Strangers

February 12, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A stranger comes into my office and tells me about the guesthouse he might want to build in ten years or so. Then he stops and asks rhetorically, Who am I kidding? I don’t know what will happen this summer.

I say (through my mask), Really, what might happen next week?

There’s a moment before we both laugh. What else could we do?

Driving home, through this gorgeous Vermont scenery — white snow sprinkled on blue mountains, enormous red barns, pretty clapboard villages with church spires the highest manmade mark — I think how lucky I was to travel a lot as a kid and in my twenties. So much camping, so much washing of hair beneath spigots. And yet, everything is just weird. Maybe this will change by the summer; maybe not.

At dinner, my daughter tells me about an elderly couple who stopped their car while she was walking and asked for directions to the high school. She said they told her they were on their way to get vaccines, and they waved happily to her as they drove off.

Listening, for some reason I remember an old word from novels I read as a child: Godspeed.

Thinking of that couple, I thought, Godspeed. Thinking of all of us, I thought, Godspeed.

And here’s inspiring news of an ancient shell.

Tuesday

February 9, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When I step out to start my daughter’s car before she heads to work this morning, a very light snow is falling, flakes drifting in the light from the kitchen window.

Last year, I would have been headed to Burlington through the snow, driving through whatever the weather might have tossed at me. This year, I’m headed a far shorter distance up a back road.

In my twenties, I lived in Washington state for a few years, on the western side, in the Cascade mountains. The mountains were beautiful, the people kind, but I missed the heart of winter, the drama of Vermont’s swinging seasons. On mornings like this, I sometimes wonder what the heck I was thinking. In February, so many Vermonters draw in — even pre-pandemic — hibernating at our hearths against the winter.

For a moment longer I stand shivering. In the village below, only a few lights glow. A milk truck drives along Route 14.

Then I head back in to make more coffee. My daughter yawns and packs her bag for work. She asks me, Remember the smell of rain?

Yes, I say. I do.

Sweet Day

February 4, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

All day on my oldest daughter’s birthday, I remember that this was the day I became a mother. The day is imbued with a rosy holiness, transforming the everyday world of mundane things — a laundry basket, a cheese grater, a dutch oven — into pieces of our miraculous life. Parenting is a long, long road — there’s no doubt about that — the world would be unimaginable without this road.

At the end of a very long labor with this baby, I saw myself descending deeper and deeper into a dark, stone-lined well, my arm outstretched, reaching for my baby who I knew was somewhere down at the well’s bottom.

This child was born at the very end of the 20th century, in contemporary Vermont. Modern medicine made her life possible, and certainly saved my own, too. Every year, when I’m grateful for this young woman’s life, I remember the strangers who brought her into the world.

Happy February.

Border Crossings

January 20, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

On inauguration eve, I dream of wandering through my childhood hometown and wake thinking of the November morning four years when I woke early and realized I would have to tell my daughters that Donald Trump won the presidency.

Four years seems so long ago — far longer ago than my own childhood of the 1970s when not all that much seemed to happen.

As I lie in bed reading about the Vikings — these ancient, fascinating people — snow drifts down outside, twinkling in my neighbor’s porch light. She’s up, too, as are my neighbors across the street, all three of our houses awake this morning long before dawn. In a different world, I’d pull on my coat and slip into my boots, walk through those unshoveled inches of fresh snow, and offer a piece of coffee cake my daughter baked.

In my own family life, we’ve slipped through so many borders and changes in these four years, one tiny ripple in the endless ripples of human life. Today, January 20, yet another change. May this be for civility and decency.

The Viking Age was very much a time of borders—between cultures and ways of life, between different views of reality, and between individuals, including at the level of liberty itself.

— Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

The Way Forward

January 9, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Skiing along the former railroad bed in the late afternoon, I meet a fellow skier — a man wearing a gray knit hat who’s retired now from the local high school. In one connection or another, I’ve known him since before I became a mother.

We pause and talk for bit. He asks about my daughters, and then he opens our conversation to what’s happening in the nation’s capital. Behind him, I see the Lamoille River winding towards Lake Champlain, flowing its slow way to cross the Canadian border and head to the Atlantic Ocean.

As a complete non-sequitur, I say, The sun actually came out today.

We look at the blue sky overhead between the trees. It’s January in Vermont, and the sun’s presence is never a given here.

We talk for a few more minutes, acknowledging chaos and the pandemic, these odd days and that sun overhead — light without warmth.

Then we part ways, he to his ski, and I towards home.

But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

— William Carlos Williams

Dreaming

January 5, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Often after the new year, the cold hammers down in Vermont, like a nail gun, sealing the human world except for well-bundled expeditions. The coldest I’ve seen is 40 below zero; mist moved ghost-like over the river, creeping over the icy banks like a strange memory.

This year, what small amount of snow we have is often soft, and the air during the day often thaws and carries the scent of water.

It’s an illusion, I know, to imagine that anything but a long, long winter lies ahead of us. But still, yesterday when I left work, I mentioned to a coworker that it was nearly five and day still lingered.

For a just a moment, we stood there with car keys in our hands, reveling at the light.