#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Last Week of November

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My female friends, thinking of middle school, cringe – like me, too – as though we’re all reliving those years.

Just months into middle school with my second daughter, it seems to me the heart-wrenching agony is driven by a burgeoning and raging sense of injustice. Sometimes I wonder if the adult world ever escapes middle school, or merely wears down and accepts bad behavior.

November, November, I remind myself. Afternoons of lake swimming will return.

The girls and I cook dinner and wash the dishes and – because it’s dark – take an evening walk in the dark. White sparkling lights are strung on the footbridge suspended over the river, and even the closed stores on Main Street are lit. Around us, the lights hang low on the mountains stretching up into the black sky. A crescent moon cups its white-gold place in the sky. Walking, I think of Martin Luther King’s long arc of the moral universe, bending back towards injustice, imperceptibly and, yet, making its gradual way.

December, season of falling snow and good cheer, isn’t far.

If ever God’s heart was drowning
in fifty gallons of despair, I would mention
the anatomy of birds as a flashlight
to shine through His heavy grief.
Avian Pallium, I would say….
… the kindness
of this gentle bone, how it protects Cerebral Cortex
like hands wrapped around
a small snowball.

– From “The Anatomy of Birds” by Steven Coughlin

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Knitting Circle

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Note this: a Vermont November day in the fifties. My girls toss text notes to me from Hardwick to my windowless desk in Burlington: Who did you loan the pie pans to? When will you be home?

The teenager and her friend are hatching a plan to pick up an old friend at the airport which requires, first, that ancient human activity: waiting.

The friend, nervous, taps her phone.

I take out the hat I’m knitting, and – like that – the girls ask for needles and yarn. My teenager, former Waldorf student, knits quickly, weaving in a second color. The kittens leap from one ball of yarn to another. Our needles, fingers, and voices work, in this other old activity: women at handwork.

Twilight comes to the little farm
At winter’s end. The snowbanks
High as the eaves, which melted
And became pitted during the day,
Are freezing again, and crunch
Under the dog’s foot. The mountains
From their place behind our shoulders
Lean close a moment, as if for a
Final inspection, but with kindness,
A benediction as the darkness
Falls….

From Hayden Carruth’s “Twilight Comes”

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Thread of Thanks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I turned off the lights and went home from the library the other day, I checked out a ‘thanksgiving’ tree a child had made and left behind, maybe to dry, maybe because the project was forgotten. Branches were stuck in a mason jar, with colored leaves tied on with white yarn, handwritten with the child’s thanks.

Whoever this child is, she or he had painted the jar a brilliant turquoise blue, and the branches were so large, they nearly tipped the jar over.

I read a few written in purple marker in a child’s handwriting: mom, my bike, the sky, chocolate.

These November days, the dark is ubiquitous. I rise in the dark with the mewling kittens. Before I begin dinner, the dark has already wrapped us again, familiar, like a long-term visitor we must endure. The heady days of an evening swim in the lake, of splashing while the late sunset descends, will return.

Here’s my own offering, from Julie Cadwallader-Staub’s Milk:

… and it was all too much then –
the endless stream of groceries meals
bills illnesses laundry jobs no sleep –
so to sit in the rocking chair was sweet respite,
to do just one thing:
watch the baby
drain the profusion of milk out of me
watch the baby
become so contented that nursing faded into sleep…

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Librarians Rock

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

5 hours of interlibrary loan training? Really, the best thing about library conferences is the decency of fellow librarians. Smart, witty – definitely quirky – exuding a capability far beyond the circulation desk. Usually women, many of these librarians are likely equally handy shoveling a roof or driving a tractor.

Better yet, wandering deep in the state library stacks, I found a row of the Little House books, and remembered when I first discovered these in second grade. Shelved in the Ws, the books were on the bottom shelf. Even now, I remember my intense happiness at finding so many of these novels.

The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Surprise Visitor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I went out to the garden yesterday morning for frozen sage for breakfast omelets, and my neighbor walked up from her woodpile and asked for a favor.

Without thinking, I said yes. Sunny and sharply cold, the morning was already filled with the radiance of a bit of fresh, sparkling snow. The grass crunched beneath our boots.

My neighbor’s moving, and her pump organ needed interior storage for the winter. The old, exquisitely crafted organ was made in Brattleboro, in the Estey Factory, near where I worked in college at a nursing home.

My brother, who’s visiting, says, Where are you going to put an organ?

I was on my way to work, so I mention that maybe he and my daughters could manage that one particular detail. We’re laughing at this unexpected turn of events. Who imagined an organ would arrive today?

Not one of us play. When I come home from work, the girls tell me how the neighbors’ two friends carried the organ up the icy hill and into our house. My youngest lifts the keyboard cover, puts her feet on the pedals, and pulls the stops. My brother and I look at each other. The melody, even from her untrained hands, bellows deeply, soulful.

My brother says, Wow.

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Radiance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My 12-year-old went wild with the row of tiny icicles along our roof. They’re back! It takes me a moment to figure out what she’s saying. When I do, I jam on my boots, step out, and reach up for two tiny sticks of ice.

Inside our sunny kitchen, I offer her the icicles. She shares them with her kitten. The ice melts quickly – it disappears to wet fur, and then that’s all.

The kitten wraps his paws in stray yarn. Our day moves along. First sprinkles of snow: beautiful.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

– John Steinbeck

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