gratitude

Bright Lights, Sparkly City

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

This stepping out of the nest thing?

Wow, has the internet changed the world from my 20th-century youth. Via I-phone, my rural Vermont daughters rented their first solo AirBnb in Maine, to check out a college. My older daughter texts: It’s busy here. So much is happening.

Ocean, lights, dinner in a hippie place kind of like Vermont.

Meanwhile, the cats and I have holed up in my office, eating curry and drinking espresso. Plenty happening here, too.

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

— George McGovern

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Photo by Molly S.

Geographical Balm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

We moved two-and-a-half years ago, and only now does our house seem to feel worn in as a house should — both with memories and simply day-to-day use. While I’m a huge fan of tradition — like camping on the same lake every summer — this holiday I had an incredible need to mix it up, do something different. There’s three of us now when there were once four.

We left, just for a night, with a single cat feeding required, and didn’t even go far — a little more east in Vermont where there was even less snow. I was looking for a break from work and school, for talking together in the same darkened room before sleeping, for exploring a different place with no looming deadline of time.

Interestingly, the unexpected part was the pleasure in returning home, to our warm house and our cats and the patterns we’d left behind. That, perhaps, was worth the trip alone.

… writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing — of possessing — thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.

— Emilie Pine, Notes to Self

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One Day, Otherwise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A few drops of rain graced the very end of our walk yesterday afternoon. Later, our kitchen redolent with baking pies, rain hammered on the roof.

I hope all my readers have many, many things to celebrate. Oddly enough, on this day I’m mostly grateful to be in a place where I can be grateful. My life has not always been that way — or, more accurately perhaps, I’ve been pressed at times where I could think only from here to there, and not have the luxury of gratefulness. I know I’m not alone in that. Gratitude, it seems to me, needs not material or financial space (although those things certainly help), but the spiritual space to be simply in the here, the now.

One of the very loveliest gratitude poems is Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise. Here’s a few lines on this holiday morning.

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

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And, more happiness in a world with such dear creatures, my beloved hardworking cat.

Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The day’s few hours of sunlight seemed distinctly February-ish — gold wild apples are still frozen to the tree.

November narrows down to the holidays, to that time of Vermont dark. The daughters decide to bake corn muffins — perhaps because of the color.

On impulse, I buy a small jar of raw honey at the co-op. 4:30 now, and the light is that pale pink and blue that reminds me of the sea. We’re warm, we’re well, our house is well-lit with little lights. I’ve stocked up on library books. The daughters are busy with their own stories and studies. I remind myself, It has not always been this way.

Time to close the curtains and start dough for empanadas.

If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.

— Jane Kenyon

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Wrong Way Closed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

While poor California is burning, Vermont is flooded.

Driving to Burlington to meet my older daughter at the airport, my younger and I are suddenly stopped on Route 15. Road closed. I pull into a gas station and run up to a young man and ask him for intel. He’s from somewhere else and tells me Wrong Way Bridge is closed. That’s all he knows. The Lamoille is impassable at this point — the river, I’ve already seen, has risen wildly above its banks.

I stand there, thinking, unwilling to follow his advice to cut back through the mountains. I’m driving my older daughter’s car, which has — naturally — no paper map.

I approach a man who’s just bought a six-pack of tiny Coke cans, and ask for advice. He’s much taller than me, and bends down to look at my face, putting us at eye-level, then takes me to the edge of the parking lot and tells me where to turn, which roads to follow. It’s beautiful country, he says, where I’m sending you.

He tells me to turn left at the Y, but he’s gesturing right. I ask for clarification, and then he has me repeat the directions back to him, so he’s sure I know where I’m going.

We drive along the western side of Mount Mansfield, through farms with their cornfields shorn to stubble. November. His breath had a vague scent of whiskey, but the directions were spot-on, and countryside? Enchanting.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in — when the old loyalties — God, country, and the hope of Heaven — aren’t very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends.

— William Carlos Williams

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Burlington, Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email inbox this morning, a lovely poem by Raphael Kosek, beginning:

My daughter is driving
across the continent, eating cheddar
in Wisconsin, waking to a cougar’s yellow
rasp, sleeping tentless
in a corn field….

Last night, with the power out, my younger daughter and I walked around town, the Main Street stores either marked closed with a cardboard lettered sign — gone home — or filled with folks simply hanging out, talking.

Later, we’re stuck in traffic, where the highway has washed down into the Lamoille River. We’re driving home from the one lighted town around here, my daughter eating fried rice with chopsticks, talking. We’ve nowhere in particular to go. I’ve let that constant press of time slip away. As we come into the town where we live, the darkness ubiquitous but for a gleaming slip of crescent moon, we’re still talking, just the two of us. She’s no longer the darling five-year-old I once tickled daily — daily tickle? she’d ask. How the world changes, and how it doesn’t. Short as time is, time is also long, too. We stand in the cold November night, beneath the starlight, listening.

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