A Handful of Words

March 5, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Recently, on a freezing afternoon, I was late to a workshop for writing a grant, in an attempt to keep funding my second novel endeavor. Either because I live where parking is usually not a problem, or because I don’t think ahead, I arrived with about a heartbeat to spare, but then couldn’t find parking, and ended up running in my clunky boots and parka a few blocks.

The workshop was held in a dance studio that was hardly heated, and all of crowded around tables in our sweaters and coats and hand-knitted hats. Mainly painters, the other attendees ranged from a young man who seemed to have just rolled out of the sack to elderly folks who asked a lot of good questions. Although I didn’t linger, I knew these were my tenor of people – not all that well-coiffed, intense enough about their passion to seek out sitting for a few cold hours in a shabby end of Burlington.

To get through the first cut, I’ll need to write four paragraphs. I sat there, in my sweater with the unraveling cuffs, and thought, That’s it? Four paragraphs? While the painters asked questions about matting, I started scribbling my answer. Be specific. Be profound. Articulate why literature matters. And, for God’s sake, don’t be afraid of four paragraphs.

Check back in May and see if I’m weeping….

Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place.

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

Hazen Union, Hardwick, Vermont

Radius of This Afternoon

March 4, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The cold hammers down around us again, returning with March’s powerful jaws, reminding me of all those years when my daughters were little, and we were housebound around the wood stove. Always, I bundled up the baby and walked out into the cold, even in the rawest of days, and the house’s warmth welcomed us on our return.

My friends would bring stacks of Sunday New York Times, and I would read months-old news before the wood stove, children playing with dolls or wooden frying pans, devouring the news aptly while eating popcorn. Such was the world of living with little children…. Today is merely a dip back in my mothering days, a memory when the girls couldn’t zip their coats or read a book.

I’m glad to welcome this reprise from the world-out-there of news I’d rather not hear but will make its way to our door, one way or another, eventually. For now, I’ll shake down the coals, lay on more wood, and brew tea.

March is the in-between season, of library books, knitting, board games. End-of-winter pause.

The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,
it brings no relief from winter.
My neighbor stares out the window,
talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,
trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.
It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.
We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light…..

From Louise Gluck’s “March”

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Gift-Bearing Guest

March 2, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Many months ago, I wrote in this blog about visiting a friend who was gravely ill. I’d known this friend for years, and, driving him home from a doctor’s appointment, he imagined raising chickens and pigs and lambs. I believed he was not long from death; I could see the nearness of his demise in his ochre skin. Today, he stopped by with pork, from three pigs he slaughtered on Monday. We exchanged stories about our kids, standing in my kitchen he helped build.

Those pigs represent a dream come true for my friend: more of this life.

He has the money problems he’s always had, but he copes with those challenges as he always has, making do, one way or another. The little bit of help I offered him I gave as freely as I’ve given anything in this life, with no thought of repayment. After he left, I opened up the cardboard box and found ham steaks, painstakingly packed, for the short distance from his house to mine.

Here’s a typewritten piece of Woodbury’s history I found in our little library’s stacks.

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Flipping the Lesson Inside Out

February 28, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As part of my on-going museum fascination, my daughters and I stopped by the Burlington library today to check out a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about human evolution. Pointing to one panel, I (no doubt, tediously) explained to my 11-year-old about the progression of homo sapiens’ brain development depicted by a series of illustrations.

My girl pointed to a nearby rack of magazines with a crazy-haired illustration of our nation’s current commander-in-chief and laughed. We’ve progressed?

Which pretty much ended my history lesson.

We walked down the street for coffee and little cupcakes.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

– Charles Darwin

Photo by Molly S./Burlington, Vermont

Out!

February 27, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.

Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.

That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon-beholders.

– Matsuo Bashō

Hardwick, Vermont

Largesse

February 26, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A full-throated sunny thaw yesterday. With laundry hung on the line, the younger daughter and I dropped off outgrown clothes at the Salvation Army where two volunteers pointed out blackbirds in maple branches spread over the back lot.

Wearing shorts and a white t-shirt, my daughter and I ate lunch outside on a bench, watching folks walk by in everything from summer skirts to zipped-up parkas. It’s that kind of season.

Later, my friend and I walked a dirt road into Hardwick, while the girls clambered over the chicken coop and threw snowballs at each other. The dirt roads ran with trickling channels of melting snow and thawing frost, catching glittering gold coins of sunlight.

There’s that old adage about traveling the world over to discover what you were looking for all those miles was in your own backyard. I’m grit-minded enough to acknowledge that yesterday an antique claw foot bathtub emerged upside down in our yard from melted snow. A ripped pair of outgrown jeans that fell from the clothesline last fall and froze beneath a snowbank bled bluely up through ice. The messiness of compost spreads near my garden. But our treasure is infinite, too.

I’m reading Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition now, a fascinating tale written by a Spanish conquistador. Again, the same story of desire and seeking, of gold and suffering. I can speculate how this short narrative will end…..