Running Icicles

February 23, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Birds are singing this morning when I step out on the back deck, and walk barefoot to the edge of the covered porch to see the blue layers of mountains and valley, the gray clouds from horizon to horizon, thin enough that sunlight might emerge, later this morning. It’s 3 degrees, and I don’t linger long, lacking socks and all.

It’s winter break for Vermont school kids, the week that straddles into March’s first Tuesday Town Meeting Day. While a surprising number of families I know are flying elsewhere — warmer climes, assuredly sunny beaches — ironically, I’m writing an article about parenting on the cheap, a topic I’m intimately familiar with. The writing will be creative and even informative, but the 2,000 or 2,500 words might as well be compressed into don’t spend, my general roadmap.

If economy is my roadmap, though, the compass points are not in the least money-related. Years ago, I walked around the halls of the Dartmouth Medical Center, baby in my arms. We were really merely passing through — our stay was so minor — but the stay of many, many others was not. I stood in one cathedral-ceilinged lobby, baby girl sleeping with her tiny head on my shoulder, listening to a man play a Mozart sonata on a grand piano. On a wall hung a painting of a red tulip in a flowerpot with take joy written below.

Those two words? A challenge, perhaps, but a reminder of sheer possibility. Yesterday, icicles dripped from our roof, all morning.

And, as always, it’s a pleasure to appear in State 14 again, sending out a Postcard from Hardwick.

(Happiness comes) ….to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

—Jane Kenyon, from “Happiness”

Midwinter Mail

February 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On a day when winter seems determined to seal over our house in a re-emergence of the Ice Age, the mailbox yields something interesting besides the usual jumble of instant recycling.

My daughters collected the mail and left it on the kitchen counter. When I walk in from work, the girls tell me about their days. One daughter fries bacon, the other presses pecan halves in a geometric pattern in a pan of brownie batter.

I toss out the junk assortment of credit card inquiries, a bank’s repeated request to sell me life insurance. The state has kept us on their health insurance, and announces this in three different envelopes. Glossy Taproot magazine sends two copies of their recent issues with an essay of mine, utterly satisfying me. At the stack’s bottom is a fat envelope with court papers in my attempt to collect child support. Earlier that morning, I’d decided to walk away from that battle, but perhaps not. I toss the envelope on my desk.

The jumble of mail, I can’t help but note, reflects a tiny facet of our life, and I’m wondering what jammed up the neighboring mailboxes. The girls are full of energy about a walk they took that afternoon on the local trails. Well after five o’clock, daylight hasn’t given up yet, and that seems a kind of promise, despite the snow surrounding us in a mimicry of Shackleton’s ice. A better ritual than mail is dinner. One daughter lights the candles. The cat mews an inquiry for bacon scraps.

Living with two teenagers through a prolonged winter, with heaps of snow and nearly endless cold has likely brought me to this same and extremely familiar place: what the heck, exactly, am I doing? This has been a philosophical winter, but, good lord, I’m ready for some barefoot weather. But enough. We’re warm and well, and did I mention a collection of essays about schizophrenia came in the mail, too…..?

All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.

— Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

Kids’ trampoline, hibernating on the lawn….

Why Read?

February 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

February — surely the freaking longest month of the year in Vermont.

Unable to endure the unremittingness of winter, I’ve taken over the couch with my laptop and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Unableto tell my friends and library patrons about this book — as then I might be forced to hurry, hurry and read, read, to pass this novel along — I’m sunk down deep in this story. What to love? The book is the American road trip (and I’m a sucker for road trip stories, a veteran of innumerable mishaps along my own blue highway adventures), told by a mother who understands the importance of buying coffee for grownups and cookies for the kids, of unrequited lust, of a marriage bending, of the thrust of creative work, of how all those pieces fit and don’t fit together.

I slept on this couch for over a year after my husband left, unable to sleep in our former bed, the room we built with the balcony and double glass doors, the windows on three sides, the moon rising over my prolific garden. The couch, I discovered, was enormously comfortable, and the (former) marriage bed a possible remnant from the Middle Ages.

I purchased this book with library funds, with actual property tax dollars from the taxpayers in Woodbury, many of whom I know. When I’m finished with the novel, I’ll pass it along, happy to hand it over to my reading friends. But in the meantime, I spy many February days on the calendar remaining. I’m in no particular rush to finish. The brighter and warmer days of spring are most likely an illusion — and I’m hoping for a breathtaking ending to this novel…..

But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden…

― William Carlos Williams

Sunny Sunday

February 17, 2019February 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re in the February funk, with every family I know sick in one variation or another and a silly amount of snow and ice. Wealthier Vermont families make plans to fly elsewhere, the rest of us reveling in the days of longer light. Snowbanks to the contrary, every day carries us along towards spring.

One of the Saturday morning knitters at my library bemoans she always chooses turquoise yarn. The women around her ask. What’s the problem with that? Turquoise is beautiful. She’s unconvinced.

Turquoise, gem of the deserty red Southwest, exotic color in our snowy north.

Gently, a woman reminds her that knitting need not be about the finished mittens or sweater, but the pleasure of putting it together. Metaphor for winter? Perhaps…. Certainly, that’s easier to acknowledge on a sunny morning like this one……

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

― Elizabeth Zimmermann

Hallejuleh

February 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Behind a building in Burlington along Lake Champlain, with a ripe scent of eau de sewage, what did I hear in a nearby maple tree? Singing blackbirds!

I tossed my laptop and coat in my Toyota, covering the windshield scraper on the carseat, and walked along the icy and slushy parking. In the late afternoon, I stood beneath that tree. In the tree’s tiptop bare branches, the blackbirds gazed out at the lake, busily harmonizing.

A woman walked by with her down jacket zipped to her knees, hood tight over her head, walking a dog in a sweater. Time to unzip, let in a little sunshine, live a little.

Until the next ice storm.

“Mockingbirds” by Mary Oliver

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.

Snippets From the Snowy North

February 14, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Snow falls on my 13-year-old’s hair as we walk through the falling snow. 13-year-old girls are empirically unable to wear hats. Ski helmets, sure. But hats? Get real.

Nonetheless, I ask her to walk with me. Beneath a pine tree, our neighbor’s streetlamp glows day and night at the end of her driveway, weirdly reminding me of the lamppost in Narnia. In this Vermont transformed to the otherworldly by so much snow might a faun appear around a snowbank? Has this neighbor left the lamp lit for someone? Or has she merely closed her curtains and forgotten?

We’re keeping tabs on the neighbor’s progress on his pale blue Honda. Before the storm, he’d removed the hood and laid it on a snowbank. With the recent storm, the car is buried again.

We speculate. Did he return the hood before the recent storm? Oooo, we hope so, thinking of the car engine open to 10 more inches of snow. Implicitly, we’re rooting for him, as if repairing this vehicle is synonymous with spring.