Birthday Cake.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

March 7 is my father’s 87th birthday. My daughter, the oldest grandchild, visited my parents a few days ago and asked what to do for my parents’ birthdays. Cake and flowers. And be sure to eat the whole cake.

At town meeting, on the fly, I had to add a few numbers, tally a total. Writing with my pencil, the 100 or so audience members looking at me, I thought of those childhood evenings when I handed my dad an algebra or calculus problem and asked for help. He always made me sharpen my pencil, align the numbers so the problem made sense, and exhibit some respect for mathematics, please. These three things have stuck with me my entire life.

Every year on my father’s birthday, I think of this Hayden Carruth poem. My father — a man who taught his kids about Arkhipov Day and Ancient Greek philosophy, and spent so many nights in the desert, playing cards with his kids at a picnic table lit by a battery lamp….

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Vermont Town Meeting Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Here’s Vermont Town Meeting Day in a nutshell: lousy coffee for a buck, the cash box in the hands of sweet kids who are raising money for field trips the school board quit funding years ago.

My father calls Town Meeting Day the purest form of democracy. And democracy, hoo boy, what a fascinating creature this is.

On this Town Meeting Day in Greensboro, the moderator drank water from a Daffy Duck glass that he said he’d used for the past thirty town meetings (not a tall tale). Knitting and side conversations, Presidential primary voting, school budget voting, knitting and more knitting, talk about housing and logging and, inevitably, taxes and delinquent taxes.

Late afternoon, a cold drizzle fell. On the playground, the kids had left a bucket of stick stew. I had about a hundred things yet to do that afternoon, but I squatted beneath the white pine and checked out the lean-to the kids had built from branches that had fallen in a winter storm. As we head into this election year, let’s remember the kids keep the world real. Savor some spring stick stew.

Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.

— Abbie Hoffman

Vermont’s fifth season: mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I carry my laptop out the backdoor of Hardwick’s coffee shop. A couple I know pulls up on their fat tire bikes and rave about the biking. There’s an adage in Vermont that the state’s fifth season is mud season. The first week of March is way early for the back roads to break up. Most towns post their roads around March 15, prohibiting heavy trucks, like log or delivery trucks, from destroying already soft roads. Now, towns have already posted these warnings, ribboned with orange survey tape, a sure sign that winter is on the wane.

I meet a friend at a former golf course now owned by the city of Montpelier where people let their dogs run. The course is last year’s brown grass, but when I squint I can see emerging green beginning shimmer, pushing back the dull amber. How much the world leans into living.

My oldest daughter calls from New Mexico, on her journey to visit the grandparents. Through our phones, her face glows with desert light. I think of her driving around Santa Fe, this old adobe city and the stunning landscape an infinitely complex story that stretches so far back. Within that human history, my own family story lodges in with its numerous plot points. Ah, family… never a straight line.

T. S. Eliot wrote of that April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm… Mud season may be the least loved. But in my mind, it’s the sweetest. Sap runs. The softening ground sucks our boots into its stickiness. Tender green unfurls, strengthens. We move, onward.

March 1: Cabin Fever, the Impossibility of Spring.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March: a day of singing chickadees, mushy ice, all the little paths running with thaw, twinkling in the sunlight with the promise of what I cheerily call early spring! The next morning, the temperature pegs itself solidly at 15 degrees and refuses to budge. I walk down to the post office, the wind scraping my cheeks. What grit of sandpaper is this? 80? 60?

Vermont late winter/spring is the season of vehement vacillating, of freeze and melt, sun, snow, rain. It’s the season of cold hands, flushed cheeks.

Late into the night I lie on the floor reading Leslie Jamison: “It’s what fairy tales have been trying to tell us for centuries. Don’t be afraid of never getting what you want. Be afraid of what you’ll do with it.”

March: the lurching season of cabin fever, of Where are those crocuses, anyway? Will flowers ever bloom again? I bake a cheesecake, fill bird feeders, have one, two, three essays picked up by little mags. The waning moon shines up the rutted mud, the dregs of snow. Early morning, the birds are at it, singing for dear life, tugging in spring.

‘Soon it will be the sky of early spring…’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Wild February!

At noon, I stand talking to the road crew in a sparkling snowfall. I wax on about the prettiness of snow on the emerging earth. The crew, who’s endured the strange vagaries of mud season in December, the fickleness of Vermont’s winter weather made weirder by climate change, humor me with a nod.

Fifty degrees and rain forecasted for today, followed by more, followed by bitter cold, then rain and wind, the sun I lean towards…. Late winter, again, and I remember when I could distinguish the years: the spring we boiled sap from March 1 to the 31st. The year we made 540 hard-earned gallons, two of us and a five-year-old, and I wore through three pairs of gloves carrying in wood and feeding the arch.

Walking around my snow-scattered garden, I envision where I will plant the bare root Japanese lilac I’ve ordered, for me or someone else to admire and love. The path down to my compost is both icy and soft mud, the conundrum of winter reluctantly losing its teeth to spring. The true joy is the inevitability, the earth’s order to proceed from twinkling snowflake to downy crocus, the planet’s sheer opinionlessness regarding skunks and black flies.

The road crew and I kick around a few more pithy remarks about government corruption, and then we head along….

From my one of my favorite Louise Glück poems, March:

The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes;
it doesn’t lie.
You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

Finally the dog goes in.
We watch the crescent moon,
very faint at first, then clearer and clearer
as the night grows dark.
Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and
violets.

Don’t let your cow get the upper hand, er, hoof…?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Ah, February, the month with the strange “U” that children stumble to spell. Two inches of a sugar snow this morning when I carried out the stove’s ashes, the cardinals whistling the day alive, a buttery full moon charming the evening sky. For the past few weeks, my life has overflowed with the challenges of faraway aging parents, with details mundane and immense, and all very very real. There’s that Tolstoy saying about families unhappy in their own way. Carrying in firewood, I remind myself: families endure the unspeakable in their own particular vernacular, swaddled in the way of all human life.

Sugaring season is hustling into Vermont now. The years I spent sugaring with a husband and two young daughters taught me to strip away the unnecessary, to bend into work when bending is required. It’s a habit I’ve carried to writing, and I’ve managed now to write three books against odds that even now seem not in my favor. But it was single parenting that honed my skills to grasp the nourishing in times of hardness, suck hard the marrow of the real. In a conversation with a young homesteader and poet today, she offers me a line of wisdom so pithy and wise I laugh out loud: Don’t let your milk cow get the upper hand on you. Yeah, think that one over.

Here’s a David Goodman interview with Elizabeth Price, mother of the young Palestinian man Hisham Awartani who was shot with two friends in Burlington, Vermont, last November. The family epitomizes courage, knowledge, and depth of heart — highly recommended.