This.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Midnight, my 19-year-old pulled free the extension cord on the Christmas lights around our barn door and came in the house, banging snow from her boots.

On my bed, the cats pricked up their ears and hurried downstairs. I followed.

Cheeks flushed with full moon sledding down Mt. Mansfield, my daughter and I talked about the history of birth control — the political is personal — ate cold clementines, and fed the cats shreds of turkey from our fingers. Over our metal-roofed house, the moon made her silent, luminescently gorgeous way through the heavens. We turned off the lights and headed upstairs to bed. I parted the curtains and touched a single fingertip to the cold glass.

In this season of a new and vulnerable family on the move, of the ineffable mysteries of angels and holy gifts, a prayer for domestic peace, in odd and unexpected moments.

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Christmas Eve, Hubbard Park, Montpelier, Vermont, 2018

 

 

 

Unfinished

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughters’ gentle-pawed cats cry in the night, dragging a toy mouse around the hall and looking for company. Nearly 20 years a mother, the nether realms of nights are my familiars. I lie listening to wind chimes singing in the nighttime wind.

At the solstice, the darkness is no stranger to us now. The afterschool children ski around my library in the utter darkness.

While waiting for pasta water to boil, my 13-year-old and I slice and eat wedges of cheese — a Christmas gift. Around our little house, I imagine the moon making her steady, slow rise into the starry sky above our metal roof, the unbroken night pooling through this village, with its lit-up twinkling strings of white and colored Christmas lights.

So, the day funnels down into the night, this year into the next. She talks about our old house — unfinished was the word we always used for the house, and she says it again, unfinished. I push aside my stack of work papers. Between us is a little bonsai plant, a gift from her friend.

I keep listening to this girl — just her and me and the cats beginning for crumbles of cheese. Goodness, adolescence — clear and mysterious as the rising full moon. She stirs the boiling water.

You can contemplate existence all you want, at the end of the day someone needs to blow their nose and hand you a dirty tissue.

— Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritko, Letters From Max: a book of friendship

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Joyful Interlude

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A few years back, I told the man at the dump about an argument I’d had with my now ex. The old man always assessed what I had for garbage and recycling and then suggested what I should pay. Are you okay with that price? he’d always ask me. We had a sugaring and carpentry business then, and I often had strange assortments of things like moldy sap lines or boxes of broken syrup jars or a busted stroller.

The old man — who always spoke to my rowdy toddler daughter — told me to take her swimming for the day. That’s what you need to be doing today.

I think of him every time I go to the dump.

Before my second daughter was born, he suffered a terrible burn accident and died a prolonged and horrific death. I know this because I read his obituary in the newspaper one fall when I was crumpling up newsprint to build a fire in my wood stove. Those days when I pulled into the dump with my lively daughter and the million things I was doing then — syrup and mothering and trying to figure out my life — the day of his death seemed far away.

There’s a lesson in this I repeat to myself, that I must swallow down into the marrow of my bones. Seize joy — the unremarkable days of swimming that make up a life.

… We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left… very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins…. whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

— Mary Oliver

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Open Hearts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The cliché about a small town is you know everything and everyone. By far the simplest part of my day yesterday was the boy who walked into my library, returned books, and asked how many he could check out. He’s the hungriest kid reader in the library, and we mutually agree he needs to stock up on books for the Christmas break.

Maybe 7 years ago, I laughed with this boy’s mother at a friend’s birthday party. Shyly, the little boy and his even younger sister crawled beneath her long skirt. I wrote his father paychecks the summer he worked for my now ex renovating the large yellow inn in town.

How little we really know, though — of each other, of our own selves.

I jammed so much into that day — hours of solitary work; a doctor’s visit with my teenager where she used her voice, ringing with the righteous truth of adolescence; an hour at a selectboard meeting with people I’ve known in one way or another for years, together in one room, united in concern for the future of the school and the town. The future’s unknown path hovers above us.

Outside the town clerk’s office — a former one-room schoolhouse — the moon shone in the cold dark, caught in the bare branches of a maple tree.

How time moves on — and yet it doesn’t. For a moment, I stood talking with a friend on the moonlit snow. Then she went her way. I went mine, home to daughters and an algebra problem with a flipped sign and the cats sprawled on the rug.

More reading recommendations from my father:

It’s the same with the wound in our hearts. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wounds continue to cause us pain… But here’s the trick — they also serve an amazing purpose. When our hearts are wounded that’s when they open. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations. That’s why you have to embrace each and every difficult thing in your life.

― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

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Summer memory!

In the Gloaming

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Even the kids remark on the darkness.

In our kitchen, the girls baking cookies after school turn on the overhead light. At my library, the little children play outside in the afternoon dark, rolling down the snowy hillside in their bulky clothes.

I turn on the outside light beside the door for the parents. It’s not yet 5 o’clock.

Around our house, a bitter wind swirls snowflakes with tiny teeth. On our red rug, the cats stretch, indolent. Through the vast space, on our heavenly blue-and-emerald body, we spin.

Already light is returning pairs of wings
lift softly off your eyelids one by one
each feathered edge clearer between you
and the pearl veil of day

You have nothing to do but live.

— From “Winter Solstice” by Anonymous

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Kindling in December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Frost twists upward this morning on the sticks of our lilac bushes. Come early June, we’ll live outdoors, surrounded by the fragrance of multiple blossoms. Not so, these New England winter days.

In a brief pass of sunlight, we hurry outside, take a walk through the woods, observe the ice curling over a running brook. Later, in my Sunday housecleaning, shaking rugs over the deck railings, I hear the girls in the cemetery laughing. From the barn, they’ve taken the sled in search of a snowy hillside.

Mid-December — the hard and holy time.

Upstairs, my daughter plays the clarinet, the melody languorously easing into the afternoon’s already fading sunlight.

Mid-December, holy perhaps precisely for its hardness. Draw the darkness fast around us; see what we hold, what we cherish.

I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

— Gary Soto, Oranges

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