poetry

Wet Gloves, Grievances, Blessings.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

It’s been awhile since I did a carpool or handoff along the road — once a mainstay of my life. Seems like I spent hours of motherhood waiting at some designated place. I leave early to have this little pocket of time, a few minutes, no more, to watch the sky darken. I bring a book, too, more out of habit than anything else.

Vermont highways are lonely and busy, with stretches of time where you can walk down the center line, and then times when you risk your life (actually) to walk those yellow strips. The girls are laughing when they arrive. I hand over my daughter’s gloves, warm from my car heater as I tried to dry out the wet remains of yesterday’s skiing. I stand talking, shivering in my sweater. I’m sweaty from skiing, and I’ve forgotten my coat. The girls are busy, busy, happy in a plan of their own, my daughter’s hair still in the braids I wove for her this morning.

The girls drive away. I head back to my car, sliding in my plastic-soled ski boots, and someone I’ve known for years pulls over and asks if I need help. Good lord, I laugh. Because our kids played together as toddlers, I feel I can start right in and so I do. I begin with the bathroom sink drain that I need to take apart, and how does anyone endure the college app process, and am I ever going to remember to clean the inside of my windshield, save for when the sun hits it and blinds me?

I’m really laughing by then, and she is, too. I lean against my car — again, shivering, shivering — while we exchange the usual kid and life updates of people who know each other but sometimes go years without talking. The cold air comes down in this sweet-spot crepuscular moment as the night slowly floods in. She leaves, and I stand for a moment, looking up for the first stars. Such little cares I’ve listed, the stuff of living, blessings more than grievances.

And then I’m on my way, too, leaving the river and road, at least for now.

The Horizon’s Edge.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment
Photo by Diane Grenkow

Many years ago, one of my daughters’ playmates wandered through our sugarhouse with a huge pine branch over her shoulder. My then-husband and I were working in the kind of frantic way we often did in those days, sap-turning-to-syrup boiling fiercely in the pans. The playmate was a slight and quiet child. She moved through us and then disappeared outside again, enmeshed in whatever imaginative world.

On this below zero morning, heading towards my oldest daughter’s birthday, this photo taken by my friend comes into my email, which reminded me how much of my approach to parenting little kids was let them wander around the world. More than a few times, that seemed to have evolved into a kind of what the heck is happening now sense from the kids.

Just for the record, we swam a great deal at this beach, too, although never in the frozen months.

The horizon’s edge, the flying seacrow, the fragrance of saltmarsh and shoremud;
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes and will always go forth every day,
And these become of him or her that peruses them now.

— Walt Whitman

Midwinter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

On a Wednesday washed out of color, this mid-January has the taste of February, wet, the wind wicking up wildly then dropping down again to the sodden snow. January is the season of work, of leaning in hard to a task at hand, for pleasure, for wage, for cleanliness, for the way work sweeps us out, makes something new. In its own way, winter’s short, pinwheeling along to spring, to the radiance of summer.

Here’s a perfect poem for today.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry

Water. Ice. Rain. Cold. Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The light is slowly returning; I repeat this to myself in defiance of the gray and brown. How bright a fresh sparkle of snow would feel.

Is it mud season? Sugaring season? Has winter barely begun? One thing that does seem evident is that cabin fever has set in extraordinarily early this year. At work, a stranger phones in and asks for info. I offer the facts, just the facts, and then the stranger remarks, What I’d really like is a small piece of good news to start the new year. I can’t resist; I laugh. I note his bar is pretty darn low. I tell him about seeing a flock of evening grosbeaks Christmas morning in the box elders behind our porch.

That’s something, he agrees. He asks me a few more questions, then remarks that he doesn’t even need to care about these questions, anyway. He could let this go. He says thank you, goodbye, and hangs up. In a strange circumstantial way, I realize I was his good news.

“Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don’t always take into account.” 

― Ada Limon

Glass. Packages. Blood.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My daughters spent years playing with glass containers. Sure, we also had the usual endless assortment of empty yogurt containers, the odd plastic collection, the paper cups such as the beloved Easter bunny cups (known lovingly as cups-with-bunnies), but we made and sold maple syrup for years.

At one point, wedding favors in leaf or heart bottles was a chunk of our livelihood. I made endless trips to different maple distributors, loading up the back of my station wagon and often around my daughters in carseats with cardboard boxes of glass. That 8oz maple leaf with a gold foil top? Top seller.

I packed and shipped maple syrup in the PO’s flat rate boxes. Those boxes made shipping syrup a viable family endeavor, and I knew all the post offices in my small sphere of travel. Headed to story hour at the library? I swung by the Greensboro post office. Picking up more glass? East Montpelier post office. Need bike parts? Morrisville.

I had a “well, duh,” moment this week at the post office when I weighed a package to my parents. The clerk kindly handed me a flat rate box, tape, and a mailing label. I asked for use of a pen, too, then stripped off my winter coat and hat, and went to repackaging work in the PO corner. I sliced my fingertip on the blade of the knife dispenser and bled on the label and then on my check. All those years, so many bottles filled with sand and pebbles, with colored water and concoctions of leaves and flower blossoms, and I don’t remember a single glass cut on my daughters’ little hands.

I ripped up the check I’d bloodied and wrote another, left-handed and nearly illegible.

Cutting into with the ax,

I was surprised at the scent of.

The winter trees.

— Issa

Winter Koan.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

I stop in at the former Hardwick Gazette building, now turned into the Civic Standard, an organization trying to figure out itself. An acquaintance and I stand at the windows in the building’s rear, staring down at the Lamoille, where ice feathers only along the edges. The water is low enough that the rocks are mighty in the rushing current.

I drink coffee and sit crosslegged on the couch, and we talk for hours. I finally vaguely inquire if we haven’t had enough of our own words, and then we go on and on again. The building itself seems marooned in the 1970s, and even in 1972 the building likely felt stranded in 1957. An old printing press hulks beside us. One of us has an Hungarian immigrant family, and our conversation inevitably weaves in the first half of the 20th century.

December in Vermont is as good a time as any to ponder the Zen koan chop wood, carry water in the pieces of my life. Sunlight on the living room floor. Kim chi and brown rice. Reading Ruth Ozeki’s The Face on the rug.

Sunday afternoon, light snow sifts down, the sweetest gift, its fresh cold sweeping away our stale human layers of mind and emotion. I carry in an armful of wood to feed our little stove for the night. The snowflakes melt in my eyebrows. Finally, I think, finally, a scattering of snow. Then I quit thinking, close my eyes, and listen to the falling snow.

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?” 

— Ruth Ozeki