Easy Snow

November 21, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving the neighbor girl home tonight, in the dark descended already at five, the headlights illuminated the pristine snow at the roadside; in the first real snowfall of the season, winter has returned with all its familiarity. The truth is, this season is profoundly beautiful, the nights deeply dark, the stars purer than any possible manufactured light.

Winter tugs out the humanness of us, too. In the descending cold, the hearth has genuine meaning: practicality bound into pleasure. In the backseat, the children laughed, the car steamy with the scent of my wet wool sweater, the snow around us gently falling, the merest whispers of winter’s roar yet off in the distance.

I write this by lamplight
holed up for the winter
there it is on the page

– Yosa Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

The Value of One Word

November 19, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 11-year-old opened a box with a brand-new puzzle today and said happily, “This smells puzzle-y.”

What a world this is, where a kid can make up a word that’s indicative of so much – winter evenings around a table, cheerfully chatting – and spin together that treasured past with the tangible promise of future pleasure literally in her hands.

Our physical world is dictated by laws of equal and opposite action; the earth gives generously, but the earth taketh, too, and doesn’t skimp on the taking. Which is perhaps why that word puzzle-y shines so brilliantly. Like Noah’s olive branch, my daughter’s word treasures the past and beckons in the goodness of the future.

And it came to pass… the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry…. (The Lord said) bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth… While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Genesis 8:13-22, King James Version

Stowe, Vermont

An Invented Life

November 17, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the midst of a tedious work project, I took my laptop to the laundromat, which promised the double advantage of using a clothes dryer and providing me with a clean, well-lighted place. Hardwick’s a slow place this time of year, and I had banked on a quiet space.

As things turned out, I ended up closing my laptop and chatting with a woman working there. She shared stories about growing up in town, sixty years ago, and showed me her scars from heart surgery. And then – as though I were someone else entirely different – I told her a half-pretend life for myself.

I couldn’t do much about my careless ponytail, but I created a different occupation, a husband with a steady salary, and a childhood in Maine. While my daughters are brightening up the house with Christmas carols, my laundromat foray qualifies as November humor in Vermont.

…Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow…

– Robert Frost, “My November Guest”

West Woodbury, Vermont

Dirty Shoes

November 16, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’ve officially entered into the season of increasing darkness – not merely politically but because of the planet’s tilt. My teenager, home early from school, slouches at the kitchen table and moans about the gray. I advise her to head out for a run in the rain. She’ll return, pink-cheeked, and far more cheery, her running shoes smeared with greasy mud on their soles.

Post-election, all these words have surfaced again, the same ones Vermonters use over and over – community, persistence, hope – words that are distressingly meaningless without tangible action. How do our footprints mark our paths? For my daughter who will mature to adulthood under a new administration, I’m going to keep advising her to muddy your feet, girl. In my garden, the johnny-ups are yet blooming amongst the weeds.

I’ve been reading Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches, her memoir of growing up in Rwanda, and that’s all I’m going to write about this slim, powerful book.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

November color

How the Water Flows…. Or Doesn’t

November 14, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, The New Yorker published a photograph of Marina Oswald the morning after Kennedy’s assassination. She was pinning diapers to dry on a clothesline. Last night, I was remembering this photo while solving my washing machine’s leaking cold water. While my mothering energy often heads toward the future – what will my older daughter do after high school graduation? will I make it to my younger daughter’s concert? – the nitty-gritty of daily life is really the grease in family wheels.

Case in point: my washing machine. Leaking hoses have now led to a clogged water filter (or so I believe….) Some days, family life seems one problem-solving exercise after another. This problem, in the scope of things, will crest and diminish. Via google, I’ll remedy the situation or find someone who will. More fodder for the creative grist mill; an aspect of modern family life I’ll master; one more piece of know-how my fingers have dirtied their nails upon.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

– Alice Walker

Folly

November 13, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

History’s legend claims the Roman emperor Caligula so loved his horse Incitatus that the animal was housed in a stable of marble, dined from an ivory manger, and dozed beneath blankets dyed a precious and beautiful purple. History also testifies to famines suffered by the citizens of the Roman empire. Now that our white house will soon shelter a man whom Holden Caulfield would have likely called a “prize horse’s ass,” we might want to brush up on some of those spicier historical stories.

In my own very minor public service on a local school board, always absent at the board table is the kindergartener who’s wearing a worn-out pair of shoes with laces he can’t tie – and yet every decision made considers that child. It’s folly to forget the little ones… and what’s the other word again? Full of hubris.

Here’s a line I gleaned from the library conference I attended yesterday: