Vermont

Monsters. Childcare.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I stand outside the town office building, eating leftover beet-carrot-garlic salad for lunch, watching the sky alternately break apart in sun or drop rain. If there’s a rainbow, it eludes me. A retired couple who lives up the street walks by, returning from their daily post office walk. We kick around the news: a petition to close the town’s elementary school and how last night’s snow turned to rain.

Slushy, slushy.

The wind kicks up a hint-of-late-February warmth, the way that month can smell of thawing earth, of the gradual thaw-and-freeze-and-thaw that morphs into spring. Midwinter here, the weather out of whack. The afternoon opens into sunlight. The sun’s rare January appearance carries me through the afternoon and into a cheerily ebullient Selectboard meeting, and home again along an icy road, the stars glittering over hayfields, to play cards with my daughter while the cats savor their feline leisure, sprawled before the wood stove.

I lay awake late reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Dederer writes:

… the genius is not you. Not me. The genius, as we understand it, is not the person who spends most of her time, and I mean that quite literally, thinking about childcare. My major artistic concern for the past twenty years has been childcare, it has preoccupied me more than any other subject; even now that my children are mostly grown I’m still not sure I managed it well, I lie awake worrying about it, and meanwhile old Pablo was putting out cigarettes on his girlfriend’s face.

Solstice Dandelion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I stopped into a candy shop in Montpelier to buy chocolate Santas for my daughters. We’ve been visiting this store since my daughters were so young I always held their hands downtown. The owner read my book, and we always talk about writing and family and Vermont small town life. Her store had reopened recently after July’s devastating flood. The rain and snowmelt in the forecast hovered around us as I filled a white paper bag with those bright foil-wrapped chocolates. As I listened, I added chocolate pastilles and more Santas, for her or my daughters or me, for the giving or taking, or maybe both.

This week’s rain likely spared this sweet shop, but towns around us were flooded again. In the town where I work, sections of roads carefully repaired after July’s flood broke again.

Yesterday, I spied a folded dandelion blossom in the town green. I squatted down and stared, not touching this brilliant gold in its emerald set. Overhead, those bunching clouds. A balmy breeze stirring over the lake that by day’s end will whet a bitter cold.

Solstice: hallelujah on this spinning planet.

Less and less surprises us as odd.

— Tracy K. Smith

I believe in good gloves.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

At the Vermont Almanac‘s celebration of volume four, I talk with people I haven’t seen in years — my daughter’s beloved elementary school teacher, a couple who bought a house down the road from where I once lived. As the staff from the center where the celebration was held clean up, ready to head home themselves, I walk out with my former neighbors. We stand for a few moments by a fire burning in a pit, talking about sugaring and our daughters and Vermont dirt roads. Through the wide windows, I watch people wrapping up the remains of cheese and dried sausage. In my house, I am still eating the remains of Thanksgiving’s cheese, the sharp cheddar I used in my friend’s birthday sandwich.

Overhead, stars strained again the clouds.

I’d been asked to read a poem, “Dear Day in Late September,” for poet Kerrin McCadden, who couldn’t attend. I consider this poem a love letter in the tenor of love letters I admire most — elegantly stripped down, mindful of life’s deep sadness and the beauty of our world fat with bees.

On my way home, I think of the line “I believe in good gloves.” As a former sugar maker, I’ve used up countless gloves. With my small hands, I’ve never had a pair of gloves that fit. At Thanksgiving, in a shop looking for boots, my daughter handed me a pair of petite gloves. I nearly laid them to the side (thrift, thrift), but I bought them. Yesterday, wearing these gloves to bring in wood, I realized the gloves fit me perfectly, downy on the inside. Warm, strong, practical. What do you know.

…. I want to tell you I am

thinking about closing up shop for the winter. I am settling

my accounts. Enclosed, please find a brace of birds,

which I hope you will accept as payment against last winter’s

oil bills. There is much to do. Up in the barn, I have spelled

out the name of the man I love with crabapples. It is one way

to know a man’s heart. I believe in his name, though,

like I believe in good gloves. Oh, how we fight the cold

with everything we have.

— Kerrin McCadden

Pocket Treasures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On this Sunday afternoon, my guest departs in the falling snow. When I head out for a walk, the cold has sunk in, deep enough that tendrils of snow cling to the grass and trees branches. The snow bends down last summer’s sunflowers in the garden. I leave my woodbox full, the cats sleeping, plates on the table. I intend only to return a handful of library books, but I head up the hill and around the high school and into the woods where the snow lies deeply and slows me down.

It’s December. Snow circles down, lovely and miraculous, this silent transformation.

Here’s a few lines for winter:

“Treasure what you find
already in your pocket, friend.”
― Ted Kooser

Stitching, in Friends & Wool.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

December, and by five o’clock, the dark has hammered in for the night. A friend and I walk to the post office, talking about work and family, laughing as we avoid icy patches glowing beneath the streetlamps. We meet a neighbor walking home with her two children from the afterschool program. The boys have glowing strips wrapped around their wrists, red and green, that draw lines through the darkness as they pinwheel their arms.

We return to my dead-end street where the light glows on my back porch. At the silhouette of mountains across the valley, an immense column of amber light illuminates the night sky. Moonrise. It’s not particularly cold. We linger and watch the stars and planets rub on against the darkness, one by one, and keep talking about those complicated stories of family, of how history bends back upon itself and what this might mean for our children who are in the time of their youth.

Above, stitches of a sweater I knitted for a faraway friend, something I created with pleasure and gratitude, that I’ll box up and mail away. Who knows when I’ll see these friends again. But it’s the only way forward that lends any illumination for me: stitch. When need be, unravel and begin again.

“The products of science and technology may be new, and some of them are quite horrid, but knitting? In knitting there are ancient possibilities; the earth is enriched with the dust of the millions of knitters who have held wool and needles since the beginning of sheep. Seamless sweaters and one-row buttonholes; knitted hems and phoney seams – it is unthinkable that these have, in mankind’s history, remained undiscovered and unknitted. One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.”

— Elizabeth Zimmermann

How to Reconcile Contradictions?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The November days end in early darkness. Late afternoon, I close my laptop, comfort the cats with a handful of kibble, and pull on my jacket. The village lights glow: the few restaurants, a garage, a laundromat, the library. When I’ve reach the high school, the darkness spreads ubiquitously through the town forest that spreads up the hillside. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in New England, and yet the profoundness of this late autumn darkness always amazes me.

Later, I’m in the neighbors’ house who need some aid. As we stand talking in the well-lit rooms, I feel the house around us, the century-old vessel of wood and nails, a metal roof. Around us, the wind stirs through the evergreens. I walk back in the dark, my head bent against the cold channeling through the valley. All night, wind howls, the inexorable thrust of our world into winter.

While I read on the floor beside the wood stove, the cats keep me company, thinking their feline thoughts. Eventually, I turn off the lamp, and we three beings watch the fire’s flames through the stove’s glass door. Encompassing us, this profound darkness I will never comprehend. In it, our hearts beat on.

Here’s a few lines from David Truer’s “The Americas They Left Me” I read last night, in The Best American Essays, 2023.

This country is a terrible country, and this country is not…. There is a great ugliness on the land and also a great beauty. This country would and will do its worst at the same time it embodies the most nurturing habits our civilization has to offer. There is no reconciling these contradictions; they cannot be reduced or done away with. I must, we must, find a way to contain both.