Reprieve

February 16, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sunstruck afternoon in February — I opened the windows and aired out the house. The kids jumped off the back deck, ate potato chips, planned building projects we needed to start right away.

A trustee signed off on an email to me, Happy sap run. These are the intimations of sugaring season, the beginning of the thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. When we first began sugaring, twenty years ago, I believe the thaw would come in a rush and stay. Not so. Thaw and more thaw, studded with bursts of hard cold, slowly melts the frost down deep.

(I had) a revelation the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays

February 14

February 14, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Ten years ago, a friend drove to my house in a snowstorm, and while we talked and talked, drank tea and knitted, so much snow fell that, when she went out to clear her car, we weren’t entirely sure where the hood of her car lay under all that snow.

With a kind of seriousness, my daughter packs small pink boxes of candy hearts into her backpack for her friends. She gives me a box, too, and, in a Brach’s variation of Proust’s madeleine, I’m in grade school again, mesmerized by these hearts and a little mystified by the valentine exchange and what that might mean. I offer a tiny green heart to my daughter with the words Be mine.

Here’s a love song to Vermont:

To our Mother of Mud Season
(may she come early and be soon gone)
and the happiness of cows and the sadness
of meadows; to snow in April, and cowslips and marsh
rose and bulk-tank days, to serenity
and late-winter languor…..

From Tony Whedon’s “Things to Pray To in Vermont” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

Woodbury, Vermont

Cabin Fever, #1

February 13, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Somehow, we’ve reached the middle of February: this is the period of deep winter, and its many juxtapositions. The sun shines blissfully all morning on the sleeping cats sprawled around my feet on the kitchen floor. The neighbors’ septic backs up; we meet in our nearby driveways, shoveling snow yet again, and he laughs, Not my best day.

The older daughter takes a highlighter to her textbook, determined to pass an EMT course, while the younger plans an elaborate visit to Burlington. Through my perpetual email, I wonder if she’s imagining Burlington as the spring paradise of blooming fruit trees rather than the gray pavement I see once a week.

My taxes are unfinished in messy pile beside stacks of overdue books from three libraries. I mean to invite over parents of my daughter’s new friend. I miss drinking coffee with my friend in Montpelier. In the basement of either the town hall or the town clerk might be boxes of legos for my young library patrons: a kid gold mine I need to spelunk. Somewhere out there is my next husband. When will he arrive?

This is February.

March will bring my library’s pie breakfast, when hundreds of people in town bake pies and carry them in both hands to the elementary school’s second floor cafeteria. Two live bands, endless conversation and gossip, coffee and more coffee, sweet and savory pies, and hundreds of Vermonters in snow boots. Pie breakfast is March’s small town brilliance.

The moon has nothing to be sad about….

— Sylvia Path, from “Edge”

Imagination

February 11, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My brother is standing on a ladder shoveling off our back porch roof when a sheet of snow from the house roof creaks loose and cascades over him. With my daughter’s help, he empties little chunks of ice and powdery snow from his pockets. Rain falls a little.

After we clear the snow, the three of us stand on the back porch — scene of summer hanging out — and I mention the sweet William that grew last summer, and will presumably again this summer, in the wild patch below the railings. I can imagine the tiny, frilly flowers in three hues of pink, laced with white.

All around us, the world is painted in hues of green pine, brown bark, and all that snow, on branches, over the garden, the trampoline frame nearly buried. It takes imagination to envision the lushness of spring — singing frogs, mating birds, tender green, and all those wildflowers, unstoppably unfolding from the earth — but we imagine it. February.

‘This is Just to Say’

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

— William Carlos Williams

Turning 19 or 20? Whatever

February 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Birthing a baby through Caesarian may not be the low-light, mystical ideal, but it suffices. My daughter turns 19 today, although she’s decided she wants to be 20, so we’re going with 20 this year, with plans to do 20 again next year.

After a prolonged labor, a surgeon very quickly delivered her. In the dreamlike world of the OR, where the adults rustled in gowns and masks, the surgeon held up this tiny baby in his hands for me to see. In that room filled with sterile white light, the baby was vernix-greasy, pink and wet, intently alive. Unwittingly or not, in that crowded room she looked directly at me. Suffused with joy and drugs, I had the keenest sense of familiarity: I knew this baby.

A few years later, when my father was laughing so hard he took off his glasses, I realized the shape of her eyes mirror his.

…the world… was not enough for (my mother) without me in it,
not the moon, the stars, Orion
cartwheeling easily across the dark, not the
earth, the sea, none of it was
enough for her, without me.

— Sharon Olds, “The Planned Child”

Four Maples

February 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend from my high school years (which, my daughters remind me, were literally in the last century) sends me an email, and I email back from my car, in a gray parking lot beside even grayer Lake Champlain. I remember canoeing from Burton Island to the mainland on a bright, balmy morning last July, and then waiting on a high point on the mainland, watching the ferry traveling across the lake with my 12-year-old daughter and her friend. When the ferry docked, I ran down to meet them, the girls glowing and happy with their adventure.

This friend writes about taking his kids swimming, and I wonder, pond or lake, river or pool? It’s been so long since I’ve seen him I would pass him by on the street, and not recognize him.

Finished, I fold up my laptop. I nod goodbye to this polluted and yet gorgeously beautiful lake and head towards a building where I’ll be blind to the lake all day, but I think for just one more moment of that town where I grew up. Along the square of lawn that my sister and brother and I wore down through endless kickball games stood four giant sugar maples, so tall their lowest branches were high above our heads. I wonder if there’s any chance those maples are still there, haven for songbirds, their leaves lifting up and ruffling over in approaching summer storms.

Once there was a tree….
and she loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come
and he would gather her leaves
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest…

— Shel Silverstein

Where we are now

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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