A Little Levity

January 24, 2019January 24, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Draw me a purple chicken, a kid asks me at the library — then adds, as he looks intently at me, please.

I love the kid world: what adult would take magic markering a chicken so seriously?

This might reflect simply my desire for funny things in a world that doesn’t seem particularly funny these days. After a long drive through a snowstorm — there’s a definite Driving in Snowstorms theme to these winter posts, I know, I know this — listening to VPR, I exclaimed about the craziness of makeshift food shelves for TSA workers who were working without pay. With two kids, how long could I go without my paychecks? Not too long.

So for lovers of consummate writing and of laughter, here’s the late Russell Baker’s Francs and Beans column I read early this morning, courtesy of my dad’s email.

Yahtzee: another fine family January pastime

Got Wool?

January 12, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

When I was 19, my mother gave me a heavy wool, intricately cabled sweater she had spent years knitting and I was certain I would never wear. I was living with my then-boyfriend in the coldest place I ever lived — and anyone who knows me knows that means something. The beautiful old farmhouse was at the end of dirt road in southern Vermont. In one half of the house lived a single mother and her young daughter (I cringe now to think of what abysmal neighbors we were to her), and my friends and I housesat the other half.

The house was heated by a wood furnace. It was December, and the wood supply we had been left was nearly depleted. I certainly knew nothing about heating with wood. I was greener than the wood we burned.

I wore that sweater for the entire month I stayed there. I slept in it. I wore the sweater so hard and for so many years that only pieces of it remained when I moved from my last house.

What taught me to love scratchy wool? Cold Vermont.

5 below zero this morning….. Could be much colder. ‘Tis the knitting season.

Use It Up. Wear It Out. Make It Do. Or Do Without.

— Calvin Coolidge

Reprieve

January 1, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At the hardware store in town, the woman ringing up my chicken feed asks if I’m going out partying for New Year’s Eve.

Are you kidding me? I blurt out. Then I apologize and ask about her plans. I like these hardware store folks, with their humor, their can-do willingness to solve my piddling problems — a clogged bathtub drain, a stuck lamp switch.

The cold’s broken for December’s last day. Before dusk, I follow the raccoon tracks from my compost down the snow-crusty hillside, wondering where this creature lives.

Another of my daughter’s homemade calendars folded up and put away, the day-to-day record of our lives — work schedules and friends and dentist appointments — the stuff of our lives.

For this year? Stay solvent. Paint the kitchen gold, my bedroom turquoise. Swim in the Atlantic with my kids. Follow wild tracks and fill the creative well.

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.

— Hayden Carruth

Bloody Nose

December 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My daughter’s nose has been bleeding for days — a trickle, a stream, and suddenly she bleeds steadily from both nostrils.

7:30 on an utterly dark evening just after Christmas: we’re at a gas station at the edge of town on what feels like the coldest evening of the year. Save for a teenage boy in the convenience store, playing on his phone, no one’s around.

While my older daughter hands paper towels to her sister in the car, I stand under the florescent lights and call the ER. What’s the threshold for a bloody nose? I ask. I get fever, but when I should I worry about a bloody nose? Utterly unconcerned, the nurse tells me I’ll know.

On a post beside me, I read a dirty sign — Fresh Sandwiches To Go — and wonder how many years ago that sign was someone’s bright idea.

I’ll know?

Through the car window, I see my daughter’s eyes, frightened.

Over the holidays, my brother told her all minerals were formed in supernovas and made their far way to earth through meteorites. How cool is that? he said. Our bodies are created from ancient stars.

A single pickup truck passes along the two-lane highway.

The night is utterly still, the darkness beating around us — alive — the pulse of the universe, miraculous with ancient remnants of stars, my open eyes at the edge of the infinite unknown.

Then we head home, where the cats sprawl, sleeping.

This.

December 25, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Midnight, my 19-year-old pulled free the extension cord on the Christmas lights around our barn door and came in the house, banging snow from her boots.

On my bed, the cats pricked up their ears and hurried downstairs. I followed.

Cheeks flushed with full moon sledding down Mt. Mansfield, my daughter and I talked about the history of birth control — the political is personal — ate cold clementines, and fed the cats shreds of turkey from our fingers. Over our metal-roofed house, the moon made her silent, luminescently gorgeous way through the heavens. We turned off the lights and headed upstairs to bed. I parted the curtains and touched a single fingertip to the cold glass.

In this season of a new and vulnerable family on the move, of the ineffable mysteries of angels and holy gifts, a prayer for domestic peace, in odd and unexpected moments.

Christmas Eve, Hubbard Park, Montpelier, Vermont, 2018

Unfinished

December 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughters’ gentle-pawed cats cry in the night, dragging a toy mouse around the hall and looking for company. Nearly 20 years a mother, the nether realms of nights are my familiars. I lie listening to wind chimes singing in the nighttime wind.

At the solstice, the darkness is no stranger to us now. The afterschool children ski around my library in the utter darkness.

While waiting for pasta water to boil, my 13-year-old and I slice and eat wedges of cheese — a Christmas gift. Around our little house, I imagine the moon making her steady, slow rise into the starry sky above our metal roof, the unbroken night pooling through this village, with its lit-up twinkling strings of white and colored Christmas lights.

So, the day funnels down into the night, this year into the next. She talks about our old house — unfinished was the word we always used for the house, and she says it again, unfinished. I push aside my stack of work papers. Between us is a little bonsai plant, a gift from her friend.

I keep listening to this girl — just her and me and the cats beginning for crumbles of cheese. Goodness, adolescence — clear and mysterious as the rising full moon. She stirs the boiling water.

You can contemplate existence all you want, at the end of the day someone needs to blow their nose and hand you a dirty tissue.

— Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritko, Letters From Max: a book of friendship

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

#familylife