#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Where You Find Yourself

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The first job I ever had, when I was fifteen, was a library page in the village library where I read darn near every book in the children’s section. I was so desperate to read, I even read the sic-fi and books about dinosaurs, neither of which were my favorites. One day, I discovered the classics were hidden in a back room off the children’s section. Dickens! Tolstoy! Steinbeck!

This fall, I became the librarian at Woodbury’s even tinier library. While I had to be talked into this position, I should have taken it right away; the library is one of my natural places. Likewise, a welder I sometimes use has a group of guys in his shop, hanging out in lawn chairs, with a hot wood stove crackling in the winter. That’s the place for those guys.

I see love of places in both my children, too. My teenager runs every day along our dirt road, breathing deeply of the woods. The younger girl has a place in her circle of friends where she’s at home. Which brings me to the present I’m knitting for someone’s Christmas gift. Knitting (and creativity) is a portable place, a true winter activity.

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.

– Elizabeth Zimmermann

fullsizerender

Little Song

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The December my youngest daughter was two, she and I did a sweet little one-day-a-week Waldorf mother and child program. One song she loved had the line Look at the snow falling down….

By the end of that December, snow had fallen every day, and our kitchen window was majorly obstructed. I took to gazing out the window and murmuring Look at the snow falling UP…. just to crack the monotony and mix things up a bit.

Those eternally long afternoons with a two-year-old. On a walk this afternoon, my now 11-year-old looks slightly down at me, so merrily proud she’s taller than me, and certainly no longer chubby-cheeked. Same lovely girl on our familiar dirt road, with sparkling winter all around, but always, eternally, in motion.

All things are in flux; the flux is subject to a unifying measure or rational principle. This principle (logos, the hidden harmony behind all change) binds opposites together in a unified tension, which is like that of a lyre, where a stable harmonious sound emerges from the tension of the opposing forces that arise from the bow bound together by the string.

– Heraclitus

img_2936

December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Leaving the library in the dark tonight, with fresh snow sprinkled over the black sidewalk, I remembered a Mark Richard story I once read, about two institutionalized orphaned boys, talking in their beds at night. One boy relays the story of the Christmas angel appearing to the shepherds, who were “sore afraid.”

Although I haven’t read that story in years, I often think of it at winter, when there’s much to be sore afraid of. Cold, and more cold, and the infinite varieties of how cold makes life more difficult all the way around. Dying car batteries. Frozen pipes. The cold kitchen floor.

The darkness is profound at this time of year.

Maybe it’s merely the moon shining through scrim of hazy cloud, a mysterious beacon, or that the heart of winter tugs one deeper inside, but winter appears radiantly beautiful this year. I loved when my girls were babes in arms, toddlers pulling at my knees. But I love this age, too, with each of reading by the wood stove, together, but a little less intense.

 

…..My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year….

– Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

fullsizerender

Sunny Sunday on Skis

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Goodbye, running shoes, and hello, ski boots! It’s the sparkle season.

Winter days like this one – twenty degrees, dazzling light, new-fallen snow in exquisitely formed flakes – embody the season’s perfection. No need to worry about battling weeds in the garden. With the woods’ closed-in canopy dispersed, mountain ridges luminescent with frosty snow shimmer all around our horizon.

At the moment, we’re not hemmed in by the endless varieties of ice or gray, falling sleet. Our cheeks glow with exercise and merriment. The girls are home, and pie warms in the oven. These clear days open up our horizon. Chickadees dart from the apple tree.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow…

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

– Wallace Stevens

img_2925

Backyard Skiing in Woodbury, Vermont

Appetite

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my teenager was an infant, I peddled maple syrup, homemade root beer, and ice cream at what was then the very tiny Hardwick farmers market, so sparse that some Friday afternoons it was just me and another vendor.

In those long hot afternoons, the vendors got to know each other. My friend Charlie Emers, of Patchwork Farm, had an enormous orange, rust-eaten Suburban, that would eventually head to the junkyard with years’  worth of debris inside. Son of an artist and an artist himself, Charlie grew the best peppers I have ever eaten. In late summer, he began pickling my favorite variety – Habanero Hots – in small jars he called Poker Peppers after his favorite game.

Yesterday, in a Williston store I’d never entered, I found a jar of bright red peppers that reminded me of those Poker Peppers: jalapeños, but deliciously fragrant with the spicy summer season. I might eat the whole jar myself.

‘Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world – and what is to become of it.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

img_4354

Photo by Molly S.

Magical Math with Mittens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My sixth-grader ended her school day yesterday with rosy cheeks, sweaty hair, and an enormous smile. With their teacher, the class had hiked into the snowy woods and built what she described as an enormous snowman.

There’s more, though. She described this cold creation as a Fibonacci Snowman. You know what the Fibonacci numbers are, right, mom?

Indeed, I do, but I had missed that these mysterious numbers fit into giant snowmen. One hat, two stick arms, three rocks for eyes and a nose, five buttons, and eight pieces of birch bark for a mouth. What I also missed was the love of much larger numbers, the centimeters of girth and height that went into the hundreds.

With such gusto, this girl relayed the small class’s adventure, involving mathematical calculation and joint herculean strength to lift heavy snowballs.

With these short days, I sometimes cast my vision elsewhere, envying light-filled territories. Then my tousled-hair daughter reminds me implicitly why we’re Vermonters, and why winter is wildly lovely. As we narrow through this time of sparse light, our table is lit each night with a single red candle, in this sacred time of impenetrable night, waiting for the earth to turn around and make her slow, eternally patient way back to the season of mammoth sunflowers.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Dylan Thomas, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

fullsizerender

Our kitchen window view over the December garden.