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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….

Continuing without a sign.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

An inveterate list-writer, at the end of each day, I’m often summing what I’ve done. Somedays, my hands and my hand seem to come up empty. Or my heart has articulated a question.

I pass a few days drinking coffee and talking with my daughters, walking through the woods, along rivers and streams and a rock-throated gorge. They’ve teased me for years about my focus on the gritty and hardscrabble, my fascination with wandering into abandoned cellar holes, my curiosity about abrupt turns in human stories. But when has the world ever not been falling into pieces? There’s this, though: surely at times the world’s misery spins harder and swifter and unbearably more painful.

In those cellar holes, gardens of flowers and sustenance once bloomed at doorsteps, their seeds dormant in the soil. Sunday, nearing dark, I brake for wild turkeys meandering across a dirt road. There’s no one around. I pull over and walk down the road to snap a photo, but the turkeys suddenly rush, hearing my footsteps, and I’ve forgotten my phone in the car anyway. I’m at a driveway that bends up the hillside, the house of out sight. Many years ago, the man who lived there offered me his dead wife’s fur coat. He must be long gone, too. I’ve long since lost any sense of who lives there now.

“Matins”

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

— Louise Glück

The Pleasurable Stink of Wet Wool.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Rain begins spitting midday. I’m on a clearing-my-head walk through the forest, and the songbirds are crazily lovely, singing mightily away, simultaneously solo and in concert, and the flowers — my goodness — the flowers. The forget-me-nots trail me like loving, silent cats.

There’s a thousand things going on — that thickening rain, the myriad leaves in ovals and spikes, the blooms and the seed heads. I take the long walk back to civilization, emptying my mind as I go. When I return to the human threshold, there’s a little reluctance to head on back in… I stink of wet wool, the better for these minutes.