Holy/Unholy

December 26, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A warm Christmas Day rain washes away every bit of snow in our patch of northern Vermont, save for a few ice-hardened and blackened plowed-up ridges. As the dawn drips in with its gray, the landscape appears unfamiliar to me in December — an experience that, again, sums up 2020.

Friends of ours had Christmas dinner on the in-laws’ porch, with the in-laws inside and themselves on the covered porch, eating Christmas dinner 2020-style. Strange and weird, but what wouldn’t I have given that for hilarity.

Talking with my brother on Christmas morning, he mentions he may grout a floor that afternoon. My youngest, afterward, tells me how fun that sounded and then wonders if she would see her uncle before she’s all grown up, headed out into the world on her own, not so far away.

And so it goes in this landscape of unfamiliarity: suspended in a warp of uncertainty. In the midst of all this, there’s me with my lists, my agendas, my determination to craft plans for happiness.

In this gray and blue and brown landscape — not the traditional Vermont snowy Christmas — there’s nothing to do but let all that fly away in the rising and balmy breeze. The heart of the Christmas story, after all, is the unexpected gift in the barn’s manger, the promise of joy where we least expect its appearance.

Wild Discoveries

May 26, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Walking through the town woods after dinner, listening to what must be one of the loveliest sounds on the planet — the wood thrush — my younger daughter says quietly, “Cub.”

Just ahead, where we were about step into a hayfield, a small black bear wandered, sniffing. We stood for a moment, admiring, then slowly backed away and headed back through the woods.

Walking, we remarked on the proliferation of wildlife we’ve seen this spring — the cub, bald eagles, a den of enchanting fox cubs just behind our house. While the human world is fragmented, the animal world seems to be filling in those cracks, closer and closer.

In Vermont’s May, every day the world appear more and more alive — the leaves unfurled more, and the dandelions higher. Sure, invasive dandelions have their place — or the curse — in the world, but a field of dandelions? Joy — thank goodness for spring.

Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May…

— James Russell Lowell

Day Travels with Kids

July 18, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We stopped at the top of Lincoln Gap, still cold from swimming in the rain in the Otter Creek.

This photo perhaps best sums up our summer. Girls, growing, nature, and, all around, words.

Summer, Vermont. 2019.

A Creamy Moon…

July 16, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

… rose over the hillside. Like a surprise, the moon simply appeared.

All day long it often seems, I go about moving things — words, dishes, weeds. Laundry from the line to the basket. My own sometimes tired bones. Then the moon, rising infinitely serene and wise.

After a late soccer game, the girls sat at table outside, the air abruptly cooling as the sun began to sink. The girls kept eating strawberries, shortcake, whipped cream. A forkful dropped on the table.

There you are, my daughter said to the moon, laughing. A hello from her to this heavenly sphere. July.

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White Mountains. Hiking with my brother. Photo by Jess.

Déjà Vu Hiking and a Warbler

May 28, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In Plainfield, Vermont, my daughter and I start up a wide hiking road, after a discussion about why I so frequently fail to read directions — and yet, as I pointed out, I generally arrive where I’ve planned to go. This is not an abstract, metaphorical conversation. The truth is, I’ve taken the Gazetteer out of the car, failed to print directions, and my daughter — with her adolescent orientation to cartography — navigated by cell phone to the trail head.

Amicably, we’re walking up this wood-flanked, pleasant road, when I have the strangest sensation that I’ve hiked this path, many times, although I know I’ve never been here.

My daughter’s ahead, around a bend in the forest, when a warbler lands on a slender branch near my face, its chest flame-gold, so stunningly beautiful I simply stand there, alone. A second, then a third, fluttered by. Later, Peterson’s guide indicates this is the Blackburnian warbler, fairly common.

The mystery of déjà vu and extraordinary fiery feathers.

O bush warblers!
Now you’ve shit all over
my rice cake on the porch

— Bashō

Apple blossom season! Photo by Molly S.

The Kingdom’s Rocky Peaks

July 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hiking the peaks in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, it’s easy to see how glaciers and rock and time have shaped the northern landscape where my family lives, once-upon-a-time channeling immense grooves into the earth and strewing the territory with boulders. Clear, deep lakes – tantalizing for swimming – lie in these cuts.

Maybe it takes the sweeping vista of a mountaintop view over immense valleys, coupled with the immediacy of childhood, to place time in that perspective of distance juxtaposed against the immediacy of the here-and-now: our world was shaped and formed by ancient movements, and yet we go about our day-to-day lives as though the past was merely story, an anecdote over lunch’s cheese and mesclun sandwiches.

Yesterday, my 11-year-old, dutifully and non-too-cheerfully starting out on yet another hike, came around a wooded bend to the base of an immense boulder where she gasped with pleasure. Scrambling up the rock, she found herself stranded at a steep pitch on crumbling lichen. Afraid, she edged to the trail again, summited, then later feared again, seeing stormy clouds rolling in from a distant horizon, foreboding lightning and thunder.

I can’t help but think that’s an encapsulation of time: the radiant pleasure of a child swimming in a lake and discovering one tiny shell on the sandy bottom and the real presence of an electrical storm moving in. All that in one day: and then the journey back home again.