community

Short Visit

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

A retired man shows up at my job, looking for a little info and then stays to talk, sitting in a chair while I lean against one of the cement posts that hold up the ceiling, and the building overhead.

A former landscaper, he’s survived numerous joint replacements, an overseas war as a young man, and he’s holding cancer at bay, for now. He’ll succumb to the cancer, he says, at some point. But for now, he tells me how much he savors that first slurp of hot tea every morning.

I have plenty to do, but for that time, I might as well, really, have nothing else to do. He tells me about a double blossom primrose flowering in his garden. Another spring, he says.

Snow expected today; that’s Vermont spring, too.

Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The temperature weirdly shoots up to 70 degrees. 70 degrees in Vermont in early April! For anyone who doesn’t live here, know that this warm, daffodil-growing weather makes our world a communally happy place.

While my daughter plays soccer, I take a walk, then spread out my work on a picnic table. Three geese fly overhead, making a honking racket. On the other side of a school building, I hear the kids laugh. Two dads roll up on bikes and stand in the parking lot, chatting.

Another parent I haven’t seen for a long time appears and stands at a distance. We talk and talk, about how our work has changed, and what’s happening with our kids, and even more, about each of us might want this summer — happiness, in some small way. Listening, I think, of all the many things we’ve learned this year, surely valuing the connection between us rises high. How little that might seem, and how infinitely valuable.

My daughter returns with a blister. At home, the carpenter has just finished repairing the porch railings broken by falling ice. We stand for a bit, talking and waving at early mosquitoes. He admires the view of the village below us and asks how I like living beside a cemetery. I like it just fine, I tell him.

Don’t talk to me about the stars, about how cold and indifferent they are, about the unimaginable distances. There are millions of stars within us that are just as far, and people like me sometimes burn up a whole life trying to reach them.

— Ted Kooser

Vermont Town Meeting Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

… today, except it’s not.

So much for those days jammed into town halls and school gymnasiums, debating school consolidations or upping appropriations to local food shelves. So much for buying a bowl of chili for lunch and supporting the local PTO. Stand up and vote by voice has been replaced this year by the ubiquitous paper ballot all over the state.

All night, the wind blows — March’s mighty lion. I wake thinking of the old farmhouse and broken down barn I visited the day before. Someone I knew years ago has bought the property and intends to build a new house. The farmhouse lies along a mountain ridge, with a view into a valley. Far up the valley, wind towers sparkled in the sunlight.

There’s no one around at this house, just the sun and myself, snowbanks sculpted by the wind far higher than my head. I might as well be on the edge of the world. I walk back up that long driveway, the snow drifted nearly to my knees. At the crest, I turn again and look back, curious to see next summer how this property will return to life.

Strangers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A stranger comes into my office and tells me about the guesthouse he might want to build in ten years or so. Then he stops and asks rhetorically, Who am I kidding? I don’t know what will happen this summer.

I say (through my mask), Really, what might happen next week?

There’s a moment before we both laugh. What else could we do?

Driving home, through this gorgeous Vermont scenery — white snow sprinkled on blue mountains, enormous red barns, pretty clapboard villages with church spires the highest manmade mark — I think how lucky I was to travel a lot as a kid and in my twenties. So much camping, so much washing of hair beneath spigots. And yet, everything is just weird. Maybe this will change by the summer; maybe not.

At dinner, my daughter tells me about an elderly couple who stopped their car while she was walking and asked for directions to the high school. She said they told her they were on their way to get vaccines, and they waved happily to her as they drove off.

Listening, for some reason I remember an old word from novels I read as a child: Godspeed.

Thinking of that couple, I thought, Godspeed. Thinking of all of us, I thought, Godspeed.

And here’s inspiring news of an ancient shell.

Where We Are

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On a gorgeous Friday afternoon, my 15-year-old and I are outside the Vermont Department of Libraries, to pick up a sneeze guard and hand sanitizer for my library. The building’s locked (of course), but we’re allowed into the vestibule of this beautiful building that once was the town’s high school.

The Department’s employee who helps us is like all the state library’s employees — utterly helpful — and a bag of children’s books has been included, too, to add to my library collection or give away. I imagine on the employee job application is a box — Are you a decent person?

There’s been some snafus in the pickup, and I’ve been texting the woman who arranged for these free drop-offs around the state. By then, my daughter and I are at our next errand. She’s in the driver’s seat, and we’re in the parking lot of a wood stove store.

The woman apologies for the confusion, and I text back not to worry. She writes that elevator problems were not in the plan. Then, laughing, I text that 2020 and Covid were doubtlessly not in her plans, either.

Haha, she writes back, nor were distributing sneeze guards and hand sanitizer in my career plans, either.

While I’m laughing and texting, my daughter has cracked open one of the half-gallon bottles of sanitizer and says, Hey, this is the good stuff!

The July day is stunning beautiful — not too hot, but the perfect day for swimming. There’s plenty of good things I’m happy about this day: I’m employed. I’m (nearly) finished with another draft of my book and about to hand that in. My 15-year-old is ecstatic to have the car keys in her hand.

Here’s what’s also happening.

I’m in this parking lot because I’m looking to solve a chimney problem in my house and heat again with wood. In the early mornings, reading the news, like so many other people, I worry about the country descending into chaos. My 21-year-old reads the same news and asks me what it means. What’s happening?

Like everyone else, I don’t know. I’ve never lived through times like these. But I do know human history is filled with times of uncertainty and movement and hardship. I’m doing everything I can to get us through the winter, as best as possible.

Part of getting through the winter is loving these summer days now, knitting deeper the ties around me — and that includes these bits of texting with a woman I haven’t yet met. The levity doesn’t diminish what’s happening, but collectively lightens the load. My daughter, rubbing that great sanitizer into her palms, asks if I’m going to laugh and text all afternoon. I might.

You’re rocking the distribution of plexiglass, I write.

She answers me, Thank you!

Then I put on my mask and head into the store.

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Not-So-Secret Crush

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 11 a.m., like clockwork, I turn on Vermont Public Radio for the governor’s address. Sometimes my daughter takes a break from whatever high school endeavor she’s engaged in, and stops in the kitchen.

Are you actually listening? she asks.

Sometimes, raptly. Sometimes, I simply sink back into whatever email or work I’m doing. But I generally listen — and particularly listen to the commissioner of health, whom my daughters have taken to calling That Dr. Levine. Sometimes the press conference is jammed with news I’d rather not hear; the state’s unemployment rate is astronomical; Covid-19 seeped into a state prison.

But sometimes I laugh out loud — such as when Dr. Levine does a weekend shopping spot-check (although not frivolous, as he always buys an undisclosed item) and provides his estimated data about mask compliance by staff and shoppers. How much I’d love to see our state’s health commissioner standing in line with, say, a bag of oatmeal, calmly asking questions and dispersing info to fellow Vermonters.

Laugh on, daughters, but my older daughter shares that the doctors in the clinic where she works are all devoted Levine fans, too. Or maybe simply fans of adherence to science, honesty, calm in the face of despair and near panic, and steadfastness.

Here’s an article about free milk, farmers, and the Secretary of Agriculture — another reason I’m grateful to live in the Green Mountain State — despite the two inches of snow this morning.

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu.