writing

Psalm for the Ordinary.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Ordinary Life, by Barbara Crooker

This was a day when nothing happened, 
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves. 
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor. 
And lunch blended into naptime, 
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards, 
one of those jobs that never gets done, 
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea, 
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch’s little scraps. 
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow, 
preened and flashed his jeweled head. 
Now a chicken roasts in the pan, 
and the children return, 
the murmur of their stories dappling the air. 
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb. 
We listen together for your wheels on the drive. 
Grace before bread. 
And at the table, actual conversation, 
no bickering or pokes. 
And then, the drift into homework. 
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa’s ridges and hills. 
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss, 
tasting of coffee and cream. 
The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton, 
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white, 
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter, 
the hard cold knuckle of the year, 
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift, 
and the stars turn on, 
order themselves
into the winter night.

Breezy Walk. A Stranger.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

March in February — the fields are beginning to open, at least for this afternoon, for this particular moment. I park by the side of the road and take the long way where I’m going, by foot, my hat off, jacket unzipped, letting the wind pull at my hair.

I’m snapping a photo of a field and the sky when a car pulls over at the side of the road. There’s no one else around, and for a moment I wonder if he’s a landowner, angry or just curious what I’m doing. Wednesday afternoon, and no one is around.

He gets out of his mud-splattered white car, laughing, and asks for directions back to a paved road. He was visiting someone and took “the other way.” I laugh back, and we joke about where the other way in Vermont leads someone.

We stand there, joking, the dirt road both melting and already beginning to freeze again as we speak.

When he gets in his car and disappears down the road, I stand for a moment longer. I’d wanted nothing more than wind in my eyes, sunlight on my face. Fait accompli. Then it’s back to civilization for me, too.

“I feel my life start up again, 

like a cutting when it grows

the first pale and tentative

root hair in a glass of water.” 

— Jane Kenyon

Somewhere in February. Dirt Road Land.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments
Kents Corners, Calais, Vermont

Every so often, a friend and I make plans to meet at a rural crossroads, at a brick inn that was once a stagecoach stop. I imagine in those days the crossroads was populated with chickens and horses, with people coming and going, not Priuses, but in wagons and on foot. My friend and I began this habit in the summer of 2020, and so the inn has been shuttered to the public all this time.

Walking, we pass a few other Sunday walkers bundled in coats and hats. But few people are out, and there’s scant traffic. In contrast, our conversation is packed — about raising kids and planning spring gardens, about relationships, about navigating the working world as a female in a patriarchy (why are these conversations still necessary, anyway??)

The thing about Vermont in midwinter is the stillness and what breaks that quiet. Icicles drip, freeze, and then thaw and drip again. Birds appear at our feeder in increasing numbers, then whisk away again. A rouge wind blows in a squall, soon chased away by the emerging sun.

Pandemic notwithstanding, robins return to our crabapple trees.

“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.” 

— Alan Watts

(And many thanks for Erika Nichols-Frazer for a review of Unstitched in the Valley Reporter.)

Bald Eagles. Vermont State House.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Montpelier, Vermont

Sunday, we bought coffee and pastries in Montpelier (for a change of venue, a change of scene) and ate outside in the cold. There’s a pandemic, after all, and bakeries open on the weekend had closed their indoor seating anyway. None of us complained or even remarked — something I silently noted.

On this cold morning hardly anyone was walking. We passed a man sitting beside an apartment building, flossing his teeth. My youngest pointed out a bird gliding high above the state house. “Bald eagle.”

Bald eagles have recently been removed from the endangered species list in Vermont. I noted again how eagles are now part of our life. Last summer, in particular, we saw eagles frequently. I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw either an eagle or a loon my entire childhood. Now loons (also removed from the endangered species list) have always been part of my daughter’s life.

We walked up the street and then returned. The eagle was still silently gliding on its immense wingspan.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River…

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this…

~ Joy Harjo

Overheard.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Far enough after twilight that the darkness has set in for the night, I walk up to the library to leave my returns in the book drop. The bitter cold has snapped, worn down by the day’s warmth. Cold in February will return — it nearly always does — but the tide of winter has pushed over.

Spring in Vermont is a long ways off. This is a rude truth, and it’s also true that this is the time of year I begin hungering for green. I take my time, walking back through a neighborhood. Hardly anyone is out, save for a man standing on his back step, drinking a beer and smoking. The smoke curls upward in the lamplight just above his head. Down the street, a small child comes running at me, his or her head hung down a little, tired perhaps. The child wears a knit cap and a dark coat and hurries along, keeping a wide berth from him. At the house with the man and the cigarette, the child leaps the snowbank. The man says, “Hey now, been waiting.”

The boy rambles about “sledding gone soft.” As I turn the corner, the man’s deep voice follows me. He says kindly, “Wait a week, kiddo.”

Good advice for kiddo, I think. I follow the steep street up to my house, where the cat is waiting in the windowsill for me, and the daughter is solving math equations.

Collectively, I think, we’re all in a waiting period.