The Edge of the World

November 27, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November light in Vermont is eerily dim, the daylight rapidly leaking away, and even what full sunlight we have is thin and scant. My older daughter complains, I don’t like this, to which I reply that no one does. Sometimes I wonder if an unspoken mainstay of my parenting might more concisely be: deal with it.

Yesterday, the girls and I took a short, unfamiliar hike in the White Mountains, switchbacking up an abandoned road. Below us, pine trees and mountains rose out of a sea of mist, and we never saw the valley floor. The girls were enchanted by this Lord of the Rings world. As we climbed higher, the view spread further, as if we peered down into an endless ocean with sacred islands rising majestically from its billows.

At the top, we found a blasted site where someone had once intended to build a house, and – likely through lack of money – abandoned that project and wandered off elsewhere. Fox prints tracked through the house now. The younger daughter remarked that the school bus wouldn’t come. She’d have to ski to school, she noted with real delight.

Stay honest whatever happens
says the bamboo bent under snow
over my window

– Buson

Mt. Washington Valley, NH

This Brief Place

November 25, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These few days, we’re staying in a house without a clock, which makes me realize just how much of my life is sewn together by those magic hands. When my daughters were tiny, and I was mostly home with them, our lives unfolded daily in the ways of very young children: the endless cycle of eating and play and napping. Now, I arrange complicated days, while stringing together long hours of work. But even when I have that time, I am always aware of that clock hammering down: work, work, while I have time.

Now, time-out-of-clock. With the shades pulled down, we slept late this morning. The sky is sleeting, the house warm, the children here and well. We may never return to our empty house.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings…

M. S. Merwin, “Thanks”

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My List Begins…

November 24, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was a kindergartener, I discovered Thanksgiving was combined with cool crafts of making paper turkeys by crayoning around my hand. I also learned that people called pilgrims who lived a very long time ago wore strange white hats. Which was the sum total of my knowledge of that holiday for an embarrassingly long time.

Many years later, when homeschooling my ten-year-old and digging through her father’s past, I realized her ancestors arrived on that rickety wooden ship called the Mayflower. I was riveted. Related to the pilgrims? Those hardy, fanatical souls?

This time of year, I can’t help but think of those Mayflowerites, and not because of the colorful paper turkeys everywhere, but because right around now the cold and dark encompass my cedar-shingled house, and, instinctively, as I go about calculating my wood pile and battening down storm windows for our house’s journey through the coming perishingly cold months, I imagine the keening worries of families who had too little for sustenance and shelter – and too much of illness and exhaustion.

My list of thanksgiving begins with what I have here: pies on the table, a sweater to knit for a gift, warm boots. Us.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

– Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower

Photo by Molly S.

Birds, Black and White

November 23, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When you drive down our dirt road hill, the woods give way suddenly to open farm fields along the river valley bottom where, before the rivers were polluted, must have made for amazing swimming. We never swim in the river, but the immense fields and the arching sky are beautiful, and all my many journeys along the brambly edge have yielded treasures – wildflowers I’d never seen or small running streams from the steep hillsides.

This afternoon, crows pecked at the corn stubble. Something like white cloths fluttered in the light snow, and I realized those graceful swoops of white were seagulls. I’d never seen seagulls there.

If you’d been looking for an omen – and I had, indeed – that mixture of the black birds, with their beaks working where the open ground lay barren and brown, coupled with the downy white of seagulls who tilted upward in the breeze and drifting snow would have sufficed. It was just me and the birds, and the birds would have gone on quite happily without me, serene in a mysterious drama all their own.

…. you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

– Mary Oliver

Hardwick, Vermont, snowing

Easy Snow

November 21, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving the neighbor girl home tonight, in the dark descended already at five, the headlights illuminated the pristine snow at the roadside; in the first real snowfall of the season, winter has returned with all its familiarity. The truth is, this season is profoundly beautiful, the nights deeply dark, the stars purer than any possible manufactured light.

Winter tugs out the humanness of us, too. In the descending cold, the hearth has genuine meaning: practicality bound into pleasure. In the backseat, the children laughed, the car steamy with the scent of my wet wool sweater, the snow around us gently falling, the merest whispers of winter’s roar yet off in the distance.

I write this by lamplight
holed up for the winter
there it is on the page

– Yosa Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

An Invented Life

November 17, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the midst of a tedious work project, I took my laptop to the laundromat, which promised the double advantage of using a clothes dryer and providing me with a clean, well-lighted place. Hardwick’s a slow place this time of year, and I had banked on a quiet space.

As things turned out, I ended up closing my laptop and chatting with a woman working there. She shared stories about growing up in town, sixty years ago, and showed me her scars from heart surgery. And then – as though I were someone else entirely different – I told her a half-pretend life for myself.

I couldn’t do much about my careless ponytail, but I created a different occupation, a husband with a steady salary, and a childhood in Maine. While my daughters are brightening up the house with Christmas carols, my laundromat foray qualifies as November humor in Vermont.