travel

The Mind of Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Poet Wallace Stevens wrote: One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.

In northern Vermont — thus far — the winter has been cold and dark and ice, scant on snow. When the sun is out, we lift our faces, as if our bare cheeks can gather the light like June’s strawberries in our hands.

The mind of winter is the Vermonter’s mind, for sure, for sure — slipping away in the swimming and gardening season, returning in late fall.

Each of us in my house is sunk into work and school in ways that seem particularly pleasant — at this time. Keep the house warm, the cats and kids fed, and walk under the stars at night.

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Barr Hill, Greensboro, Vermont

And So Begins… December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Sun in Vermont’s December? Sunday morning, we discovered perfect snowflakes scattered over the icy ground.

This final month of the year always seems more shut in, filled with post-holiday and pre-holiday and holiday, with snow piling (although more ice than snow here yet), with a warm house and knitting and those sleeping cats. What’s homier than curls of sleeping cats?

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.

― Dylan Thomas

 

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Note the washed-pale blue: save for sunrise and sunset, that’s about it for color.

Taxi Driver

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I’m at the gas station, in the far back, where the light is out, filling diesel cans by the light of my iPhone, when an older woman pulls up and starts talking to me.

Busy, busy, she was at work that day.

As she’s waiting for me to finish, and I’m crouched in the dark, I ask what she does for work. I’m thinking nurse’s assistant. I’m dead wrong. She’s a taxi driver. She’s taken people to Chicago, to Boston, and then everywhere around the state. To the grocery store, or south to Bennington. For years, she had been a long-distance semi driver, so the taxi gig is a kind of retirement, keep-her-busy kind of gig.

I’ve never met a taxi driver in rural Vermont, as common an occupation as that might be elsewhere.

Peat moss from Canada, she tells me. By this time, she’s taken my phone and lights my way. Blustery, she tells me. But that doesn’t stop her from wiping off my cans with her rag and lifting them into the back of my car, saying my hands must be cold.

I offer to hold the light for her, but she sends me on my way. She’s left the hatch of her vehicle open, so her side of the gas pump is relatively well-lit. She knows her way around a dark gas station; she knows what she’s doing.

Last of November. I drive home to where my daughters are heating Thanksgiving leftovers in the oven.

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Rain, Sleet, Snow, Silence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Third snow day, and it’s only November. Driving from one side of the state to another, I travel through a landscape of gray — pavement, mountain — flanked by icy trees in that always questionable terrain around Bolton.

Then — the lake. I’m late already to work, with a list of things I absolutely want to do that day, check off, simply be finished with. But I turn around anyway, find a parking space and put an actual nickel in the meter, hoping no reader will be walking by in this snowy day.

The rain by then has turned to lacy snowflakes, the perfect kind for a child to lean back her head and open her mouth to catch a flake on her tongue. There’s no one out at all along the lake — improbably not even the dog walkers. Just all that snow, for just that moment.

A cessation.
You’re not searching.
How nice it is tonight.
Two birds fell asleep in your pocket.

— Yannis Ritsos

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My Daughter, My (Former) Younger Self

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

My daughters dropped me off for a dentist appointment — worse, an oral surgeon — appointment and disappeared to check out a mural in town.

I wait. I wait a little more. The appointment’s at the end of the day, and, as I’m waiting, darkness wraps around the little building. Later, my 14-year-old tells me she was outside in the dark, jumping up and down and waving her arms at me, watching me read.

Who sits in the dentist chair and just reads? she asks.

It’s an odd feeling — myself in a brilliantly lit chair, while my daughter’s outside in the dark, trying to get my attention.

As for the tooth, he looks at it and says, What a shame. The rest of your teeth are so good. I explained I injured the tooth many years ago, but I see he’s not really listening. He’s looking at that tooth. He’s thinking. I say, what’s the least bad way forward?

Then, alone in the room again, I wait and wait, no longer reading, thinking of the story of the tooth, that slender bit of enamel.

It’s nearly 6 p.m. when he returns with an insurance option. I agree, of course. When I walk out, my daughters roll down the windows in the car, laughing, teasing about taking forever….

Here’s my ode to silver maples in State 14.

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/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The full moon gleams in the sky this morning as I head out to start my daughter’s car this pre-dawn morning.

Winter, my familiar friend.

Yesterday, chatting with my neighbor while we’re back to our traditional winter activity — snow shoveling — he said laughingly, Well, what are we going to do? Be mad about it?

Winter, dear friend, I now know you very, very well, in your elegant beauty. This year, I’m going to love you wholly — for at least two weeks.

Here’s a few Rebecca Solnit lines for this impeachment hearing week.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

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