Female Rage & FB

December 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the midst of an argument with my oldest daughter, I glance down at the subtitle of the book I’m reading: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood.

If I wasn’t so angry, I’d laugh.

Motherhood. Odd how all how reading all that Plato as an undergraduate works into parenting…. The unexamined life is not worth living.

Stop pretending, I insist — I crab at her, really — could you please stop pretending anyone on the planet has a Facebook life? That living includes love of sizzling bacon and three-layer chocolate cake and cappuccino, of merry friends, of loving your cat who licks butter from your fingers? But our bones also hold the sorrow of loss, and rage at the universe.

Our evening ends with Yahtzee, broken bits of dark chocolate, laughter.

Putting It All Together…

December 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

No earthshaking moment, but satisfying nonetheless, last night I cast off the second sleeve on the sweater I’m knitting for my daughter, and she slipped the blue sweater over her head.

Verdict? Unravel the hem and lengthen. But this will fit; I can see it now. Whether she wears this or not, my knitting eyes and fingers, a little math, some decent yarn, are pulling together.

I love knitting because it’s functional — especially in Vermont — creative and satisfying, because it’s portable, comforting when alone, a source of interest when together, because fellow knitters are often decent and curious people. Knitting never ends. Sure, eventually I’ll tie in the loose threads of this sweater, decide the length will do, and pass it along to my daughter. She will wear it; if not, I will. The cornflower blue yarn will hold dirt. The sleeves will fray. I’ll repair with a silver needle and scrap yarn. Maybe eventually her beloved cats will claim this sweater, nestling and purring.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

― Alan Watts

When In Doubt, Do Handwork

November 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 19-year-old, pondering what to do with her life, buys fat skeins of yarn and begins knitting a blanket. The metaphor of comfort consoles me, too.

I just read David Grann’s The White Darkness, about Henry Worsley, descendant of Frank Worsley, of the Shackleton Endurance expedition. It’s hard to imagine a more manly man than Henry Worsley, who ultimately perished from complications of his solo South Pole trek. Yet Worsley sewed to calm his nerves. He was skilled at needlepoint. He volunteered to teach tatting — yes, tatting — to London prison inmates. How cool is that?

Shackleton… sought recruits with the qualities that he deemed essential for polar exploration: “First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.”

State 14 ran the first of my monthly Postcards From Hardwick. Check out terrific Vermont voices here.

#10 Pond

Friday Night, The Three of Us

September 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Sitting on the back deck after dinner last night, in jeans and long-sleeved shirts, the girls asked if we were going swimming.

Well, why not?

The girls sprawled on the grassy bank while I swam down the pond, from the shadows into the sunlight, the water warm, the surface rippling with feeding fish.

All summer long, we swam in this cupped bowl in the earth, our bodies both in all that dragonfly-filled sky and the water with muck and weed, minnow and turtles. A curled oak leaf floated on the surface. I floated on my back, staring up at the fading blue sky, a single cloud laced pinkly at the edges with sunset.

Later, knitting scrap yarn into a scarf, I shivered. Hours later, still cold, a cat crawled with me until the blankets while I read with a flashlight.

During the siege of Leningrad:

The heat in the (public) library gave out early, and the plumbing eventually froze and burst. In late January, the building finally lost its electricity. The librarians still searched the shadowed stacks with lanterns, and, when they ran out of oil, with burning pieces of wood. They still served patrons and sought out the answers to practical questions posed by the city government: alternative methods of making matches or candles, forgotten sources of edible yeast. As the building grew colder and more battle-scarred, they closed the reading rooms one by one. Finally, patrons and librarians all huddled in the director’s office, where there was still a kerosene map and a buzhuika stove.

— M. T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Hardwick, Vermont

Winter’s Wow Factor

January 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Checking to see a child arrived home last night, I drive around a hillside — the cemetery hillside — and my daughter says, Whoa, under her breath, with not a tinge of 12-year-old sarcasm. Just wonder.

Feral, the ebbing, ravenous wolf moon. A profusion of moonlight in an unending night, and all that cold. 6º and expected to get much, much colder.

We feed our own hunger — for warmth, for color, for stories spoken and read.

All night long, while we’re sleeping, meshed in cats and blankets, that pristine moon sails silently over our rooftops, more luminescently magical even than St. Nick.

Endless bare fields
not even a bush
nowhere to abandon a child

— Buson

Stranger’s Gift

April 2, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A friend stops by the library on my shift and offers hand-me-downs from her coworker I’ve never met. I lift pastel cotton t-shirts, a linen skirt, an embroidered sleeveless blouse: summer things that whisper to me of sunnier days, bare feet on grass, a season not too far off in Vermont’s snowy April but requiring memory and imagination.

At the paper bag bottom are two handmade sweaters. A knitter myself, I lift the blue one and immediately see this is a pattern I would have loved to knit, in this well-spun wool. The knitter was ordered, with evenly placed buttons and mirror sleeve caps, and practical, too: one cuff has a pattern slip I might have made and not redone.

While my friend keeps talking, I ease my arms into the sweater, and, although I’m so small I’m nearly in the land of the Oompla Loompas, the cardigan fits me perfectly, all the way down to the right length of sleeves, as if this unknown creator was my doppelgänger.

The second, white sweater I merely admire with my fingertips and leave for someone else, whose name I’ll never know.