Continuum

January 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This afternoon, driving home with my friend, our 12-year-olds in the backseat with their skis, sharing crackers, my friend remarked that the days were longer already. A few very cold days into 2018, and already the light — like a long-ago companion — returns. If I have time to reflect on a deathbed, I’m sure the evening’s crepuscular light is something I’ll miss when I pass out of this life.

This weekend had a suicide in town, a grief-soaked death, a death I can’t yet write about.

This weekend also had my library filled with new babies and mamas — one infant so little she was yet womb-sleepy. These mothers braved subzero temperatures, with their determination to meet, their pleasure in their new motherhood, the shared exchange of company and steaming tea.

These two pendulum swings of the human condition. How much grief, and how much milk-laced joy.

We’re one week into this new year. My daughters and I sat in our kitchen this morning, eating sausage, drinking coffee, talking and talking and talking… Savoring Sunday.

Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you.

— D. T. Suzuki

And A High Today of -10º

January 6, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re surrounded by cold. Two days of school this week. The air cuts.

The cats have wholly given themselves over to this season, indolently lying on blankets, nestled in cardboard boxes and the laundry basket, wrapped in each other, luxurious in their fur and the warm house.

At ease. Peaceful. Marvelously content, sweet little beings.

Meanwhile, I read Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions.

We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn’t sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.

Winter’s Wow Factor

January 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Checking to see a child arrived home last night, I drive around a hillside — the cemetery hillside — and my daughter says, Whoa, under her breath, with not a tinge of 12-year-old sarcasm. Just wonder.

Feral, the ebbing, ravenous wolf moon. A profusion of moonlight in an unending night, and all that cold. 6º and expected to get much, much colder.

We feed our own hunger — for warmth, for color, for stories spoken and read.

All night long, while we’re sleeping, meshed in cats and blankets, that pristine moon sails silently over our rooftops, more luminescently magical even than St. Nick.

Endless bare fields
not even a bush
nowhere to abandon a child

— Buson

21º Below Zero

January 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

January.

I’m naturally a sweater knitter — not a sock creator like my sister. Likewise, I’m inclined to the lengthiness of novels, but more and more I admire the uses of brevity. Such as…

January 2.

Kittens, yarn. Piles of work. Stacks of library books. Friends on the calendar. Winter, Vermont-wise, has barely commenced.

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.

— Matsuo Bashō

Gliding

December 31, 2017December 31, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

10º below zero this eve of 2018. Like an oddly magical gift, I woke from a dream of visiting a woman with whom I’d had conflict, conflict, and I lay as the day’s light slowly trickled into the room, rubbing a happy cat and thinking I could release that piece of worrying.

One more year slipped by, my younger daughter officially leaving the terrain of babydolls for the mountainous terrain of adolescence. Here’s a good thing I fostered: ice skating.

If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see the world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

— Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Cold Snap!

December 30, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Our neighbors borrow my teenager’s hair dryer to thaw their pipes. It’s 14º below zero, and they’re confident their situation is minor. Gossip winds around town of whose pipes have frozen. This morning, I woke in the dark with a cat purring beside my shoulder. My daughter, 19, gets up with me in this predawn and says she doesn’t know what she should do with her life.

Aim to do something you’ll be proud of, I suggest.

Deeper than 20º below is when the bitter cold really sets in. The lowest I’ve seen the thermometer is 40º below, in farm fields along the Lamoille River. A ghostly mist ambled around, as if we were in an otherworldly dream.

This is the season of library books, board games, knitting — one year ebbing into the next.