#Vermontwinter

Somewhere In December…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

We’re all home at 3, the youngest just home from school, the oldest finished with exams and lying on the couch with her cat who eyes me warily. What now? that cat seems to say. As if the cat himself is out of sorts with the weather.

Are any of us made to live so far north? I insist we pull on boots, go outside. The sun slips down over the mountain before four.

Then — here’s the thing — we’re talking about not much at all, and the younger daughter says something about the cat that’s not shall I say kid appropriate, and I just laugh. I mean, I really laugh. I’m not entirely sure she knows why I’m laughing. The other day she asked if I was intended to hang little white Christmas lights in the “residential quarters.” I did, and I do.

But just thinking about it makes me laugh again. Why not?

Like a wheat grain that breaks open in
the ground, then grows, then gets
harvested, then crushed in the mill for
flour, then baked, then crushed again
between teeth to become a person’s
deepest understanding…

There is no end to any of this.

— Rumi

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December Sparkles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When I was really little — probably three or so — I vaguely remember my family parked outside of town, watching the Fourth of July fireworks. My mother said the sprawl of lights in the darkness was Santa Fe. That’s how little I was — I didn’t even realize that magic was city lights. We lived on a dirt road then, out of town, and my guess is I hadn’t seen much of those bright city lights.

Oddly enough, I remembered that as I was taking out the compost the other night, just around 5 o’clock. The sun had sunk, leaving not even a smear of pale pink.

In the darkness, later, the dishes washed, my daughter and I walked around town, our jackets unzipped.

Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.

― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

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Teen Talk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

4 degrees this morning when my older daughter leaves for work. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw — classic New England weather. We’re now into the final descent into darkness. Evenings, we hang out — homework and reading — and often just talking. No one’s heading out for an evening run, a last long walk before nightfall, because these days nightfall is in the afternoon.

My older daughter reads aloud about what it’s like to live in the Arctic Circle.

My 14-year-old and I spend a day driving around in Burlington, doing errands and a little Christmas shopping and I buy her a toasted cheese and ham sandwich she loves. For the first time, I notice she’s watching the college students. Waiting in line for that sandwich, we’re surrounded by a very tall men’s athletic team. They’re buying enormous containers of juice and talking about what that night might turn into, and a friend of theirs who has taken a job as a horticulturist at a well-known college. What’s the difference, they muse, between horticulturist and agriculturist?

Only much later, talking with her older sister that night, do I realize how intently this quiet teen has taken in that talk, how she’s imagining the multiple possibilities for her young adult life, not so very far off.

At a stoplight, she asked me what it’s like to be a college student. I thought back to my six years in school — four as an undergraduate, two in graduate school. What’s six years in a life? A lot, or not so much. She waited for my answer. Finally, I said, It’s like nothing else.

Likewise, a year from now she’ll be driving me around, with her learner’s permit. About parenting? From toddler to teen? It’s like nothing else.

There are many times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you’d be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.

― Ayelet Waldman

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Maple

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

End of the day, in the gloaming, I’m running up the road. A little bit of snow is falling, and — dare I write this in December? — it’s just nice. That sweet, snowglobe kind of beauty.

In not so many minutes, I know I’ll need to get off this somewhat slippery and icy road before a pickup turns a bend a bit too quickly, its driver maybe distracted by the same things I am, the enchanting serenity of these maples, this field, the light funneling down over the horizon.

I know, too, as I start cooking dinner that I’ll listen to VPR. My listening, or not, has absolutely zero bearing on congressional hearings. I’ll be irked. And yet, I’ll listen, if for no other reason to participate in the dinner conversation at our house.

For for these few moments, though, I revel in the sky, the snow, the crows in the distance flying home, too.

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

― Derrick Jensen

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Hardwick, Vermont

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.