Your place in the world.

December 15, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

A rare mid-December day of sunlight, and the town seems festive, stirred by the truly false promise of spring. Not true, not true.

December’s a season of reckoning, of that inevitable look back across the months, to a year ago, to five, more. I’m old enough now that the seasons jumble into a Jacob’s Ladder of years: the Christmas of the hoar frost, the year a mouse drank from our Christmas tree stand, the 60 degree Christmas Eve my brother’s dog went swimming and gasped from the cold. The December snow fell every single day. That year, holed in the house with sick children, I wondered if I would go mad; I did not. All past, all somehow yet still with us. Heraclitus reminds us that the single constant in this life is change, and yet it’s still the same molecular stuff arranging and re-arranging, by the force of the universe and our sheer human will.

Oh December: you heartbreaker, you. Sleet and radiant sunlight in the span of a few days. Icicles drip. Chickadees whistle in the white pines. My wood chores finished, the compost bin dug out, I linger in the sun, leaning against the house, reading Paolo Cognetti:

You find your place in the world much less predictably than you’d imagine.

The sound of wind.

December 12, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Seems a little early, pre-solstice and all, to be citing winter haiku, but the thing is, winter haiku is just so darn good. In so many ways, winter brings out the New Englander in each of us, as we ramble on about previous winters (the year back in the mid-90s when antifreeze froze, or the year school was cancelled was for three days straight). Or how to survive with savviness: long quilted coat, chop wood, frying pan on the sheets. When a few strands of sun tumbled out of the clouds this afternoon, I dashed outside to fill my eyes with light. Hope the weather’s keeping you more interested than inconvenienced…..

Winter solitude—

In a world of one color

The sound of wind.
— Bashō

Vermont Almanac.

December 5, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My copy of the fourth Vermont Almanac arrives in my mailbox. Remember real mail? I remember exchanging long letters with friends for years. Email is fine and dandy, but email has no smell. I open the book in my kitchen and breathe in the scent of ink and paper. I was fortunate to write and edit a bit for this issue.

These days, on my moonlit evening walks, living in Vermont is often on my mind. So much has happened in my own life and in this dear state: a summer of rain and wildfire smoke, a flood, beloved Montpelier drowned, a rise in violent crime. And yet, I’m tugged more deeply into this state I’ve called home nearly all my adult life. Reading this hefty book, I’m reminded, again, of how yankee ingenuity is so often yankee generosity, too. While our nation (and much of the globe) as a whole is navigating unsettled and often stormy waters, I’m heartened by Vermonters’ ruggedness, tenderness, and, so often, outright humor. Who could imagine a world without these fine things?

Hope is no mere aspiration that things will turn out well. Hope instead takes our hand, shines a light ahead, and pushes us onward into the messiness and uncertainties of life.
— Bryan Pfeiffer, Vermont Almanac, Volume IV

Pocket Treasures.

December 3, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On this Sunday afternoon, my guest departs in the falling snow. When I head out for a walk, the cold has sunk in, deep enough that tendrils of snow cling to the grass and trees branches. The snow bends down last summer’s sunflowers in the garden. I leave my woodbox full, the cats sleeping, plates on the table. I intend only to return a handful of library books, but I head up the hill and around the high school and into the woods where the snow lies deeply and slows me down.

It’s December. Snow circles down, lovely and miraculous, this silent transformation.

Here’s a few lines for winter:

“Treasure what you find
already in your pocket, friend.”
― Ted Kooser

Vermont.

November 28, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

VTDigger‘s reporting about Burlington, Vermont.

Everything Is Made Of Labor

The inchworm’s trajectory:

pulse of impulse. The worm

is tender. It won’t live

long. Its green glows.

It found a place to go.

Arrange us with meaning,

the words plead. Find the thread

through the dark.

— Farnaz Fatemi

Two Bald Eagles.

November 25, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

After losing Yahtzee twice and then again to make a third, I’m in the passenger seat, heaing north for no particular reason at all. I’ve forgotten the library books I meant to return, and my bend of mind is that it makes no real difference at all.

Just out of town, I spy two bald eagles on the reservoir, hunched on the beginnings of winter’s ice, unmistakable with their dark bodies, the white of their heads. We drive around a bend, disappearing up the road that’s so narrow and tight there’s no good place to stop. By the time the road widens, I know the way back is impassable through thickets. And so we go on. Talking, talking.

The eagles are perhaps the best of holiday metaphors, utterly outside the realm of any camera lens. (Please, my family might beg, could you lay off the insistence of seeing the world in metaphors?)

This, then: two mighty raptors, the season’s early ice, the rising moon. The evening now is cold enough that the moon sprinkles frostily. I dump the compost in the bin and crunch back over the scattered snow, hungry for the embers in my stove.