writing

What’s Possible

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter mishears that Vermont’s governor extended the Stay Home, Stay Safe order to May 31, so when I read the order is actually May 15, the extension doesn’t look so bad. In the middle of March, that date would have appeared impossible.

What’s impossible and what’s not has changed enormously in the past few weeks.

In our little world, we walk and we talk. We walk alone. We walk together. The world as we know it might possibly be crumbling around us — 30% unemployment in our state that a month ago had the second lowest in the nation, a Main Street shuttered closed, people I’ve known for years suddenly foreign in masks — but the possible continues.

Every morning — snow or not — birdsong strengthens.

My daughters and I walk out to the ruins of the town pest house, built a hundred years ago in fear of smallpox. There, geese honk clamorously on the lake. From a white pine, two large birds swoop out from the highest branches. My youngest says simply, “Eagles.”

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Famous”

 

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Where We Are

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

One week into April, golden coltsfoot flowers — dime-sized — push up through roadside gravel. Every day and then again in the evening, we walk and explore, searching for frog eggs, for ribbons of green shoots pushing up through the forest floor.

The isolation is hardest on my teenager, who gets up every morning, soldiers away at her schoolwork, goes for a long run.

Implicitly, she understands. There’s no attempt to discuss the end of isolation, of the emptied-out town, of her abandoned high school. In these sunny, radiantly spring days, we progress.

Isolation pulled us down — almost immediately — to what matters, and, really, nothing else. Each day, accomplish some work. Share a meal. Pet our cats. Knit a few rows.

Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

— Philip Booth, “First Lesson”

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Sacred Space

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I repaired the vacuum cleaner. That’s something.

On the kitchen floor with a screwdriver and a spew of dirt, cat hair, and balsam needles from our last Christmas tree, I listened to my daughters washing the dishes and talking about little things — a song, a work schedule, a high school teacher.

It’s holy, I thought, this time is: all of this, every bit, a rare and holy time — even the hard and worrisome parts — so, so many of them. No matter what happens, though, we’ll always have this time as a family, the three of us, the texting and calling with my brother, the phone calls and emails with family. In an odd way, it’s as though my daughters are little, little again, and we’re back in isolated rural Vermont.

We now live in a village. My oldest daughter is all grown up, shouldering her weight of our world, and more. But, like darn near everyone else I know, this Stay Home, Stay Safe mandate has slowed our life down immeasurably. No flying out the door in the morning. No when are we meeting up for dinner?

So while it’s here, with its scary gravity, I’m reminded so often these days that the holiness of our days is both the dirt on my kitchen floor and my daughters’ laughter. Who knows where we’ll be next week — heck, who knows what news the governor will share tomorrow, or today — so this, now, this.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future.

— Alan Watts

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Yes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the grocery store checkout line — six feet at least apart from everyone — the man in front of me starts in on a rant about Boeing and the proposed bailout. I set down the gallon vinegar and my bag of purchases I’m sure our family utterly needs in a pandemic, like masa harina, and assure the stranger I’m with him.

In this utterly strange world — far apart but suddenly socially unleashed — I ask him question after question. A Vietnam Vet, he and his wife are sewing masks for medical workers. He raises a cardboard box of wire ties the grocery store donated to aid their efforts.

I don’t know if those masks will impede the virus or not. I’ll probably never see this stranger again, who lifted the box just before he left, while I cheered him on and thanked him.

Yes, it snowed nine inches in Vermont. Yes, we’re under a Stay Home order, the governor’s distinctively less-alarmist version of shelter-in-place with your arms over your head. Yes, the governor’s on the radio every day, assuring Vermonters we will endure. And, yes, this, too, will pass.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

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Home: Wanderlust On Hold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Like I hope everyone else — I hope — we’re holing up for the long haul in our house, figuring out our world day by day, in utter suspension of any “normalizing” of life. What’s normalcy again? Something we’ll never return to — or so I imagine at this point.

In the evenings — some balmy like last night, or others spring-raw and wet — we go for walks. The open-ended time reminds me of being a young mother again. Days and nights with young children had frustrations and challenges, sure, but also the deep pleasures of those endless walks and wanders I took with my daughters, learning the names of wildflowers, splashing through streams.

When I pick up beef for our freezer from a friend’s farm, he stands on his deck while I’m at a distance. In a wind so cold I begin shivering, we talk and talk. He asks about my daughters — he always does — and I tell him how my older daughter had considered moving out this summer, but she’s offered to stay home now, for whatever the long haul might be, pooling our resources.

She’s smart, he says. Now’s the time for unity.

When I leave, driving carefully around his flock of snow-white geese and slowly along the mud-rutted back road, I turn off VPR in my little Toyota. There’s never any returning full circle in this life, never getting back to where you once were. But we’re still here, our little family, sometimes irritable at each other, sometimes joyous and laughing. It’s different world, an American dream utterly broken that my daughters will redefine for themselves.

And for these days, I hope wherever each of you are, you’re settled into your own version of social isolation, with the sky’s beauty around you.

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Hardwick, Vermont

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Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

These days I’ve discovered I’m phenomenally grateful for the state library listserv. An email sent with the subject line What’s happening in your town? opened a flurry of communication.

Librarians, like so many people, have an innate desire to please. Want a book? We’ll get it. Have a problem? We’ll solve it.

Innumerable emails have debated the merits of closing libraries, first, then of leaving books out. No one seems concerned about theft or loss. The concern is, obviously, disease. How can you leave free books on the library’s porch and not expect a few loyal (and likely elderly) patrons to shuffle through those? The library is a place of congregation and chat. How do we suddenly shut that down? Close our doors and ask you not to come? And yet, we are.  I read:

Our town library has been closed to the public for two days. Staff is now being sent home to ride out the storm.

Be well and we’ll see you soon.

We’ll leave the wi-fi on for you.
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Last night, walking in the dark around empty Hardwick, we wandered by the melting ice rink. Hardwick, VT, Day 4