recognize this curly-haired woman. She asked me if the cat was mine. When I said no, she wondered aloud why she had kept sitting in the car. I didn’t know what to do, she told me. The cat didn’t move.

I laughed and told her, You did the right thing.

She raised her hands from the steering wheel and began laughing. I did the right thing! she exclaimed.

Walking home in the dark, I kept thinking of what looks to be a long winter ahead. But for a radiant moment, Saturday showed us our VP-elect proudly acknowledging the history and labor of so many nameless others. It’s a historic moment my daughters relish.

“So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sticky Notes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A week of chaos, a jumble of days.

By yesterday afternoon, my desk was littered with multiple sizes and colors of sticky notes, scrawled in my lousy handwriting. Before I headed home, I stood staring at this mosaic and considered chucking the lot in the recycling bin.

Instead, I decided to let that wait until next week.

Despite all this, we’re headed to the state championships for a soccer game — socially distanced, with masks, in the brilliant sunlight. At the beginning of soccer season, in September, my daughter’s high school team wasn’t even sure they would be able to play a game, but it was enough to practice together. Then they lost the first five games. Now, apparently beating bad odds, they’ve progressed to the state championships.

In this midst of utter adult chaos, what a pleasure to see radiant teen joy. Here’s hoping that joy is a harbinger of better days, all around, for all of us.

The Long Haul

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After work, it’s too dark to go running, and I’m home in a foul mood while my daughters cook dinner. While cleaning out a closet that afternoon, they discovered a box of photographs and claimed the photos were evidence there was little adult supervision in their early childhood.

I insist there was plenty, but I had always seen wildness as more of a virtue than a vice.

The three of us are wise enough to let that lie, and dinner conversation winds into the details of the day. After, the girls wash the dishes and I carry in firewood. Then my oldest and I walk through town. There’s no one out these days. It’s dark; the cold is beginning to staple down around us.

Coming home, we stand on the knoll outside our house, watching the creamy, waning moon rise. As we stand there talking about hard deep things — how we carry the past around with us — I remember myself as a brand-new mother, believing that the wildness of imagination shapes our lives. I no longer believe that; I know that, but I also know what a long hard haul this life can be.

I call into the house for my youngest to come out and see the moon. She walks barefoot through the snow. We stand there, the moonlight on our faces, soaking up that ethereal light, before we head back in.

Once in a Blue Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Saturday, we were at a jack o’ lantern walk at the elementary school where my youngest graduated a few years ago.

Because it’s rural Vermont, it was dark, and everyone was spread out. I slipped away from the few kids and walked further along the woods path. I know this path well, and it veers down to the wetlands. There, I leaned against a white pine. The moon was nearly full, and the silvery light skipped over the rippled water.

For the longest time, I stood there, knowing my daughter was happily wandering around in the dark with her friends. In the darkness, I remembered the countless times I had admired this lovely lady moon — over fresh snow and icy backroads, in the muggy heat of summer.

At the beginning of this election week, I woke thinking of our beautiful moon, silently orbiting the globe.

The old man of the temple,
Splitting wood
In the winter moonlight.

— Buson

August flowers