Little Walk.

March 8, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When my daughter and I return from a walk tonight, we stand for a moment outside our house in the dark. The moon is a bit of a creamy curl over our roof. Mighty Orion stands at his guard in the constellations. Whoever dug this house’s foundation in the sandy soil, carefully set the fieldstones, and built this home has long since passed out of this world. People have lived and fought and loved and died in this house. It’s March and Mud Season hovers over us, freezing, thawing, freezing, and eventually the thaw will win out for the summer. Upstairs, my youngest daughter puts her face to a window. We go in, leaving the stars and the night to their own particular magic.

“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Q&A.

March 4, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teen and I are in an office filling out paperwork and the last question asks her how apprehensive she is about dental work.

She stares at me. “Why on earth,” she asks me in her reasonable way, “would I reveal anything like that?”

I note it’s a standard question. Her answer: that’s a ridiculous question.

It’s another cold afternoon — a mostly sunny day in Northern Vermont — in a winter where cold has now dragged on well beyond its welcome. We’ve driven a little distance and taken a detour along a river whose middle has thawed. Only its shores are frozen.

A couple of decades now into parenting, I’ve observed children are formed by their parents’ lives — and not, too. She’s driving, and I seem to have taken up residence permanently in her passenger seat — a place I inhabit uneasily and definitely gracelessly. We drive and talk. Youth, I think, repeating the word soundlessly, like a mantra; I’m drawn to its utter ebullience and brashness, like the sunlight we all desperately need.

We remark on the price of gas. Our sheer luck at the happenstance of living in the Shire of Vermont right now. Of the war in cities and villages and homes on the other side of the globe.

At our house, the icicles on our covered porch are exceptionally skinny and long this year. In the early morning, the ice begins falling in spires that break on the wooden porch. So many questions, and my answers are so poor. Keep asking.

Squall. Blindness.

February 28, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Right before the pandemic shut down the world two years ago, I drove with my youngest daughter to the New Hampshire village when I had spent ten years of my childhood. My family no longer lives there. An old high school flame had contacted me around that time, and I was half-thinking I might look him up some day. My daughter and I parked at the end of the street where I had walked with my siblings countless times, and then past the house where we lived and into the library when I had spent so many hours, dreaming of my life to come.

In a strange, almost sepia-toned kind of way, I felt I had been able to step into that past and see again the sweetness of it — something that seems so often lost in memory.

There’s that famous line from Tom Wolfe that you can’t ever go home again, but these days I’m wondering if that’s because you can’t ever really leave your home. I read that novel in high school, in that beloved library, a great big novel that I devoured with such enthusiasm.

Twenty-five years ago, a young woman driving a Subaru Justy ran into my VW Rabbit in a sudden snow squall, just like the one above. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and somehow miraculously survived wholly intact. The young woman sat in her car, crying, in the middle of the highway, and I stood outside her car, begging her to get out. “I’ve killed you,” she wept. I kept insisting I was fine. I was wearing a blue sweater my mother had knit me, and I spread my arms out wide. “I’m alive.”

Her insurance company gave me three thousand dollars, which my husband and I used to start a sugaring business. Much later, I sold pieces of that business and bought a house in the village. I’m still carrying that squall and that woman with me. I never saw her again. I hope she’s well.

Wild Honey.

February 27, 2022February 27, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In what could be called Yet Another Phase of Life, I meet my oldest daughter at her apartment, and we take the dog for a walk up a dirt road where I’ve never been. It’s rural Vermont, and the road bends away from the river valley and winds steeply up a hillside. It’s sunny and cold, and there’s absolutely zero traffic on the road. The weather had turned warm a few days ago, rutted up in a foretaste of mud season, and now is frozen in deep ruts.

The trees end at a stone wall and a sprawl of farm fields, with an incredible four-story 19th century barn. Whoever lives here appears to be hosting a kids’ sledding party. The homeowner appears on the road, with his black dog, who coincidentally shares the same name as my daughter’s dog. We speak pleasantly for a few moments, and it’s clear not many strangers wander up this road.

My daughter snaps a photo of a dripping icicle from one of the little outbuildings.

The kids’ party slowly heads back to SUVs and station wagons, the kids red-checked, in snowsuits, carrying small white paper bags. The adults wave and smile at us.

A little later, I drive home through that river valley I’ve driven countless times now, alone or with kids or sometimes with friends. The road switchbacks through the shadowy Woodbury gulf, and shortly after that, I’m home again, feeding the wood stove and cats, then on the couch with my laptop and work, listening to the litany of reporting from the Ukraine. I remember clearly when I was 23, too, living in Vermont, and it seemed utterly normal to have strangers ask, out of curiosity and nothing more, where do you live and what’s your story?

I sweep up the stove ashes and bring in more wood. The night promises more cold. How much I’d love to put my hands on sun-warmed soil and plant a garden of sunflowers.

Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust – of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold – smells of nothing.
― Anna Akhmatova

Psalm for the Ordinary.

February 25, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Ordinary Life, by Barbara Crooker

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch’s little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa’s ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

Breezy Walk. A Stranger.

February 23, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

March in February — the fields are beginning to open, at least for this afternoon, for this particular moment. I park by the side of the road and take the long way where I’m going, by foot, my hat off, jacket unzipped, letting the wind pull at my hair.

I’m snapping a photo of a field and the sky when a car pulls over at the side of the road. There’s no one else around, and for a moment I wonder if he’s a landowner, angry or just curious what I’m doing. Wednesday afternoon, and no one is around.

He gets out of his mud-splattered white car, laughing, and asks for directions back to a paved road. He was visiting someone and took “the other way.” I laugh back, and we joke about where the other way in Vermont leads someone.

We stand there, joking, the dirt road both melting and already beginning to freeze again as we speak.

When he gets in his car and disappears down the road, I stand for a moment longer. I’d wanted nothing more than wind in my eyes, sunlight on my face. Fait accompli. Then it’s back to civilization for me, too.