writing

Squall Survival

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving home in the crepuscular light, as I approach Woodbury Lake the sky shimmers violet, dusk refracted through snow squalls. I’m mesmerized by the voices on Vermont Public Radio — I cede two minutes to the gentlewoman from Wherever State — and I don’t turn off the radio as I head into the squalls.

Almost immediately I can’t see the edges of the road. I’m not even sure where to turn off, so I keep driving. Somewhere ahead, in that squall or on the other side of it, my daughters are waiting. As I drive, I keep hoping they’re not driving, that they’re safely home, baking muffins and playing music.

It’s not just me driving slowly — we’re all creeping along. The UPS truck has marooned in a driveway, flashers blinking. That last steep, curving downhill, through the Woodbury gulf, seems to take forever. At the end, there’s just snow, snow, snow. At home, my daughters have the lights on, the Christmas tree sparkling through the window. I gather my backpack and head up the path.

Whirling snow and darkness: that winter mystery.

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

“The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass

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Geographical Balm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

We moved two-and-a-half years ago, and only now does our house seem to feel worn in as a house should — both with memories and simply day-to-day use. While I’m a huge fan of tradition — like camping on the same lake every summer — this holiday I had an incredible need to mix it up, do something different. There’s three of us now when there were once four.

We left, just for a night, with a single cat feeding required, and didn’t even go far — a little more east in Vermont where there was even less snow. I was looking for a break from work and school, for talking together in the same darkened room before sleeping, for exploring a different place with no looming deadline of time.

Interestingly, the unexpected part was the pleasure in returning home, to our warm house and our cats and the patterns we’d left behind. That, perhaps, was worth the trip alone.

… writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing — of possessing — thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.

— Emilie Pine, Notes to Self

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Wear Your Sunscreen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

As if to compensate for last winter’s length, June turns ineffably beautiful. Last night, a downfall again: this morning, our world sparkles, the greenery drinking up rain and growing — every day. Every day, the mock orange beneath my bedroom window unfurls more leaves. The skinny pears in the front yard are fattening their branches lushly.

From New Hampshire, my 14-year-old writes me, I went on a 10 mile hike today. Today, with family, she and her sister are kayaking in a river. I can’t help but remind her wear your lifejacket, use sunscreen. After work, I swim in the evenings with my friends, whose children — paired up in ages and friendship with mine — are also elsewhere. Down the pond, a loon fishes. We make up a silly story about a goose and goslings we see, and the other goose who makes its way along, later….

This June is not a variation of Ram Dass’ Be Here Now. The past is always with me, clinging, and the future unfolds around me, every day, mine and the lives of others’ around me. But there’s this: from where we live we can see deep into the valley where our town, Hardwick, lies. We can see storms mixing in the distance, the white sheets of rain before water dampens my garden. We’re surrounded by the mysteries of the world — the swifts, the pollinators, the raccoon determined to eat our chickens. We’re here, at this moment, taking it in.

And… my daughter’s photo (much to her happiness) heads up my recent Postcard from Hardwick in State 14.

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Car, Deer, Collision: Tuesday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Driving to work, listening intently to an NPR piece about the capture of Saddam Hussain, I hit a young deer. As these things often go, in a kind of slow motion I see the deer leap the guard rail and then stumble.

Braking, I pull over on the graveled shoulder, and the tailgating pickup behind me roars by, in some godawful hurry. While the traffic continues to rush by, I stand there in my sandals, a breeze blowing my thin sundress above my knees. I haven’t brushed my just-washed hair yet, either, so I’m pulling long hair from my eyes and mouth as I walk back along the road. But the deer is gone — whether off to die in the lush and flanking forest or free, maybe even okay, I don’t know.

Gently, rain begins to fall, just a few drops on my face and hands, maybe a harbinger of an all-day soaking rain, or maybe that’s all, simply these few drops on the roadside, while I’m wondering what’s happening in that forest.

If we are lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin.

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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Notes from kids beneath the library backdrop….

Crisis of Faith

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Exiting the interstate at midnight last night in rainy St. Johnsbury, it’s just me in my little silver car, the strange combination of lonely hearts’ radio and tinny country music, and that profound country Vermont darkness. That stretch of interstate rims the outer edge of utter nowhere.

Year ago, returning from a trip to my sister and her husband and their hospital-bound infant, my brother and I had trouble finding his snow-covered truck in the New Hampshire airport parking lot. Maybe it was midnight already, maybe not, but we certainly passed it, driving north on the interstate, where we stopped at a gas station and bought (and drank) terrible coffee. We were so tired we laughed until we were too tired to laugh, and then too tired to talk. Finally, at his house, his wife sat on the stairs and offered us take-out Indian food. I lay on the kitchen floor. Possibly, I even slept there, in a pile of boots and cat food bowls.

The next day, my friend and her 4-year-old drove over the White Mountains in a snowstorm to bring me home to my family — and my four-year-old. At the top of the Crawford pass, I got out of the pickup and brushed snow from the windshield and stood for a moment in all that white, not sure entirely where the unplowed road lay.

But I got back in. Her son waited patiently in his carseat between us. She kept driving. What else could we do? We couldn’t stay there. And, that, perhaps, is all I ever needed to learn about faith.

Miraculously, the snow lessened as we neared the Connecticut River, heading home.

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