Parking Lot Humor

February 18, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend once remarked to me that my older daughter has a “very thin scrim” between her and the world. Last night, returning with the girls and their skis, we stopped at a supermarket in Waterbury and wandered through the mostly empty store. When we walked back to my daughter’s car, she stopped and remarked about the car parked very near to hers: What a dick move. She edged around to her driver’s seat and said with absolutely no rancor at all. This is the kind of parking job I would do.

I laughed. I mean — parenting? It’s hard. It’s darn hard. The thinness of that scrim gets to me. So any humor? Send it my way……

February 14

February 14, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Ten years ago, a friend drove to my house in a snowstorm, and while we talked and talked, drank tea and knitted, so much snow fell that, when she went out to clear her car, we weren’t entirely sure where the hood of her car lay under all that snow.

With a kind of seriousness, my daughter packs small pink boxes of candy hearts into her backpack for her friends. She gives me a box, too, and, in a Brach’s variation of Proust’s madeleine, I’m in grade school again, mesmerized by these hearts and a little mystified by the valentine exchange and what that might mean. I offer a tiny green heart to my daughter with the words Be mine.

Here’s a love song to Vermont:

To our Mother of Mud Season
(may she come early and be soon gone)
and the happiness of cows and the sadness
of meadows; to snow in April, and cowslips and marsh
rose and bulk-tank days, to serenity
and late-winter languor…..

From Tony Whedon’s “Things to Pray To in Vermont” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

Woodbury, Vermont

Cabin Fever, #1

February 13, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Somehow, we’ve reached the middle of February: this is the period of deep winter, and its many juxtapositions. The sun shines blissfully all morning on the sleeping cats sprawled around my feet on the kitchen floor. The neighbors’ septic backs up; we meet in our nearby driveways, shoveling snow yet again, and he laughs, Not my best day.

The older daughter takes a highlighter to her textbook, determined to pass an EMT course, while the younger plans an elaborate visit to Burlington. Through my perpetual email, I wonder if she’s imagining Burlington as the spring paradise of blooming fruit trees rather than the gray pavement I see once a week.

My taxes are unfinished in messy pile beside stacks of overdue books from three libraries. I mean to invite over parents of my daughter’s new friend. I miss drinking coffee with my friend in Montpelier. In the basement of either the town hall or the town clerk might be boxes of legos for my young library patrons: a kid gold mine I need to spelunk. Somewhere out there is my next husband. When will he arrive?

This is February.

March will bring my library’s pie breakfast, when hundreds of people in town bake pies and carry them in both hands to the elementary school’s second floor cafeteria. Two live bands, endless conversation and gossip, coffee and more coffee, sweet and savory pies, and hundreds of Vermonters in snow boots. Pie breakfast is March’s small town brilliance.

The moon has nothing to be sad about….

— Sylvia Path, from “Edge”

Disparate Pieces

February 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The December my younger daughter was two, snow fell every day. To see out the kitchen windows, my 8-year-old and I stood on the chairs to peer over the mounds of snow that had slid off the roof.

This year, we’ve had a long dry span with little snow. My brother, a brewery owner in New Hampshire, calls and complains, Bad for business. For all those years we depended on maple sugaring for our livelihood, I worried about temperature and precipitation, fretting over one forecast versus another, keen-eyed on a degree or two of temperature change.

In the dark, I lie awake, imagining snow accumulating on our roof, over our lilies and lupines, their dark roots buried silently. The cats nudge me, and in our quiet house, the daughters sleeping, I pour these purring creatures a bowl of milk. At the window, I see across the cemetery a single patch of glowing white light, as if someone left an enormous floodlight on all night. Otherwise, the town is mostly dark, with a few small porch lights here and there, the glowing amber lights of the high school on the hill muted through the falling snow.

That patch is different from the usual spread of lights I see. What’s up, I wonder? What is someone looking for in that falling snow?

(The Province Land Dunes in Provincetown, RI, resembles….) New Mexico, where recently a man who had once been and will probably be again the governor of Nambé Pueblo told me that he had found seashells in the dirt where he is irrigating, a thousand miles from the ocean.

Cynthia Zarin, An Enlarged Heart, 2013

Four Maples

February 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend from my high school years (which, my daughters remind me, were literally in the last century) sends me an email, and I email back from my car, in a gray parking lot beside even grayer Lake Champlain. I remember canoeing from Burton Island to the mainland on a bright, balmy morning last July, and then waiting on a high point on the mainland, watching the ferry traveling across the lake with my 12-year-old daughter and her friend. When the ferry docked, I ran down to meet them, the girls glowing and happy with their adventure.

This friend writes about taking his kids swimming, and I wonder, pond or lake, river or pool? It’s been so long since I’ve seen him I would pass him by on the street, and not recognize him.

Finished, I fold up my laptop. I nod goodbye to this polluted and yet gorgeously beautiful lake and head towards a building where I’ll be blind to the lake all day, but I think for just one more moment of that town where I grew up. Along the square of lawn that my sister and brother and I wore down through endless kickball games stood four giant sugar maples, so tall their lowest branches were high above our heads. I wonder if there’s any chance those maples are still there, haven for songbirds, their leaves lifting up and ruffling over in approaching summer storms.

Once there was a tree….
and she loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come
and he would gather her leaves
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest…

— Shel Silverstein

Where we are now

Winter’s Grass-Is-Greener

January 17, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving down the Woodbury gulf in the twilight, staring at the road — snow-crusted, ice packed, with two curving black lines of asphalt worn through winter — I remember all those years of driving mountainous Route 9 in southern Vermont and wonder, What if I’d stayed in Brattleboro? What if my kids went to school there? I made soup with my publisher and used the Brooks Library with their enormous windows? What if I lived on Elliot Street again?

That’s January thinking.

My gaze lifts from the treacherous road to the gray and white mountains folding around that narrow valley, with the waterfalls and the rocky cliffs high overhead.

Trouble follows you anywhere. I know that. The last time I was in Brattleboro, itinerancy surprised me, the darker threads of our society thickening. I was glad I hadn’t stayed, that I had swapped a larger town for a smaller one. In the end maybe, it’s all Vermont roads, with those mysteriously beautiful mountains always greater than us, rising silently.