Birdsong, Mortality

March 30, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Where the fields have opened up, robins flock in the trees, singing the melodies that always remind me of spring’s running water — icy cold and much welcomed, harbingers of green. These are the first flocks we’ve seen this year, and we’re doing what I’ve done with this daughter since she was a little one on my back — we’re searching out robins, these beloved spring birds.

Same activity, different backroad. We’ve moved towns and houses, and so tinged through all of this cusp-of-adolescence for this girl is both the headiness of new experiences threaded through with loss. Impermanence, I remind myself over and over, sometimes daily, is the ticket price for all of us, even these little palm-sized birdies, the fat earthworms they’re devouring, and the stones in the fields, gradually giving up their edges to the elements.

We stop for a moment and talk about the dirt road behind our boots, the shape of its crown in the middle. Birdsong, wind, running streams. The fields are so wide open here we glimpse a herd of deer at the distant crest, just a quicksilver moment as they rush across the ridge and vanish again.

My daughter, humoring me, hungry for her late dinner, asks me, Are you actually talking to those robins?

Oh, that thin scrim between mind, body, landscape….

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

— Alan Watts

Hardwick, Vermont

Rain Patter

March 29, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In our former house, the pink Owens-Corning insulation had been so shredded by mice in the ceiling that we could easily hear rain on the metal roof — a pleasant sound, although the resulting winter cold didn’t match that coziness.

Our house now is cool in the summers, warm or certainly warm-ish in the winters, the most well-insulated house I’ve ever lived in, and I’m darn grateful for that, all the way around. Last night, I opened my daughter’s window so she could hear the sound of the rain. Her cat jumped up on the sill, his nose pressed against her screen, curious about what was happening in the night. We haven’t heard the rain for a very long time now — a few aberrant storms in the winter — but this steady rain promised the chirping peepers will return.

Nearly 40 degrees out, I left the window open a few inches so my daughter could lie in bed, reading and listening to the rain.

On the other side of her wall, I read an article in The New Yorker about lost notebooks in Egypt. The sap will be running all night.

2 Things About Winter

March 24, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Saturday morning, the snow is above my knees on the long path from the parking lot to the library. Halfway up the door, the snow has blown off the school’s soccer field, and I tug the door open. Snow and I tumble in.

A patron shows up while I’m shoveling, his glasses fogged with snow. He’s walking in my footsteps, and he’s laughing. Why do we live in Vermont?

After dinner, my oldest daughter asks her sister and I to go on a walk with her. Cold but not that cold, we walk against the landscape of sunset.

No one else save a few pickups pass us. A flock of geese flies inexplicably south. This whole long walk I remember exactly why I live in Vermont. We return after 7:30 and it’s not yet full dark.

Here You Go. Love The Planet We’re Leaving You

March 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My 13-year-old took part in last Friday’s Youth Climate Strike — coincidentally one of the warmest days in veritable weeks in Vermont. Since I usually work at home on Fridays, I folded up my laptop around noon and walked downtown. I met the photographer for the local paper in front of the diner, and we joked around for a bit until the students walked down from the high school.

The principal had called the parents the night before and given the heads up that this wasn’t a school event, but he let us know when the kids planned to leave. He walked down with the kids, too, and a number of teachers came, too. The Buffalo Mountain Co-op staff came out to cheer on the kids.

The kids lined up on the suspension bridge over the Lamoille River. I stood talking with my daughter’s humanities teacher and reading the kids’ signs. My favorite: The dinosaurs thought they had more time, too. The day was impeccably sunny. Some of the kids came with an intensity to talk about the climate; others simply to escape the school, take a walk, and get some vitamin D. Then the kids headed back up the hill, chatting, happy.

I can’t help but wonder: 36 years from now, when my younger daughter is my age, will she remember this day? And what will the world be like then? Contrary to the often pessimistic bend of my nature, I’m forcing myself to envision a brilliantly beautiful day, clamorous with youth, optimism, and ebullient joy in a fine March day, a gift in Vermont.

Hardwick, Vermont, middle and high school students

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.