Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost

“…living according to the rhythms of others…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My ex and I were remarkably unsuited for each other in many ways; in particular was his ability to live without plans. I—in what’s surely irritating, too—lean into rhythms and patterns. This long holiday weekend, I wake hours before dawn, busily tearing apart a manuscript draft and rearranging, stitching, adding, cutting, cutting, cutting…

These early autumn days are sunny, with real heat yet. Afternoons, I park at the rail trail, stretch, and run. In the parking lot, there’s always that SUV with a youngster who’s on a different economic path, and an assortment of Subarus and Volvos with bike racks. These runs are short, a few miles perhaps. Sometimes, I make the four-mile loop. Ending, I often leave the path for the pasture along the river, the Joe Pye weed and purple asters and goldenrod dense. The pollinators eat hungrily.

An orderly life depends on a tenor of privilege, a gift I didn’t have in those years of in-the-thick mothering. Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle wrote about “living according to the rhythms of others”—a line I’ve considered for years. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in the sway of family, gleaning writing time where I could. Now, just a few years into the children-are-adults phase of my life, my companions are sweet fat housecats but also the unremitting remains of cancer and treatment: the mighty beast of fatigue. I lean into it and push; the fatigue pushes back. As in any family, you make your agreements. You learn to get on.

Late afternoon, we build a fire and linger. Long past dark, we huddle around the flames, the cold nipping in. I tilt my head back. Overhead, stars appear between patches of clouds. From the trees, apples have already fallen into the long grass, sweetly rotting from the day’s heat. I’ve left the kitchen light glowing over the table spread with pages and my scrawled notes. Tomorrow’s labor.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

— Galway Kinnell

Good Soil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I read Wendell Berry for the first time the 20th century summer I lived in a tipi we set up in a wild blueberry field. The land was owned by the widow of the well-known ecologist Robert MacArthur. Nights, when it rained, I stowed the library books in the VW Rabbit we drove all over the country, often sleeping in the back, from Montana to Arkansas. Recently, from an upstairs closet, I pulled out a photo of myself, circa the 20th century summer before grad school, when I painted houses and drank Genny beer. My best friend had taken up with a schizophrenic who collected rocks, so many he eventually buried his mustard-yellow Toyota Corolla beneath a pile of rocks from fist-to-large-dog-sized. I’ve long ago lost track of these people. They went their way, and I was swimming along in the current of my life, so young I didn’t realize the rising waters. I was headed out on my own long journey across the country, returning years later to the sweet and cold soil of Vermont to sink my roots deep.

Wendell Berry, Gloria Steinem, Dolly Parton… in their own unique way, each exuded pragmatism and optimism, perhaps the best of American qualities. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America? Still ringing true….

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Tangled Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little rain falls when I’m done with work for the day, nearly seven in an evening filled with August’s sultriness. There’s no one in the electric department parking lot where I swap jeans for running shorts, and then head on the stony trail through the woods and down to the river.

August, the growing of weed and tended garden finished for this season. The apples are reddening. The blackberries that remain on the vine burst with juice, sweetness on the verge of rot.

I cross the river. Raindrops pebble its slow surface. I loop behind the old yellow barn that houses a warehouse of local cheese, then circle around the osprey nests where the Black River pools behind an old dam. My t-shirt is damp with sprinkles of rain and my sweat. Grateful I am to a friend who appeared with a glass cup of echinacea this week. In the spring, I’d mused that, a year out from cancer treatment, that was as far back as I would come. “Really?” she mused quietly. “You might question that.” Now here I am, running around the edges of this village, along this rain-kissed goldenrod.

Anne Sexton wrote about “the awful rowing towards God,” a poet I read in grad school, a woman crazed by not one simple cause. For so many years, I clenched my wooden oars, my rowboat with my children circling in eddies, plunged through rapids, in a journey breathcatching sometimes from fear and uncertainty, sometimes through the sheer awesomeness of the vaulting night sky, the companions of swimming dolphins.

Much as I chafe against a linear view of time, I see myself running around the brackish reservoir, then along the gentle slope back to my car and the mason jar of water I’ve left there to quench my thirst. I run with my whole story a whirlwind in my body and mind, known and unknown. Surely, as we rush headlong forwards, we’re always going backwards, too. And yet we row on, the work of this mortal life.

Oh, Anne Sexton, with her unhappy demise. Two years ago, I often ran along this path and discovered wild grapes down an embankment. The rain paused, I scramble through weeds. The grapes are there again this late summer. I gather these sweetly tart beauties in the hem of my t-shirt. Eating, I walk along the path, studying the soot-stained clouds. My friend with a new baby in a stroller appears around a bend. I offer this young mother a handful of grapes, and she spits seeds into the trailside milkweed. Sweaty from August and running, I bend down to admire the babe. Scuttling clouds are reflected in the child’s luminescent eyes, her smile quicksilver as a rainbow trout in a rushing mountain stream.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet…
This story ends with me still rowing. — Anne Sexton

Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton