#books

What we can’t know.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The cold hammers down around us in the way we’ve known Januarys before — nothing fierce, but sharp. January is a season that draws us up against our own mortality. Stumble and you’ll break a bone. Sleep outside, ill-prepared, seriously down on your luck, and you could perish.

Wednesday morning on the early side, I’m drinking coffee and staring at the snowflakes that have appeared in the downtown again, a memory for an absent person. News has wound my way of the death of a person distant from me by numerous steps, the fate we’ll all meet, one way or another, the great leveler. In the afternoon, when I return from work, the window washers are carefully removing the lacy paper, setting the delicate flakes to one side, and then re-taping them on the windows. A gentle, wordless act of care. A piece of our human puzzle.

These winter days, I’m devouring Paul Lynch, about as good as anything can be.

“I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible.”

Household chores and world events.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The last day of 2023, I let the fire in my wood stove extinguish, and I take my stove apart. The stove has been spitting ash and spark through a damper, a chore I’m driven to by sheer necessity.

I unscrew the stovepipe and the back heat shield and plate, and carefully remove the two honeycomb metal filters that are choked with fine ash. It’s a messy job, and I’m a messy woman. My curious cat walks through the cinders and leaves dirty paw prints on my white enamel kitchen sink.

When I’ve put the stove together again, I find the driest kindling I can in my barn and build a small fire and slowly heat the stove again, kneeling before the glass where the flames ripple, listening to public radio hash over the year. I add wood, study the flames, murmur to my cat who is seriously invested in this warmth and the doubtless impending feline nap.

I’d once torn a photograph from a New Yorker issue and thumbtacked it near my desk of Marina Oswald, taken the morning after her husband Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for assassinating President Kennedy. Her face twisted unhappily, she’s pinning cloth diapers on a line. So it goes: the necessity of domestic life as the great events of the world unfold.

My stove burns merrily. I bake spanakopita and invite a few dear ones who bring chocolate. This morning, January. A drift of snowflakes. The lean winter light.

The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.

— Issa

Real Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Much as I pushed the hippie thing in my younger years, I’ve often sneered (albeit silently) at the tea drinkers, save for my pregnancy years. I’ve always been much more of a knock-back-a-couple-of-espressos woman. But this sodden late afternoon finds me leaning against my woodpile in the dreary rain, sipping steaming tea, remembering my girlhood love of The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, and scorned Sylvia Plath.

As for the photo above, our Christmas adventures involved inspection of the July flood’s toll on the rail trail’s bridges. Christmas Day, we followed the former railroad bed deep into the woods, where this enormous culvert was skillfully and laboriously constructed a few generations ago. For reasons that need no elaboration, this seems a fitting photo for the trailing end of 2023. Unless you know by word-of-mouth or friend, you could walk through these woods and never see this beauty. Which would be a kind of loss.

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions or wishes, so easily broken. But here’s a small one: less of the superficial hashtag life. Hold scorching tea. Share a secret marvel with a stranger. Adhere to the tangible.

And last — I was lucky yesterday to be invited with Vermont Almanac editor Patrick White on Brad Ferland’s radio program Vermont Viewpoint on WDEV. It’s always a joy to participate in radio — especially with my friend Brad and talking about Vermont and writing.

Hope you’re all dry and warm….

Small Victories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Like so many places, I’ve limited occupancy in my one room library, and, for the most part, that’s worked. This afternoon, just before the after school program started for the first time in months, the adults stood around in our usual pow-wow and returned to the same theme: we’ll make do.

We did.

One boy leaned in the open door, begging to come in. I told him to wait, wait, that I’d come for him when the space emptied out a little.

When it did, I stepped out on the grass and spied him across the playground. When I gestured for him and called his name, he came running.

Messed-up world notwithstanding, what utter joy to see this sprinting boy.

In honor of RBG, her words:

Earlier, I spoke of great changes I have seen in women’s occupations. Yet one must acknowledge the still bleak part of the picture. Most people in poverty in the United States and the world over are women and children, women’s earnings here and abroad trail the earnings of men with comparable education and experience, our workplaces do not adequately accommodate the demands of childbearing and child rearing, and we have yet to devise effective ways to ward off sexual harassment at work and domestic violence in our homes. I am optimistic, however, that movement toward enlistment of the talent of all who compose “We, the people,” will continue.

— Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Photo by Molly S.