Real Things.

December 29, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Much as I pushed the hippie thing in my younger years, I’ve often sneered (albeit silently) at the tea drinkers, save for my pregnancy years. I’ve always been much more of a knock-back-a-couple-of-espressos woman. But this sodden late afternoon finds me leaning against my woodpile in the dreary rain, sipping steaming tea, remembering my girlhood love of The Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, and scorned Sylvia Plath.

As for the photo above, our Christmas adventures involved inspection of the July flood’s toll on the rail trail’s bridges. Christmas Day, we followed the former railroad bed deep into the woods, where this enormous culvert was skillfully and laboriously constructed a few generations ago. For reasons that need no elaboration, this seems a fitting photo for the trailing end of 2023. Unless you know by word-of-mouth or friend, you could walk through these woods and never see this beauty. Which would be a kind of loss.

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions or wishes, so easily broken. But here’s a small one: less of the superficial hashtag life. Hold scorching tea. Share a secret marvel with a stranger. Adhere to the tangible.

And last — I was lucky yesterday to be invited with Vermont Almanac editor Patrick White on Brad Ferland’s radio program Vermont Viewpoint on WDEV. It’s always a joy to participate in radio — especially with my friend Brad and talking about Vermont and writing.

Hope you’re all dry and warm….

The Long Night Moon.

December 27, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In the year’s tail-end days, the neighbors’ children sled down their short hill, hats off, snowsuits unzipped in the warm afternoon. I wander over with a tin of sweets and chat for a bit about sledding conditions, getting the low-down on the mixture of slush and ice. The full moon rises silently, December’s Long Night Moon. Various blues layer the sky, the hues that remind me of the sea in my land-locked geography.

During the in-between pieces of holiday and work, I’m slowly savoring The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti, an Italian novel about deep friendship and love of great mountains. A main character, Bruno, speaks about rebuilding a tumbled-in Alpine house: “Look, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. If you try to think too far ahead with this kind of work, it’ll drive you nuts.” Likewise: writing a book, parenting, living a life.

The neighbors’ children offer me a handful of wet snow, chock-full with dirt and last year’s sunflower seed hulls.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend.

December 18, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Heading towards the winter solstice, the days are cropped short. I ski in the woods. The next afternoon, after a spurt of warmth, I remove my skis to navigate around patches of tree roots, the exposed carpet of pine needles.

By 4:30, darkness envelopes us, velvety and broken only by our brief human endeavors of a line of twinkling holiday lights, streetlamps, parking lots lit up like precious jewels. Like a wild creature roused by these warm December nights, I prowl through the village and along the river.

Returning home one late afternoon, I pause beside Woodbury Lake. A crescent moon illuminates the blue-black sky, the outline of its orb a faint round: a promise of January’s full wolf moon. Twilight’s but a few moments, molten gold rapidly consumed by the unstoppable night.

I remind myself that December is the time of descent, that the darkness I eyed so warily in October is now my mellifluous friend. I’ve been here before, in so many seasons of my life — dissatisfied and cracked, heart-full, my eyes attuned to starlight. Living into December and the solstice and the winter stretching ahead means stepping into the world’s great vessel, full of so much.

Here’s an article about the world’s first seed bank forwarded to me by a reader.

Vermont Almanac.

December 5, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My copy of the fourth Vermont Almanac arrives in my mailbox. Remember real mail? I remember exchanging long letters with friends for years. Email is fine and dandy, but email has no smell. I open the book in my kitchen and breathe in the scent of ink and paper. I was fortunate to write and edit a bit for this issue.

These days, on my moonlit evening walks, living in Vermont is often on my mind. So much has happened in my own life and in this dear state: a summer of rain and wildfire smoke, a flood, beloved Montpelier drowned, a rise in violent crime. And yet, I’m tugged more deeply into this state I’ve called home nearly all my adult life. Reading this hefty book, I’m reminded, again, of how yankee ingenuity is so often yankee generosity, too. While our nation (and much of the globe) as a whole is navigating unsettled and often stormy waters, I’m heartened by Vermonters’ ruggedness, tenderness, and, so often, outright humor. Who could imagine a world without these fine things?

Hope is no mere aspiration that things will turn out well. Hope instead takes our hand, shines a light ahead, and pushes us onward into the messiness and uncertainties of life.
— Bryan Pfeiffer, Vermont Almanac, Volume IV

Vermont.

November 28, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

VTDigger‘s reporting about Burlington, Vermont.

Everything Is Made Of Labor

The inchworm’s trajectory:

pulse of impulse. The worm

is tender. It won’t live

long. Its green glows.

It found a place to go.

Arrange us with meaning,

the words plead. Find the thread

through the dark.

— Farnaz Fatemi

Two Bald Eagles.

November 25, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

After losing Yahtzee twice and then again to make a third, I’m in the passenger seat, heaing north for no particular reason at all. I’ve forgotten the library books I meant to return, and my bend of mind is that it makes no real difference at all.

Just out of town, I spy two bald eagles on the reservoir, hunched on the beginnings of winter’s ice, unmistakable with their dark bodies, the white of their heads. We drive around a bend, disappearing up the road that’s so narrow and tight there’s no good place to stop. By the time the road widens, I know the way back is impassable through thickets. And so we go on. Talking, talking.

The eagles are perhaps the best of holiday metaphors, utterly outside the realm of any camera lens. (Please, my family might beg, could you lay off the insistence of seeing the world in metaphors?)

This, then: two mighty raptors, the season’s early ice, the rising moon. The evening now is cold enough that the moon sprinkles frostily. I dump the compost in the bin and crunch back over the scattered snow, hungry for the embers in my stove.