Isolation Snippet

April 23, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My friend appears at our back glass doors and startles the three of us in the kitchen. She holds up a dozen eggs she’s dropping off and the seventh Harry Potter movie.

My daughter lifts a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

Yes, my friend mouths.

I step out on the deck and suggests she step back as the porch roof is about to dump snow down her back. My daughter hands out cookies while we’re talking about wanting to step into Harry Potter’s world. Maybe the kids are interested in flying, but what we’d really like? To sit in a train car and hang out with your friends.

Until then… this snow is melting today. Bit by bit, spring is emerging here.

Wildlife

April 19, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

How many weeks are we into the Stay Home order? Thursday, I let my daughter cut my hair in the kitchen. Delighted, she made her first snip in the back and said, Whoops.

What does it matter, anyway? It’s just hair.

In the evenings, we walk up a nearby dirt road, seeking the sunset. Hardly anyone is out — a few passing pickups, often with a driver wearing a mask. Nearly every night, we see deer in the hayfields that are greening, bit by bit.

Today, kayaking, we saw a bald eagle in a white pine. We paused, watching as the eagle dove over the shallow end, flashing its enormous wingspan above a family of swimming ducks, then swept back into the tree.

One thing I’ll remember most about this time — and perhaps most fondly — are the endless walks. No complaints, because why bother? This is where we are now.

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

― Jane Hirshfield

Phone Chat

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

To save some cash, I switch cell phone companies, and I realize, while I’m on the phone with the representative, that she’s working at home when she talks to her dog.

Knowing this opens up our conversation, and I learn her husband likes to turn down the heat, they’ve been living in Phoenix for two years, and she sought out this job because she likes the company so much. I’m amazed, because I never considered working for a phone company an interesting career option. She insists the people are all just so darn nice. It’s a great job.

While she types in my info, she hums faintly. I hear a screen door squeak open, and her husband’s voice. We chat about the coronavirus, and what it’s like to work only from home, for week after week.

When she’s finished setting up my phones, she wishes me good luck and welcomes me to the company family. I feel weirdly delighted. I don’t even know this woman’s name.

Somewhere along the way, I’ve more or less resigned myself to a kind of lone wolf existence — raising kids and gleaning work hours — and much of the work I do requires solitude. But this coronavirus existence has made me realize how valuable are our slenderest connections.

When I hang up, I step over my daughters who are sprawled on the rug doing a workout in preparation for bikini season. The cat wanders between them, clearly confused, likely wondering, What now? I step out on the back porch. Snowflakes are twirling down. Summer? Hello? I wonder.

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected… One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

― Rebecca Solnit

Where We Are

April 7, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

One week into April, golden coltsfoot flowers — dime-sized — push up through roadside gravel. Every day and then again in the evening, we walk and explore, searching for frog eggs, for ribbons of green shoots pushing up through the forest floor.

The isolation is hardest on my teenager, who gets up every morning, soldiers away at her schoolwork, goes for a long run.

Implicitly, she understands. There’s no attempt to discuss the end of isolation, of the emptied-out town, of her abandoned high school. In these sunny, radiantly spring days, we progress.

Isolation pulled us down — almost immediately — to what matters, and, really, nothing else. Each day, accomplish some work. Share a meal. Pet our cats. Knit a few rows.

Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

— Philip Booth, “First Lesson”

What’s Here

April 3, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In a wet, raw snowfall, I lean against a maple tree behind the high school and talk on the phone. It’s mid-afternoon, and I don’t see a single person.

I’m clearing my head after a work conference with Skype. Skype, Zoom, google hangout — the whole thing — why bother? Vermont has completely shut down, as it appears most of the country and much of the world, too. During this hard time, much of this stuff just doesn’t matter, it seems to me, while other stuff does.

I’m worrying hard about what so many other people are — my job and income. How will my teenager survive isolation as a sole teenager in this house? But other worries — like what kind of parenting I’ve done — seem to have vanished utterly, as if knocked under an ocean wave.

My little family of my two daughters is tighter and closer than we’ve ever been, with both daughters stepping up immediately. We’re hardly alone in this. I hear from family after family, where family means something different now — deeper and richer.

It’s a strange world these days, where playgrounds are empty of children, and no one lingers in the post office, laughing and passing bits of news and gossip. We live in a world of masks and wary eyes now.

Nonetheless, in this upended world, there’s gems, sparkling and true.

I finish that phone call and lean against the tree trunk. The wet snow soaks my jeans and down jacket. I shiver for a while, and then eventually I head home. My daughter is baking a cake. Our deck of cards lies on the kitchen table.

Just around the corner,
there’s a rainbow in the sky,
So let’s have another cup of coffee,
and let’s have another piece of pie.

This Moment

April 1, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

April 1. 19 years ago we had a such a large snowstorm that we had to carry our 2-year-old daughter outside. The snow was too deep for her to walk until we had shoveled paths from doors to driveway to woodpile.

Not so, this year. Only patches of snow remain. No longer needing winter boots, I walk behind my thawing garden and through the cemetery, where last year’s faded plastic flowers push up through remains of ice, behind the abandoned playground and empty school. The town is closed up, too, the food co-op staff barricaded behind locked doors — phone in your orders — no one lingers in the post office, the sidewalks are empty.

April will bring chattering peepers, spring ephemerals, the tiny blue squill around our house. Like those long, long winters, this isolation will pass, too, inevitably. Who knows what lies on the other side — what May 1 will bring — but greenery is certain.

Tender shoots of garden peas.

Flocks of migrating songbirds in warming skies.