#Vermontwinter

Reprieve

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sunstruck afternoon in February — I opened the windows and aired out the house. The kids jumped off the back deck, ate potato chips, planned building projects we needed to start right away.

A trustee signed off on an email to me, Happy sap run. These are the intimations of sugaring season, the beginning of the thaw and freeze, thaw and freeze. When we first began sugaring, twenty years ago, I believe the thaw would come in a rush and stay. Not so. Thaw and more thaw, studded with bursts of hard cold, slowly melts the frost down deep.

(I had) a revelation the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays

IMG_1135.jpg

February 14

/ 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

IMG_1109

Woodbury, Vermont

Imagination

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My brother is standing on a ladder shoveling off our back porch roof when a sheet of snow from the house roof creaks loose and cascades over him. With my daughter’s help, he empties little chunks of ice and powdery snow from his pockets. Rain falls a little.

After we clear the snow, the three of us stand on the back porch — scene of summer hanging out — and I mention the sweet William that grew last summer, and will presumably again this summer, in the wild patch below the railings. I can imagine the tiny, frilly flowers in three hues of pink, laced with white.

All around us, the world is painted in hues of green pine, brown bark, and all that snow, on branches, over the garden, the trampoline frame nearly buried. It takes imagination to envision the lushness of spring — singing frogs, mating birds, tender green, and all those wildflowers, unstoppably unfolding from the earth — but we imagine it. February.

‘This is Just to Say’

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

— William Carlos Williams

IMG_1115.jpg

Random February Late Afternoon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, fading. No sense mentioning this to her, now.

Ice skating at the end of the day, just before the beautiful February twilight began folding around us, the girls’ former bus driver appears from the snowmobile trail where he and his dog had been walking.

He stops to talk to us as I lace up my skates, and points out a nearby house where he grew up. I ask what it was like. He’s in his sixties, and I know he’s traveled, worked in Costa Rice, and returned to Hardwick again.

It was all kids. There were six kids in my family. Everyone had at least four kids. Sometimes a lot more. He stares at the house. Irish Catholic.

I wait. On a night of freezing rain a few years back, he came to the town’s bookstore when I read my from my new novel. Later, picking up my kids at the bottom of our driveway, he told me a particular character reminded him of his father, long dead.

He tells me where the ice skating rink was in those years, stares at the house a little longer, then wishes us a good skate and disappears.

No one else is around. The ice is perfect. Before we leave, we prop the three folding metal chairs and two chairs high in bank, so they won’t get lost in more snow.

Mount Fuji in winter
The sun and stars are big-hearted
and strict.

— Lida Dakotsu

IMG_1095.jpg

Mid-Jan

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Like a long-ago friend, the cold has settled in. Those summer nights sleeping with the windows wide open, listening to the peepers’ throaty hum, might as well be a memory from a long ago life.

With gusto, the girls ski, their appetites enormous, their cheeks red as cardinal feathers.

Halfway through January, we’re meshed in winter’s routine, with so much of the season ahead. In breaks of thaw, memories of spring will tease us again, reminding us of loosening earth, the rustle of rain on leaves. Robins singing their love songs.

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable.

— Louise Glück

IMG_0920

Kid note. Sunday afternoon.

Winter’s Wow Factor

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Checking to see a child arrived home last night, I drive around a hillside — the cemetery hillside — and my daughter says, Whoa, under her breath, with not a tinge of 12-year-old sarcasm. Just wonder.

Feral, the ebbing, ravenous wolf moon. A profusion of moonlight in an unending night, and all that cold. 6º and expected to get much, much colder.

We feed our own hunger — for warmth, for color, for stories spoken and read.

All night long, while we’re sleeping, meshed in cats and blankets, that pristine moon sails silently over our rooftops, more luminescently magical even than St. Nick.

Endless bare fields
not even a bush
nowhere to abandon a child

— Buson

IMG_0817