small town

Our Perpetual Holiday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

To practice night driving, my daughter and I set off after dinner, delivering a book and knitting needles to a friend. We’re laughing on the way there, and my daughter remarks, Why is it so dark?

I answer that I’m going to let that question lie.

At our friends’ house, we can see through the windows where the family is around the wood stove, talking, the walls painted yellow. I have a sudden flash of envy at the intactness of mother, father, two children, and then that passes quickly, too. At our house, warm and well-lit, with interior walls painted limoncello, we’re as intact as any family, too.

With my friend’s book in my lap, my daughter drives up the back roads, over ice and sand, through all that darkness. We reach the crest of hillside. There, as she drives and talks, I see across the valley to where a barn is lit in a long string of lights on the opposite hillside. Sporadic houses glow in the cold night, and not much more.

She drives down, then along the S curves along the river where I remember a terrible accident years ago. We stop and fill the gas tank. Beneath the bright gas station lights, it’s just us. I walk around the car, washing windows. In the driver’s seat, she watches me, and then I step back and bow. She shakes her head at me, amused.

Middle of February. Cold. A little chit in our collage.

Strangers

/ 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

/ 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.

Photo by Gabriela

Old Photos

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The couple who last owned our home mail us old photos. When they bought the house, the 100-year-old dwelling was in ragged shape. My daughters and I spend some time looking at how the house has changed, and how it hasn’t.

I bought the house in good shape, and now we’re wearing into it, scraping and chipping at its shininess with our use. In the spring, we’ll open all the windows and polish our house again. In the summer, I’ll paint, as paint perpetually falls off in New England.

Once, I had thought to sell and move when my youngest graduated from high school. Now, like everything else in our collective lives, the future is uncertain. Shelter in place — a phrase I once believed would never apply to our Vermont life — directs the shape of our lives.

In the afternoon, I ski through the woods on the nearby trails. Just as I click on my bindings, I remember last night’s dream of a snowy owl… and then I wonder, truth or reality? I stand there alone, in the cold and under the overcast sky, wondering. For just a moment, I’m not sure. Maybe I really did see that elusive owl. Then I push off into the woods, silent but for the sound of skis over snow.

An Actual Excursion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On a whim, I bought three tickets to an outdoor light festival. Each ticket was cheaper than the price of a movie ticket, back when we once went to the movies.

It was below zero when we arrived, and the three of us stood very near a crackling fire watching the winter twilight sink through deepening shades of blue into dark. We were outside a theater where I attended a fantastic poetry reading just before our world shut up last March.

Eventually, my daughters and I, warmed enough by the fire and hot chocolate, wandered through the enchantingly lit grounds. Overhead, the stars shone. At the far end, two little kids played in the snow that was lit cobalt — laughing with great pleasure, The snow is blue!

Just before we left, my daughters started the car and the heat, and I ran back to the window for sweets to bring home. I guessed who was bundled under layers of bulky coats and scarves and balaclavas.

A stranger who was stamping his feet and waiting for drinks asked if I was from here. Our house with our cats was eight miles down the road, but he had driven well over an hour to come. We have to do something, he said, then we wished each other a lovely night, and then disappeared into the night.

Finally!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the midst of surely what will be known in American history as a lousy time, Bernie Sanders inadvertently made knitting cool.

When my youngest daughter was a toddler, one winter I cracked open a knitting book my mother had given me from her stash and taught myself to knit two-stranded mittens. In those days of diapers and playdough and winter isolation, I experimented with yarn weight, needle size, and colors. The prettiest mittens I knit had one cuff gnawed by mice when I left the pair overnight in our sugarhouse.

When we moved from one house to another and we jettisoned so many belongings, I considered that particular knitting book before I packed it in a box. At that point, I wasn’t sure I would ever knit another pair of mittens, but I packed the book, more out of sentimental affection than anything else.

This morning, I pulled the book from the bottom shelf of my bookcase. I was looking for a pattern after offering to knit my brother a pair of mittens. In the center of the book, I found pages of one daughter’s artwork. She had a set of Noah’s ark stamps as a little girl, and had carefully stamped and colored a scene.

This daughter went through a period when a hand-me-down paperback Noah’s ark book was her favorite bedtime tale — all those animals and Noah’s family cozied in a handmade boat, first having a party, then enduring through a tediously long journey, with the rewards of the olive branch, the dove, dry land, and the rainbow at the end.