#familylife

Sparkles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The phone rings early this morning with news of the third snow day in November. Complex math and prediction skills aren’t needed to guesstimate that school for my 8th grader will drag far into June — sweet, rose-scented June. In late June, we’ll be camping on the shores of Lake Champlain in our annual, always filled with laughter camping trip.

I close the Chris Hedges book I’m reading — the book jammed with history and intimate detail — tug on my boots and go out to shovel. It’s so warm, I don’t need a hat or mittens, don’t even really need a coat. As I shovel, I think of Hedges. How right he is the political ramrods my own private family life, too, that the tangle of economics and autonomy and gender weren’t created within my four walls.

Snow falls very lightly, nearly imperceptibly in the light from my house. A whole day stretches ahead, but it’s beginning here, in this pristine beauty.

America was founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of self-serving fantasy.

― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

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Red Flicker

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A single cardinal sits in the bird feeder on the wooden pole listing in the old woman’s yard. I pass this way often, where she sits on the glassed-in porch with her friends, a colored paper turkey pressed decoratively against one window.

Her boots have trampled down the snow around the feeder. My eyes search for a fallen crimson feather, but there’s nothing — just a flap of the bird’s wings, and then the bird’s gone.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

 

From Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come

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Where We Are Now

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Winter socked us in early this year, the old sheet I used for covering the remaining mesclun greens still draped over the garden fence, nailed down to the earth by snow.

Preparing to read Mary Azarian’s Snowflake Bentley book to the elementary kids, I request Bentley’s own book from interlibrary loan. As I open the cover of an old copy, I remember when my father first showed my siblings and I this book, so many years ago — the glossy pages and pages of winter’s crystalline beauty.

My older teen — in her high heel boots — complains of cold. Then, invited to sled at night, she packs her bulky winter clothes. Returning in the deep dark, her eyes glisten.

 … though the beauty of the snow is evanescent, like the beauties of the autumn, as of the evening sky, it fades but to come again.
― Wilson A. Bentley

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Breakfast with a Stranger

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On this Thanksgiving morning, a dream of our house burning wakes me. In the haze of my dream, I’m first insistent my daughters leave, their two cats found and taken to the neighbors. My laptop. Then there’s an odd pause, where I’m alone in the house, as if what next? what else?

A former sugarmaker who burned countless cords of wood on a 14′ long arch — wood stove user — and firewoman to seven enormous burn piles when I left our old house — I’m intimately familiar with the curl and lick of fire, of its wicked smartness.

I wake, happy to be in our warm house, one cat hungrily biting my bare toes, the other nuzzling my cheek, my daughters sleeping. Downstairs, a pecan pie waits, uncut, on the kitchen table.

Yesterday, I met an incredibly accomplished writer in the Hardwick diner, and here’s a snippet from our conversation over coffee and tea and the diner’s savory shredded hashbrowns.

Despite all the irritating experiences around Thanksgiving that happens when families get together, there’s also moments when we’re all sitting together and eating together and someone is telling a story, and you think how great it is that we’re all together hearing these stories together, and then living stories together….

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Rules for Novelists — Rules for Living

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Vermont, we’ve skipped from the Ides of November to the middle of January — just like that — and none of us have even eaten any Thanksgiving turkey.

The 13-year-old, on her second snow day this week, calculates how long into June the school year already stretches. She’s up early anyway, curled on the couch with her cats and her library book, immersed in an imaginary fictive world. I leave her be. The snow shoveling can wait.

Here’s rules 1 and 10 from Jonathan Franzen’s “Ten Rules for the Novelist.” I’m darn sure I nail the relentless rule at least.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator…. You have to love before you can be relentless.

— Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth

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Our November Rose

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

So long, arrivederci, to green grass.

Snow day for the school kids. My 13-year-old cut up paint swatches from the hardware store — a variety of rose and crimson and pink peony — and I had taped last week on the living room walls. We’re not a pink-oriented family, the three of us females, but somehow pink seemed just what that room — and maybe what the three of us — needed.

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