Simple Saturday

December 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I make an error knitting a hat — I skip the beginning half of a cable round. Compensate for the error and hope it’s not apparent? Or unravel (again) and start over?

Thus, the allure of craft — the potential to make something beautiful by getting it exactly right.

Not so, parenting.

On a post-Christmas slushy and raw day, the 13-year-old girls find me holed up in a corner of Montpelier’s Capital Grounds. It’s a day unfit for for their skiing plans, impossible to sled or ice skate. I close my laptop and suggest we walk. Even the sidewalks are sketchy with ice.

Too icy in Hubbard Park’s woods, we walk through the steep-streeted neighborhoods behind the capital, stop to admire six grazing deer, and muse about the houses we pass. What would it be like to live here? the girls wonder, contemplating their adult lives. Where will we go?

On the drive home through the dusk and a blowing snow that surrounds my little car in Calais, the girls both sit in the backseat as they did when they were little, eating cold dumplings and playing songs they think will shock me. Instead, I’m mesmerized.

At a gas station in Hardwick, I fill the tank in my shirt sleeves. In the backseat, the girls unroll the window and tease me, telling me to put on a coat, and suddenly I start dancing, lifting my arms over my head in a silly, made-up song about December and joy. A bitter wind blows along the highway. I leap a little higher, in our few moments of merriment, before I reach for my coat, too.

The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell

— Buson

Family Holiday Pact

December 12, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My brother calls, and I hear a terrific rattling. On inquiry, I learn he’s tipping up an empty cracker bag and eating the crumbs and salt at the bottom.

The rattling keeps up. I start laughing. He complains about the societal mandate of holiday cheer. My daughter, sitting on a yoga ball nearby, says to tell her uncle Yahtzee is part of our Christmas plans and a movie he introduced her to — I can’t bear to reveal the title — and my brother says that movie is fucking great. The movie is so bad I have a strange kind of affection for it.

Through the phone, I surmise he’s frying pork chops.

We come to our usual pact that, this time, no ER visits and no calls to the police. Mutually, we pledge to games (he and his girlfriend will trounce me in science trivia, I’ll crush them with literature), fresh air, and cooking. Mutually, we pledge not to holiday cheer but to fucking great.

State 14 ran my piece on house hunting. Eric Hodet’s stew on this site is particularly tempting….

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in…

“Days,” by Philip Larkin

In a Funk….

December 10, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

On a Saturday afternoon of errands, I yield to my 13-year-old’s desire to drink a latte. There’s no way, she insists, looking down merrily at me, that coffee will stunt my growth.

Surrounded by the gaiety of Montpelier’s holiday shoppers, I overhear a man seated behind my daughter, speaking emphatically, gesturing wildly with his hands. Listening, too, my daughter leans across the table and whispers to me that the man is a member of the sovereign citizens. Both she and I know the phrases he uses, the code, the promise of unfettered freedom to do exactly as you want.

Through the window, I see people I know walking by, talking and laughing.

My daughter asks me why someone would join a cult. I answer I don’t know, but even as I say this, I know I’m half-lying, skimming over the surface of a black miasma rising around us, as I keep watching through the window families walking by, holding packages.

This afternoon — I can feel it deeply inside me, hard as obsidian, as we pass through the dim afternoon and home again — marks the unstoppable point for this girl of true teen — not the bratty, lip-curling caricature our society portrays as adolescence, but a relentless, adamant, justice-driven quest to know why the world is flipped upside-down.

“First Sight”

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

— Philip Larkin

Stockpiling

October 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the garden withers for the winter, I collect seeds — tithonia, marigold, coneflower — pulling the dry seeds with their tufted ends with my fingers, secreting them in my coat pockets.

My daughter takes a handsaw to the mammoth sunflower stalks fencing the garden, their heavy heads picked nearly clean of seeds from marauding birds. From a scant palmful of seeds, what pleasure these beauties have given us this summer. Now, the birds and the scavenging squirrels feast, too.

A friend stops by with a bare peony root, cushioned in paper, transported in a Negra Modela box. I’m out that evening. When I return, my daughter carefully unwraps the root — not merely a stick but a complicated branching — and then lifts another smaller root. Good luck, she says. They may not grow.

Or, they might.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

— Galway Kinnell

Juncos flock the double glass doors in our kitchen, tantalizing our cat.

Driving, Dancing, Sometime in October

October 19, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The past few days — as though the deepest part of winter has set in early — I come and go in the dark, leaving early while my daughters are sleeping. When I return, I step out of my car and stand for a moment and gaze up at the inky sky, with that sprawling morass of glittering stars.

To break up the interstate’s monotony, I take Route 2 back to Montpelier from working in Burlington. Blue highway Route 2 follows the Winooski River — native name for wild onion — and cuts through small towns and sprawling farm fields. The corn fields, harvested for the year, are harrowed up, open earth against the mountains shouldering this river valley. Autumn opens up the landscape, sheds the leaves from the trees, and reveals more clearly where we are.

Where we are is the first scattering of snow on the ground yesterday morning. Soup simmering on the stove with what I’ve pulled from the garden — carrots, sage, beans, kale. Driving home, I switch off NPR and empty my mind of the day’s talk at work, of midterms and opioid use, of struggling to use writing to make sense of the world.

In our kitchen, my 19-year-old cooks bacon. I ask how the day’s gone. She says her ears are throbbing. The 13-year-olds had a dance party.

Rock on, I think. I close the curtains and ask if the chickens are shut in for the night.

We climbed stiffly out of the car.
The shut-off engine ticked as it cooled.

And then we noticed the pear tree…
and we each took a pear,
and ate, and were grateful.

— Jane Kenyon, “Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer”

The Moral Arc

October 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The fall after I graduated from Marlboro College, I was living in Brattleboro and working at Omega Optical where I crafted tiny round glass disks used as high-tech light filters — a strange and short-lived job for me.

That fall, David Souter was nominated for the Supreme Court, and on NPR we listened to every word of the hearings. A bachelor, Souter lived in Weare (pronounced where), New Hampshire, not far from where I grew up, a little town I knew well. Brilliant and witty, Souter made New Hampshire proud.

That fall, young as I was and newly in love, I rightly considered myself an adult. I walked to the company’s enormous building, not far from where I lived, and whose back doors opened to the weed-flanked railroad tracks, just above the wide Connecticut River. Before the winter, I knew I was unsuited that job and moved on. By the next spring, I was living in a tipi, and then my boyfriend and I packed up our old diesel Rabbit and a rusty Saab and moved west to graduate school.

I was glad to join adulthood, even though, as any young person, I had no idea how difficult that would be, how piercing a price the world would extract for my share of wrongdoings. My teenage daughter once urged me not to take our arguments personally — terrific advice. Step back; breathe. Justice isn’t personal to me, or anyone else, either. Watching her sister’s soccer game yesterday, in a row of women talking about Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I’m still astounded that she’s now one of us, more grownup than teenager, with all that means.