winter

Midwinter Lady Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Winter moon… in my novel, the Lovely Lady Moon appears from the beginning so frequently I think of her as a character, too. The other night, I lay reading in bed for the longest time, and then my brother started that texting thing again. He has this way of texting like no one else I know: as if he wraps his deepest, pithiest, and often funniest words in a rag, knots it up with twine and rock, and chucks it over the Connecticut River to me. Afterwards, I lay in the cold room under a thick wool blanket, staring through that uncurtained window, thinking of those words of my brother’s, his phrases of what had given him a sweet, rare joy that day.

I learned to follow the moon’s phases all those myriad March nights of sugaring, as I hurried back and forth from the house to the sugarhouse, over treacherous ice and sucking mud, beneath her radiance…. which channeled into all those nights I was awake with nursing or sick children, my eyes watching the moon as she rose and arced and descended through my slender view of the cosmos.

Those nights, in my rural house, I wondered about other women all over the planet who were awake with their babies, feeding and tending these tiny beings, their faces turned up to Lady Moon’s pristine presence – utterly familiar, uncrackably mysterious, infinitely beyond the touch of our hands. Steady as clockwork, infallible, she beams on: a beacon.

Bright Moon

                                                                after Buson  #843

Cold is the bright moon
All those trees
and this vast sky.

David Budbill, from AFTER THE HAIKU OF YOSA BUSON

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Photo by Molly S./West Woodbury, Vermont

Winter: the Whale’s Belly

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Our kitchen was forty-two degrees this morning. I leaned over the range and chipped a ridge in ice along the bottom of the window, and thought this is getting a little ridiculous. And I forgotten cream for the coffee. Often, in these morning – no Biblical scholar, not even a church-goer – I think of Jonah in the belly of his whale.

But then, home again from a basketball game, the wind blowing snow in our faces, my older daughter sang out, You can tell the light’s coming back! 

Indeed. Through translucent clouds, the day was yet bright, the moon a glowing gem tucked above the bare branches of maple trees. After a frozen day, the end was such a lovely place, with traces of snow falling, the white all around pure and white, and the light familiar and beckoning as that long-off spring.

...Winter is for women ----
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

– Sylvia Plath, "Wintering"
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Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont

Fire & Ice

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few inches of loose snow cover the snow all around our house. Beneath this lies rock-hard ice. Maybe someday I’ll live again in a world of shoveled sidewalks, but for now, our footing changes all through the winter and even well into the spring, when mud begins its 10,000 variations. I carried out this morning’s ashes and made a trail to that essential woodpile. A gray dusting of ashes covered a bucket of gleaming coals that hissed, burning down through the ice and snow.

Fire and ice. Why I love Vermont could fill many pages, or simply these three words. The contents of my hearth lie cast out on the frozen ground, dying, while jays cull my compost pile. The girls replenish our woodbox, readying for another night.

 

Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery—this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been.

– Joseph Campbell

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January, Vermont, 2016

 

 

 

 

Imagination

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday at dusk, while my daughter in her snowsuit gathered icicles and arranged them in an order known only to her, I walked in the cold along our road, the fresh snow recently plowed and sprinkled with brown dirt. How is it the sky can hold that lightest and palest of blues, complementing the frosty earth? Across the valley, Mt. Mansfield’s ridge gleamed with snow and sunlight.

Walking along the road, I imagined myself a wild creature, a woman around a wolf’s rangy body, my pelt matted with balls of ice, my lungs pulling greedily at the air, eyes keen and cunning, utterly watchful, without fear. Imagination is a word used too mundanely, like a child’s activity we toy with and too often cast away. I used the force of imagination today, descending into the bowels of bureaucracy, through windowless rooms with numbered forms and lengthy procedures and strangers weeping; I carried with me the hoary scent of wet fur, the wildness of snow and open skies, the singleminded hunger for survival.

Around our kitchen door, my child’s icicles glowed in the light through the windows tonight, widening the circle of the world she created.

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.

– Ann Patchett

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Barre, Vermont

River Ice

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Late, yesterday, bringing in firewood, I walked up into the woods just before snow descended with all its might and majesty. Dark was coming in, and I hiked to where I could see the blue ridge of Elmore Mountain in the distance across the valley. Standing perfectly still, I heard nothing, not a single sound, until merely the wisp of my own breath pried open that silence.

The river today is filled with flowing chunks of ice, green like water residing deep in a quarry’s bottom. We woke this morning to icy grapple against the bedroom windows, the wind skulking around the house, like a wild animal, eager to enter. All the wildness of winter returns, the icy realm returned in all its mighty fury – and unspeakable, very earthly beauty.

DUST OF SNOW, by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

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December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Spring, now so far away, comes with an urgency in Vermont, a breaking up of frozen roads, hail that reluctantly gives way to rain, coltsfoot – the first flowers – that thrust up through the gnarliest of patches: roadsides and where the gravel is beaten hard.

This season, too, comes with its own severity: every day, a little less light, a little more dark. What are the words I drag with me as I enter this season? Forget gray. Discard dimness. This is a world turned upside down, where the snow-covered ground exudes light, the trees pull in on themselves, myriad creatures put their heads down to sleep. The night sky is studded with white quartz. The clouds sink down into the earth. The garden rests. My callouses mend.

We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means.
— Louise Gluck
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Hardwick, Vermont