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A Little Faith

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I left a conference in Montpelier yesterday with incredibly nice people, held in unheated rooms (boiler was kaput), and with so much lingo I actually sighed at one point. How would this ever make things even marginally better in Vermont classrooms?

A water main had broken in Montpelier. Streets were closed. Police cars flashed lights.  My favorite coffee shop was locked, lights off.

Light snow fell, just the loveliest, lightest snow. In the public library, I worked furiously on a chair in a corner. When school was out, kids began sneaking around the stacks, giggling. Finally, giving the kids some attention, I realized they were in a complicated game, playing hide and seek, trying very hard not to giggle. I listened to them for a while, the kids in their snowy jackets, wearing backpacks, and then I turned back to my work.

“People expect everything very quickly, but God doesn’t work that way.” She lets go of my hand and drops down to the floor, this squat little woman in a blue housedress and ragged terry-cloth slippers, splays her fingers, and pats the carpet.

“My faith,” she says, “is from here….”

— Sue Halpern, Migrations to Solitude: the quest for privacy in a crowded world

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The back, un-touristy side of Vermont’s capital

Got Wool?

/ 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.

Use It Up. Wear It Out. Make It Do. Or Do Without.

— Calvin Coolidge

 

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Studded Snows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

What’s the one thing that makes Vermont winters survivable? Friends? Laughter? Knitting? A chicken roasting in the oven? Nope: snow tires.

Driving to Burlington on a snowy Sunday morning to interview a young poet, I kept thinking, At least I bought new snow tires. When my daughter disappears in the darkness to work, I think, I’m so glad I shelled out for those tires.

On my way home through the Calais back roads, I pull over at the town hall, a beautiful and somewhat mysterious building to me — why is it here? what’s the history that’s now disappeared around this building? I’ve been listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and laughing so hard I’m actually crying.

Outside my little Toyota, I’m immediately reminded of winter’s enchanting beauty, the bit of wind on my cheeks and the snowflakes in my eyelashes. Sunday afternoon, and no one’s out and about, save for one  grownup far down the road, walking a dog. Leaving my car at the roadside, I walk down to the meeting house and stand there, staring up at the steeple in the gauzy snow, listening. Then I put those snow tires to use again.

Winter seclusion —
Listening, that evening,
To the rain in the mountain.

— Issa

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Better Perspective

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A milk truck rolling slowly up Bridgeman Hill catches the sunset on its long, silvery side. The mud-splattered Booth Bros.’s truck reflects that sky behind and above me — ruby clouds — and that movable art mural is so wonderfully awesome I’m taken out of time, snapped back into the world only as the truck has nearly passed and I realize the driver has lifted one hand, waving a greeting.

I watch the truck continue its gradual roll up the hill, where pavement gives way to dirt road. As I descend down the hill, the village glows beneath that magnificent sunset — the granite town building, the long strings of electric lines, the houses well-tended or ramshackle — players in a landscape of cosmic beauty.

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
There’s nothing to write about
But radishes.

—Basho

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Bloody Nose

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My daughter’s nose has been bleeding for days — a trickle, a stream, and suddenly she bleeds steadily from both nostrils.

7:30 on an utterly dark evening just after Christmas: we’re at a gas station at the edge of town on what feels like the coldest evening of the year. Save for a teenage boy in the convenience store, playing on his phone, no one’s around.

While my older daughter hands paper towels to her sister in the car, I stand under the florescent lights and call the ER. What’s the threshold for a bloody nose? I ask. I get fever, but when I should I worry about a bloody nose?  Utterly unconcerned, the nurse tells me I’ll know.

On a post beside me, I read a dirty sign — Fresh Sandwiches To Go — and wonder how many years ago that sign was someone’s bright idea.

I’ll know?

Through the car window, I see my daughter’s eyes, frightened.

Over the holidays, my brother told her all minerals were formed in supernovas and made their far way to earth through meteorites. How cool is that? he said. Our bodies are created from ancient stars.

A single pickup truck passes along the two-lane highway.

The night is utterly still, the darkness beating around us — alive — the pulse of the universe, miraculous with ancient remnants of stars, my open eyes at the edge of the infinite unknown.

Then we head home, where the cats sprawl, sleeping.

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Unfinished

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughters’ gentle-pawed cats cry in the night, dragging a toy mouse around the hall and looking for company. Nearly 20 years a mother, the nether realms of nights are my familiars. I lie listening to wind chimes singing in the nighttime wind.

At the solstice, the darkness is no stranger to us now. The afterschool children ski around my library in the utter darkness.

While waiting for pasta water to boil, my 13-year-old and I slice and eat wedges of cheese — a Christmas gift. Around our little house, I imagine the moon making her steady, slow rise into the starry sky above our metal roof, the unbroken night pooling through this village, with its lit-up twinkling strings of white and colored Christmas lights.

So, the day funnels down into the night, this year into the next. She talks about our old house — unfinished was the word we always used for the house, and she says it again, unfinished. I push aside my stack of work papers. Between us is a little bonsai plant, a gift from her friend.

I keep listening to this girl — just her and me and the cats beginning for crumbles of cheese. Goodness, adolescence — clear and mysterious as the rising full moon. She stirs the boiling water.

You can contemplate existence all you want, at the end of the day someone needs to blow their nose and hand you a dirty tissue.

— Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritko, Letters From Max: a book of friendship

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