Reprieve

February 16, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sunstruck afternoon in February — I opened the windows and aired out the house. The kids jumped off the back deck, ate potato chips, planned building projects we needed to start right away.

A trustee signed off on an email to me, Happy sap run. These are the intimations of sugaring season, the beginning of the thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. When we first began sugaring, twenty years ago, I believe the thaw would come in a rush and stay. Not so. Thaw and more thaw, studded with bursts of hard cold, slowly melts the frost down deep.

(I had) a revelation the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays

February 14

February 14, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Ten years ago, a friend drove to my house in a snowstorm, and while we talked and talked, drank tea and knitted, so much snow fell that, when she went out to clear her car, we weren’t entirely sure where the hood of her car lay under all that snow.

With a kind of seriousness, my daughter packs small pink boxes of candy hearts into her backpack for her friends. She gives me a box, too, and, in a Brach’s variation of Proust’s madeleine, I’m in grade school again, mesmerized by these hearts and a little mystified by the valentine exchange and what that might mean. I offer a tiny green heart to my daughter with the words Be mine.

Here’s a love song to Vermont:

To our Mother of Mud Season
(may she come early and be soon gone)
and the happiness of cows and the sadness
of meadows; to snow in April, and cowslips and marsh
rose and bulk-tank days, to serenity
and late-winter languor…..

From Tony Whedon’s “Things to Pray To in Vermont” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

Woodbury, Vermont

Cabin Fever, #1

February 13, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Somehow, we’ve reached the middle of February: this is the period of deep winter, and its many juxtapositions. The sun shines blissfully all morning on the sleeping cats sprawled around my feet on the kitchen floor. The neighbors’ septic backs up; we meet in our nearby driveways, shoveling snow yet again, and he laughs, Not my best day.

The older daughter takes a highlighter to her textbook, determined to pass an EMT course, while the younger plans an elaborate visit to Burlington. Through my perpetual email, I wonder if she’s imagining Burlington as the spring paradise of blooming fruit trees rather than the gray pavement I see once a week.

My taxes are unfinished in messy pile beside stacks of overdue books from three libraries. I mean to invite over parents of my daughter’s new friend. I miss drinking coffee with my friend in Montpelier. In the basement of either the town hall or the town clerk might be boxes of legos for my young library patrons: a kid gold mine I need to spelunk. Somewhere out there is my next husband. When will he arrive?

This is February.

March will bring my library’s pie breakfast, when hundreds of people in town bake pies and carry them in both hands to the elementary school’s second floor cafeteria. Two live bands, endless conversation and gossip, coffee and more coffee, sweet and savory pies, and hundreds of Vermonters in snow boots. Pie breakfast is March’s small town brilliance.

The moon has nothing to be sad about….

— Sylvia Path, from “Edge”

Imagination

February 11, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My brother is standing on a ladder shoveling off our back porch roof when a sheet of snow from the house roof creaks loose and cascades over him. With my daughter’s help, he empties little chunks of ice and powdery snow from his pockets. Rain falls a little.

After we clear the snow, the three of us stand on the back porch — scene of summer hanging out — and I mention the sweet William that grew last summer, and will presumably again this summer, in the wild patch below the railings. I can imagine the tiny, frilly flowers in three hues of pink, laced with white.

All around us, the world is painted in hues of green pine, brown bark, and all that snow, on branches, over the garden, the trampoline frame nearly buried. It takes imagination to envision the lushness of spring — singing frogs, mating birds, tender green, and all those wildflowers, unstoppably unfolding from the earth — but we imagine it. February.

‘This is Just to Say’

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

— William Carlos Williams

Friday Morning

February 9, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

February: the kids fluctuate between ecstasy with the plentiful snow, or downright surliness. The double doors onto our back porch are jammed with winter boots, melting snow, ski boots and more ski boots, ice skates.

We’re in the long haul of this season, which leads into the More Winter and Yet More Winter seasons, before the many varieties of mud season and spring.

Here’s the thing, though: in February the light pours back. At zero degrees this morning, when I dropped my daughter at school this morning, her principal grabbed her skis from the back of my car, and he remarked on the day’s beauty. My daughter, worried about a Spanish presentation this morning and anxious to ski in the afternoon, lifted her face in the cold air, the sun streaming over the long brick building. She nodded.

From William Clark’s 1804-1806 journal: “Great joy in camp. We are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octian which we have been so long anxious to see….” The estimated distance the explorers had traveled from St.Louis to the ocean was 4,100 miles.

From Sacajawea by Howard P. Howard.

Random February Late Afternoon

February 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, fading. No sense mentioning this to her, now.

Ice skating at the end of the day, just before the beautiful February twilight began folding around us, the girls’ former bus driver appears from the snowmobile trail where he and his dog had been walking.

He stops to talk to us as I lace up my skates, and points out a nearby house where he grew up. I ask what it was like. He’s in his sixties, and I know he’s traveled, worked in Costa Rice, and returned to Hardwick again.

It was all kids. There were six kids in my family. Everyone had at least four kids. Sometimes a lot more. He stares at the house. Irish Catholic.

I wait. On a night of freezing rain a few years back, he came to the town’s bookstore when I read my from my new novel. Later, picking up my kids at the bottom of our driveway, he told me a particular character reminded him of his father, long dead.

He tells me where the ice skating rink was in those years, stares at the house a little longer, then wishes us a good skate and disappears.

No one else is around. The ice is perfect. Before we leave, we prop the three folding metal chairs and two chairs high in bank, so they won’t get lost in more snow.

Mount Fuji in winter
The sun and stars are big-hearted
and strict.

— Lida Dakotsu

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

#familylife