Bear, darker than midnight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m walking up a fourth-class road when I spy a black shape moving along the upper end of the nearby hayfield. Vermont divides its roads into categories, from the interstates to dirt roads to the little-used former farm or forest roads that are snowed-cover in winter, mud-rutted in spring. I stand beside a wild apple tree, the blue view of the Worcester Mountains over my shoulder, and admire this bear, darker than midnight against the field’s glossy emerald. When green kindles in Vermont spring, it flourishes.

This place I’ve never walked, although I’ve seen maps and heard stories. The road treks uphill through the forest and dips down where Caspian Lake gleams, realm of summer visitors, but for the time, still the territory of the locals.

I find what I’m seeking and also what I’m not: the labor-dense stone walls whose once-upon-a-time fields are gone to forest, moss-covered cellar holes, twisted rusty remains of farm equipment. Peepers chorus. An old farmhouse with an enormous veranda on a hill must have once had a royal view of the lake, and endured bitter winter winds. Someone has tried to cut the wild reclamation from the house and mostly failed.

In the sunlight, I linger, wondering who lived here, their stories silent. The two-story house has large dormers and many windows; it’s not a fly-by-night, tossed-up structure. On my way home, I pause where I saw the bear, searching, but of course the bear has moved on. Three ducks fly low over my head. The earth exhales its sweetness of thawing mud, the turning-over of last autumn’s leaves, this summer’s great promise.

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” — Jack London

Tick-Tock, Cooper’s Hawk.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At the local general store, I buy an analog clock for twelve dollars, find a single AA battery in my desk drawer, and, tick tock, done. The clock is the kind my parents always had in their kitchen, pre-digital craze, where you’d watch the minute hands while, say, boiling an egg.

The clock reminds me of those countless hours in a hospital bed, pondering not a baking apple pie but the length of a minute. How long that minute hand needed to click around a circle.

Late Saturday afternoon, a friend and I walk through the woods towards Stannard Pond, in search of ramps and something else more elusive, lung-fulls of serenity, perhaps, in this forest where the autumn sunlight falls down, the branches unleaved in April, the cedars silvery. We find patches of those wild leeks, carpets of trout lily leaves, two spring beauties that have not yet opened. My friend spies these; I crouched and gently cup one folded blossom in my hand, gentle with its thread of a stalk. Soon, the forest floors will be covered with these gems. For now, I contemplate this white-and-pink loveliness, wrapped in emerald.

Driving down that mountain’s back road, I spy a Cooper’s hawk on a wire. This steep road was ravaged by flood a few years back, and folks are rebuilding, small boxes of dwellings without siding. Persistent. In my bones, I’m both worn and enlivened, the road dust and sunlight billowing in through the open car windows. Tick-tock, the slowness of a moment.

“Things take the time they take.” ~ Mary Oliver

“In fear of death we lose out in life.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Yesterday, an acquaintance I’ve known for years and who I like and admire, asked me how I am, and then remarked calmly, I don’t think you ever get out of stage 4 cancer. He’s a man of clear mind who’s now into his tenth decade in this life, and his words were not unkind and not unfeeling: the reverse, I reckon.

But there are things in our lives we never leave. My mother, at the end of her long life, returned to her childhood. My siblings and I knew little about her childhood. We never knew her father who died a few months after I was born. As she approached her death, she returned to his memory, trying to unknot whatever painfulness she had held her whole life.

How easy to slip down these holes of despair. But the rope of the past is multi-stranded. My mother both loved and hated my sauciness, which surely originated from her. In my garden, still frost-cloaked each April morning, I planted Russian sage last July when I was healing slowly, day by each day, from the brutality of surgery and cancer. Will these long-stemmed beauties return this year? Will the woodchucks devour the sunflowers? Will the roses bloom profusely and claw my fingertips with their thorns? My little satchel of possibilities.

In fear of death we lose out in life. We stuff an owl with arsenic and leave it totally
perfectly not alive in the study, like something coveted privately by Calypso, like the
greatest line ever written, embalmed with iron, staring down at us from the filing
cabinet, never read aloud. What makes us despair is the impermanence of beauty. — Bianca Stone

Hell-bent robins.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I arrive home from the local arts center, get out of my car, and a robin nearly flies into my head. Winged creatures are swooping from the apple trees to the hedge of lilacs that is just beginning to bud. My god, what a lovely day.

In my bag, I have an empty pint jar of water I’ve been drinking, and a ball of purple linen I’m knitting into a summer shift, and the books of the two authors whose reading I just attended — Helen Whybrow of The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding’s translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. I have a new book, too, a collection of stories by a Turkish author I’ve never read. Sitting with my book world friend, her publisher friend hands me a book, too. The afternoon and evening has gone this joyous way, like that hell-bent robin — strangers and friends and people I haven’t seen in ages — exuberant about literature and art and the unstoppable profusion of spring.

I like this art center so much I imagine curling up on a cushiony bench and sleeping beside the wide windows, the starlight on my face. An acquaintance I met at a Vermont Studio Center residency works here, too, and we plot some amusing possibilities. We’re beside the table heaped in lush mounds of delicacies, and I graze on stuffed mushrooms and empanadas and fresh tomatoes. I wrap lemon squares in napkins and hold these in my hands away from my books and knitting.

Outside on the stone patio, the wind is lifting over the meadow, the sun sinking and the cold creeping in. All around me looms that chilly darkness, the nearness of sunset, the hole in the night where dawn seems impossible. So much of my life I’ve teased and poked at this, and, conversely, pushed the vast cold away — through distraction and once-upon-a-time through drinking and work. Now, as the twilight drains away and night stakes in for its duration, I wander among the yet leafless apple trees, the garden with its green garlic nubs, drinking tea and listening to the birds settle down to sleep. My god, the myriad lessons of cancer. Note this, too: clench joy and fear in the same fist. See what happens.

Kitchen renovation paint considerations….

Journey of many layers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

One of the best journeys of my life was when I was 19 and had long hair I rarely brushed. My then-boyfriend and I were hitchhiking (don’t hitchhike any more, folks) at the Greenfield, MA, I-91 exit, heading north, home to Brattleboro. A man driving an old convertible Cadillac, a great white Moby Dick beast, picked us up. In my memory, he’s smoking a cigar and grinning. While he and the BF sat in the front, shooting the shit, I sprawled in a backseat so enormous it could host a family. I surely wore no seatbelt. My god, on that July evening, I felt like I was flying.

This week, a grad school friend of mine invited me to spend a morning as a visiting writer with his students. All the layers of this trip—the journey south, the first solo I’ve taken since the cancer (my girls urging me to drive carefully, have fun), the stop in Brattleboro where I’d lived in my twenties and was happy, the visit with my dear friend and his wife who I immediately feel is a kindred soul, in their inviting house with a backyard vernal pool and singing peepers, a night of rainstorms, the morning’s magnolia blossoms gleaming pearly—all these layers folded into these writing students who arrived with questions and notebooks, hungry. In this breaking world, what a joy to swim for a bit with others in the passionate stream of loving literature, in all its myriad forms.

On my way home, I stop at a café near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. By then, early afternoon, I’m worn down. The café was a favorite of my daughters, in all those months I was treated. Last June, when I was finally well enough to join them, no longer sequestered in a hospital room, they bought me a plain croissant, and I ate a few bites of its inner softness. This afternoon, on the sunny patio, I devour pickled vegetables, soaked in vinegar—something I could not eat last year. Delicious.

April, mud season, it’s just me and a young woman with an infant cradled on her chest. I read for a bit, and then as I’m gathering my things, a car pulls up with two young women. They run to the woman and the baby, laughing and shouting, gleeful.

Midafternoon, I have a ways to drive yet, along the wide river and over the mountains. I take a small walk first through the pine forest behind the café. Warm sunlight filters through the canopy. No ephemerals emerge yet, but soon, soon, as the trout lily leaves spread over the earth. My mother would have noticed the young mother, her sleeping babe, the joyous friends meeting this new life. Such satisfaction she would have taken. One more element folded into this journey. Then I head north.

…. And for folks around me, Helen Whybrow will read from her fantastic The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding from her translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars at Greensboro’s Highland Center for the Arts, Saturday, followed an artists’ reception for a stunning group exhibition celebrating Vermont’s pastoral life. I was lucky to write about this for Seven Days.

I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. ~ Helen Whybrow

The die is cast?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Writing notes for a reading for Call It Madness, I scrawl in my notebook that this novel is jammed with secrets. Avah Lavoie, protagonist, stashes secrets of theft of longing, and she’s surrounded by secret-keepers, too. Early in the novel, I offer readers two clues. These questions underpin my life, too. No surprise.

The first that’s slipped into the narrative is the story of beavers in New England, how these creatures and their laborious dams once flooded New England, rendering that birch bark canoe a viable form of transportation. When the craze for beaver hats set in, the beavers were trapped nearly to extinction, drying up the land. The story of the past shapes the terrain where we live and how we see the world.

The second is Caesar’s line Alea iacta est — the die is cast. The machination of fate. It’s a question that’s arced through my life since I was a teenager, immersed in Russian novels. Now, from my Vermont house, in the tender dawn, pearly crescent moon hanging low in the horizon, the stars snuffing out as light grows, the robins striking up their day’s singing, this line returns to me. Is fate sealed for this country where, by circumstance, I live, a madman as a leader, intent to wreck destruction and pain, war crimes? Around me, the questions reverberates through everyone: how to live?

Sunday morning, the earth after this fierce winter softening, the daffodils pushing up through black earth, the delicate snowdrops pearly, persistent, the strength of these slender stalks a strain of secret, too.

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy