Money and Community — and More

March 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As Woodbury’s town librarian (population 888), my wages are paid directly by the townspeoples’ property taxes, a few donations, and Woodbury Pie Breakfast. Now the main yearly event in town, nearly 300 people showed up at the town’s little elementary school, trudging up the stairs to the second floor gymnasium, to eat pie yesterday morning.

Friday evening — and this is my most beloved part of pie breakfast — people arrive with covered dishes, explaining this is pumpkin and maple or bacon and sausage with a little dill.

Late last fall, Vermont’s State Board of Education mandated that Woodbury’s elementary school merge with two other local schools — one school much larger. After a winter of endless adult meetings about how to keep Woodbury’s school and library open, what pleasure — and relief — to fill the school with live music, the redolence of warming quiche, laughing kids — and adults in need of coffee.

Of all my photos, this is my favorite: the little girl waiting for pie to be served, while adults do adult things….

Wide Open Windows

March 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hallelujah! What I believed had permanently departed my patch of Vermont returned: sun! Warmth!

Yesterday afternoon while I’m holed up in the Montpelier library, working, my daughter texts me, asking if she can open the house windows. Please? It’s hot.

At home, we open the upstairs glassed-in porch too. Her cat presses against a window screen, entranced by — what is that? — singing chickadees?!

My daughter asks, Why are you so happy? Is it spring?

I answer, It’s enough, right now.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being…

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Spring”

Reading Harry Potter

March 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like in-laws who have overstayed their welcome, winter lingers. While you might be wanting to mop mud from the in-laws’ boots off your kitchen floor, they keep coming and going, anticipating lunch and then dinner.

So, too, winter.

Sunday afternoon, my daughter reads Harry Potter with a cat curled sleeping beside her. I stretch on the rug with the other cat, reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. She pauses to relay a Dumbledore tidbit. I consider sharing the word desertification, and then decide the heck with that. Later, we put on our boots — again, again. In the woods, we follow a narrow snowshoe trail.

I’m likely to lay down the grim reading and pick up Potter as a survival guide, in the current season and for the longer haul….

That epic era once derided as ‘prehistory’ accounts for about 95% of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark.

The Twisty Road North

March 9, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late afternoon on a Friday, I take a winter road trip north, nearly to Canada, along Route 14 so rutted with frost heaves my little Toyota bounces. The pavement and passing cars are bleached with road salt — rust, pernicious rust, I keep thinking, apprising the mortality of my vehicle.

My daughter and I return in the dark from her concert. It’s 8:30 pm, but might as well be midnight. No one’s on the road but a tractor with blinking lights before a barn. This is farming country. The few gas stations and general stores in the small towns we pass through have all snapped off their lights, shut up, gone home.

Even in the dark, this highway is familiar, although we rarely drive this way anymore. In the dark car, eating crackers, we swap stories. My daughter tells me about the high school she just visited and its long locker room. I point out the state’s largest landfill. Whoo-hoo, my daughter says. A claim to fame. We pass a farm where she once believed Santa’s reindeer lived. I was so sure of that! She tells me about a tiny turtle on Lake Memphramagog I’d forgotten. She repeats the story with precise details; in a flash, I remember that brilliant April morning, the black and white checked dress she wore and loved.

Listening to her, at age 13, I hear her imagining a different life. What would it be like to live here? I think of her as so young, but I’m wholly wrong. Her stories keep flowing. Along this road we hardly ever travel, she has a whole history already, a detailed map of her past.

What an age 13 is: so full of wonder, of mystery: which direction will I steer my life?

To move, stay put, say the Buddhists. To see, stop looking. Don’t imagine paradise in the sky. Make paradise in the kitchen.

— Kate Inglis, A Field Guide to Grief: Notes for the Everlost

A sampling of our everyday snowbanks this March

Making Sense?

March 5, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

At dusk, after washing the dishes, my daughter agrees to go on a walk with me — she is clearly good-humoring me. It’s cold, and I sense she doesn’t care all that much about the gorgeous blue horizon.

Plus, she’s 13. Having once been 13 myself — albeit in the last century — I know 13-year-olds cannot wear hats.

Walking, she asks me why is this necessary? I offer my usual lines — that it’s pleasant to walk in the evening, that a little cold and adversity build character (my dad’s line). I remind her of my amazing wealth of character.

So, she says, you have character because you froze your ass off?

Put that way, I admit that perhaps not all the pieces of my thinking always hinge together perfectly. Or perhaps they do….

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

― Basho

February Yields To March

March 3, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The snow lies so deeply around our house I might be wrong about that slender path, first through the transplanted hydrangeas from Susan and then along the milkweed behind the garden. Down the hill, through the wild tangle of pine and boxelder, I see a single porch light every night. Come spring, I imagine, I’ll walk in my boots through the melting snow, stand at the edge of the forest, and see whose light that is.