#familylife

2 Things About Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Saturday morning, the snow is above my knees on the long path from the parking lot to the library. Halfway up the door, the snow has blown off the school’s soccer field, and I tug the door open. Snow and I tumble in.

A patron shows up while I’m shoveling, his glasses fogged with snow. He’s walking in my footsteps, and he’s laughing. Why do we live in Vermont?

After dinner, my oldest daughter asks her sister and I to go on a walk with her. Cold but not that cold, we walk against the landscape of sunset.

No one else save a few pickups pass us. A flock of geese flies inexplicably south. This whole long walk I remember exactly why I live in Vermont. We return after 7:30 and it’s not yet full dark.

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Spring in the Body

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day inside, a flock of geese flies north over my head while I’m at a gas station, standing in a few sprinkles of rain, breathing the damp, soon-to-snow air.

North.

The birds flap steadily. I’m too near the interstate and Route 100, crazy with commuter traffic, to listen for honking. But for that immeasurable moment, it’s just me and the geese — none of what so often consumes me: the steady thrum of work, the wild sprawl of my family’s emotions, the incessant chatter of my own thoughts.

River valley, snow-crested mountains, those little tepid raindrops falling on my face, wet breeze, myself: the collective body of us beckon spring. The geese wing over the river, imperturbably.

This dewdrop world
Is a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet . . .

— Issa

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Photo by Molly B.

 

 

Spring, 5:58 p.m., Wednesday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My 13-year-old’s bouncing like her once-beloved Tigger. After school, she’s ecstatic, with no particular reason. All through the afternoon, through cooking dinner together, hopping on one foot from the kitchen to the dining room, setting the table….

What’s up? I think. And then I know. I force myself to drop the adult crabbiness, forswear off my intention to adhere to my list.

It’s spring fever, and there is no cure. There’s only revelry.

11 years ago, give or take a few weeks, I dragged myself in from a long sugarhouse day, got my two and eight year old daughters to sleep, picked up The New Yorker, and read this poem by Louise Gluck.

Still one of my favorite poems, these lines remind me of how this harsh season reflects not only Vermont but the long seasons of a human life. Spring is hard-earned here. We savor it more for that.

It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.

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Money and Community — and More

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As Woodbury’s town librarian (population 888), my wages are paid directly by the townspeoples’ property taxes, a few donations, and Woodbury Pie Breakfast. Now the main yearly event in town, nearly 300 people showed up at the town’s little elementary school, trudging up the stairs to the second floor gymnasium, to eat pie yesterday morning.

Friday evening — and this is my most beloved part of pie breakfast — people arrive with covered dishes, explaining this is pumpkin and maple or bacon and sausage with a little dill. 

Late last fall, Vermont’s State Board of Education mandated that Woodbury’s elementary school merge with two other local schools — one school much larger. After a winter of endless adult meetings about how to keep Woodbury’s school and library open, what pleasure — and relief — to fill the school with live music, the redolence of warming quiche, laughing kids — and adults in need of coffee.

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Of all my photos, this is my favorite: the little girl waiting for pie to be served, while adults do adult things….

Wide Open Windows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hallelujah! What I believed had permanently departed my patch of Vermont returned: sun! Warmth!

Yesterday afternoon while I’m holed up in the Montpelier library, working, my daughter texts me, asking if she can open the house windows. Please? It’s hot.

At home, we open the upstairs glassed-in porch too. Her cat presses against a window screen, entranced by — what is that? — singing chickadees?!

My daughter asks, Why are you so happy? Is it spring?

I answer, It’s enough, right now.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being…

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Spring”

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Reading Harry Potter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like in-laws who have overstayed their welcome, winter lingers. While you might be wanting to mop mud from the in-laws’ boots off your kitchen floor, they keep coming and going, anticipating lunch and then dinner.

So, too, winter.

Sunday afternoon, my daughter reads Harry Potter with a cat curled sleeping beside her. I stretch on the rug with the other cat, reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. She pauses to relay a Dumbledore tidbit. I consider sharing the word desertification, and then decide the heck with that. Later, we put on our boots — again, again. In the woods, we follow a narrow snowshoe trail.

I’m likely to lay down the grim reading and pick up Potter as a survival guide, in the current season and for the longer haul….

That epic era once derided as ‘prehistory’ accounts for about 95% of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark.

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