Gold

November 17, 2019 / 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

Sometime in August

August 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I’m picking up the pace on a wool sweater I’m knitting — a roundabout way of realizing the patches of red on some maples (and no longer just the sick or stressed) mean I actually will be wanting to wear those knitted strands before too long.

Still, summer folks fill my library these days. They all have houses along Woodbury’s lakes, or visit people who have houses along lakes. They’re full of good will, polite, curious about our winters, ready to swap tales of their winters. One family had twins last October. The parents plop the babies on the library floor, and take a deep and exhausted breath.

Driving home, just before the swamp separating Woodbury from Hardwick, the sun hits the goldenrod just so, with scrubby pink clover along the roadside. Rags of mist amble along the swamp, around the bend in the mountains.

For a moment, it’s just me and the road, the gold and the emerald and transient strands of cloud. August, at this very moment. At home, the girls have made blueberry pie, and that’s equally fleeting.

All the way I have come
all the way I am going
here in the summer field

—Buson

Sacred Spring

April 25, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

T. S. Eliot who famously wrote April is the cruelest month did not live in Vermont, where we have much crueler seasons. Like January.

Yesterday, on my way from work to a grant-writing workshop, I returned home and changed from a sundress to jeans and sweater (again), but the robins are under the trees, wrenching out live worms. Daffodils splash.

Take what goodness you can get: I hold this as a mantra of single motherhood, but that’s likely my own solipsism. Vermont spring, while inevitably snowy in places, is a ubiquitous joy.

The workshop was held on the second floor of a gorgeous community art center, where I admired the artwork and the particularly pleasant shade of lavender on the walls. Last year, I was knocked out in the final round of this competitive grant; this year, I partook liberally of their snacks and chocolate, a kind of boon.

In this State 14, my daughter’s rock garden appears.

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

— Wendell Berry

After Unraveling the Sweater, Not the Mistake

April 16, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I’ve been knitting the same three balls of yarn over and over in different patterns for months now — perhaps a silly amount of time. I’ve knit half a vest, decided the shaping was off, abandoned that vest, begun a sweater whose gauge I never measured correctly, unraveled that and began again.

Sometimes at night, as I say good night to my daughters, I wonder about this day we’re closing our eyes to — and maybe this illuminates nothing more than my own crazy mind — but that day’s gone, over.

So many of my parenting days when the girls were young, I greeted the night with relief — the chance to close my eyes and be still. But there’s no re-dos on life, no taking apart and casting on again. That’s obvious maybe — that my life is not a ball of yarn to knit and knit — but those obvious things can be so difficult.

Hence, this early morning, gifted with a few more inches of wet white snow, I’m in my bare feet on the back porch, listening to the wind chimes, for the robins’ first clear notes of the long day ahead.

...It is no surprise 
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing...

From Jack Gilbert’s “Horses at Midnight Without a Moon” — a short spring poem well worth the read…

Sunny Sunday

February 17, 2019February 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We’re in the February funk, with every family I know sick in one variation or another and a silly amount of snow and ice. Wealthier Vermont families make plans to fly elsewhere, the rest of us reveling in the days of longer light. Snowbanks to the contrary, every day carries us along towards spring.

One of the Saturday morning knitters at my library bemoans she always chooses turquoise yarn. The women around her ask. What’s the problem with that? Turquoise is beautiful. She’s unconvinced.

Turquoise, gem of the deserty red Southwest, exotic color in our snowy north.

Gently, a woman reminds her that knitting need not be about the finished mittens or sweater, but the pleasure of putting it together. Metaphor for winter? Perhaps…. Certainly, that’s easier to acknowledge on a sunny morning like this one……

Really, all you need to become a good knitter are wool, needles, hands, and slightly below-average intelligence. Of course superior intelligence, such as yours and mine, is an advantage.

― Elizabeth Zimmermann

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.