Scrap of a love story: “…the only things you know…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Asters I planted in my garden, withstanding first frosts.

More indicative, perhaps, would be this:

Darkness lies deeply on each end of the day, cats rising hours before dawn to eat, myself to weld that fork and open my laptop. Afternoons wind down into early darkness. A friend and I walk through spits of rain, wander along Main Street, jammed with locals and leaf peepers, negotiate the two empty stools at a long bar, where she drinks beer and I drink club soda, eating the pip of lemons.

What does time matter? It might be six or ten, maybe nearing midnight. Night presses against the wide windows, as if hungry.

Later, walking home, the air touches my face with its scents of diesel and rotting leaves, woodsmoke. Every year, this pause. The need to gather coats, who needs new boots? and where are the mittens?, the price of snow tires, the aligning of ash buckets, the necessity of socks. All that long winter I was sick, I couldn’t navigate the porch steps and the ice by myself, darkness relegated to my windows. Only in those rushing nighttime drives to Dartmouth Hitchcock did I know the constellations arced overhead, Ursa Major, the gleaming Pleiades, the scrap of cold on my lips. How I missed this.

And a favorite Maggie Smith poem:

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs chasing prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.

“…hear your whole existence…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I hole up at my kitchen table to work, then go for a run in the late afternoon, then circle back to work. This work is a spreadsheet where I’m sewing and ripping out and stitching again numbers and more numbers. Numbers that signify things and actions. I use my same writing approach: ask questions (what does this mean?), be precise, question myself, care about what I’m doing.

Early October. I veer off my running path and wander along the seam of fallow field and riverbank. Geese wing south, honking. Inexorable.

I grew up in New Hampshire. Autumn, how apples on the trees smell both sweet and rotting, reminds me of childhood, when time meant nothing. Now, one of my oldest friends arrives for dinner, and she shares her retirement plan, a number not-so-far in the distance. She taught me the name of the flower closed gentian. I haven’t seen her in weeks, yet she sits down, and we pick up, talking. Inexorable, the motion of this material world.

In this dry spell, the river runs low, unkempt, crammed with human debris. Wild and human intersect: shorn cornfield, wild asters, bridges, the eagles I’ve spied here, all summer. I keep thinking not of those numbers and the mathematical patterns of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, but of a recent New Yorker essay about writing and illness, the flimsiness of words in the wake of wrenching pain. Words upon words. The signifier and the signified. I crouch down and tie my shoe. Overhead, all that sky. Underfoot, the immensity of earth. I’ve five things I think I should be doing. The geese slice through the afternoon, then vanish, leaving me in this dusty field. The slow spin of this planet.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

…. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

— Galway Kinnell

Intertwining: Beauty and Broken.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Three afternoons in a row, I run along the rail trail and pause at this ox bow in the river. The Lamoille is beginning to gather its water might here, a handful of miles from its northern headwaters at Horse Pond. The dry air smells of pine needles heating in the sunlight, a scent that reminds me of camping in childhood. My parents, rich with wanderlust, never hesitated to tie sleeping bags and tents on our old green Jeep’s luggage rack, pack a family duffel bag, and head out for a month or two of open air living. Those days, a dollar would get us a night in a national forest.

This run is a flat span, nothing remarkable in distance, a path through evergreens, along farms, across a few dirt roads. Late afternoon, I’ve seen no one here but little yellow butterflies, the crows of course gleaning in the cornfields, three swimming otters. The tourist at the trailhead with his watercolors and brush.

I’m a collection of shoulders, hip bones, ankles, a jostle of organs and tendons and my own unceasing thoughts, curious to see this river in the foliage that shifts and mutates each afternoon. Again, disease taught me how strength can fetter me, fetter you, more fiercely to this mortal world.

Returning, sweaty, I pause at the bridge where the man is painting. Each afternoon, we admire this season’s extraordinary beauty: gold and crimson. “Little patch of Vermont wild,” he says.

The night before, under a waning moon, a friend and I walked along this trail. The night folded around us. The starlight thin threads on the running river. How far will we go? we asked each other. Owls called. The night spread around us, infinite. Forever, I thought.

….. and thanks to another walking companion who introduced me to Lyanda Lynn Haupt:

“Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.”

Real v. Unreal, Doorway in Seasons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Evening, I visit with a friend on her porch. I’ve forced myself from the couch, leaving behind a Carl Hoffman book. My friend talk about little things—knitting mittens, a curry recipe—and the submerged currents that drive our lives—poetry and sex and a vision to transform my side yard into perennials. The daylight dwindles. Today, foliage colors hum at their radiant best, and I say goodbye, gather my hat, and head out on a walk into the twilight. That afternoon, I’d stopped along the Rail Trail to run. A man had parked a long RV in the otherwise empty lot, watercolors and an easel propped on the granite block wall. When I returned, gasping and sweaty, we talked for a bit. I just want to be here, he says, outside. Which mirrors my own sentiment.

There’s no one else out this night, but two boys on bicycles, racing and shouting, crossing the nearly empty road.

Twice, today, I’ve had that otherworldly sense of déjà-vu. While listening to this stranger with his watercoloring and my friend with her library book in her lap, I’m also in a consultation room and the oncologist tells me the lymphoma has returned. I understand the seriousness in his voice; we’ve laughed about many other things, but there’s no laughing now. In this strange state, I leap up and stand in the doorway, one foot in the room, one in the halfway. Real, or not?

For years, I’ve endeavored to hone my discipline, to keep writing, keep working, read, walk, pay attention, listen to the story around you, for goodness sake, but the physical pain of cancer forced me to be here now, in ways I didn’t want. Nonetheless. And that’s one enormous nonetheless.

I loop around the village and return up my short steep road in the darkness. I’ve been on that threshold for years, half in, half out, always running for the woods and the trails along the river, the mountain path, gathering little scraps of conversations and friendships into my pockets, never trusting their radiance, like this foliage, won’t fade. Cancer, of course, as disease will, rendered running impossible. Across that lawn where I intend to sow a wider garden, a fox streaks, shadowy in the night. For a few moments, I stand in the surprisingly warm end-of-September night, breathing in the fragrance of fallen apples, juice sweetening the earth.

And that Hoffman book about the Asmat? The shifting realm of what’s real and what’s not? Unlearn the questions.

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment…”
― Carl Hoffman

Wild Apples: Details of Living.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The red of my friend’s daughter’s hair matches this autumn—sunshot red—remarkable. Walking along a dirt road flanked by immense maples, abundant with purple asters, the child races forward, drags behind, curious as heck about the world as she gathers stones from the road and wonders if we might follow this inviting path in the woods. Where does it go?

She’s curious, too, about me and what I might say. My dog loves to bite. (The dog does not.) She holds out her hand to illustrate that it looks like mine. Walking, talking with my friend who’s doing her own fascinating unique adult things, a line from Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air returns to me. Holed up in my hand-me-down chair from another friend, nearly incoherent with fatigue by the working week’s end, I’ve just reread this little gem. “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

In ways, the book is a meditation on that Buddhist proverb, for advice post-enlightenment: “Chop wood, carry water.”

One result of what appears to be a permanent stamp of intermittent fatigue (not a sleepiness alleviated by a nap) is a double-edged parsimony and generosity. I’ve refining a few simple sentences in email and meetings—that’s all I have for this—but I also often ignore the hours; I lose track of time in ways I never allowed myself before.

My friend climbs an apple tree and shakes the fruit loose. Her daughter considers an apple seriously. The tree was planted years ago and has now gone wild, unpruned, its branches an immense tree bouquet. The apple’s skin is crimson, tart, the flesh sweet. The child rubs her thumb over a bump in the skin and then bites into the apple. She eats gleefully.

If I timestamped this, I’d note, somewhere in Vermont, late September, gnawed apple cores tossed back into the wild.

Whatever Happens…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Immersed in a long span of writing and work, I’m nudged into driving on a rain-greasy dirt road, defrost working against the mist on my windshield. Rural Vermont. Wind throws gold leaves over the road.

The days shorten, summer’s radiance cooled. I have numerous irritating habits, but I’m a solidly reliable designated driver—the woman at the bar eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and drinking a bubbly peach kombucha. Mostly like to say, “Have another Dark ‘n’ Stormy.” It’s a slow afternoon, and the bartender and one Fat Tire-drinking soul at the bar’s end lean into our conversation. We laugh at that ageless conundrum of woman-and-men, of desire and sex and unspoken and unmastered rules, for whatever these may be, or what they may be worth.

I laugh until my jaw bones ache. It’s a kind of antidote to a teasing conversation I had recently, shot through with the meanness of sarcasm, that afterwards made me, ashamed, apologize. Aren’t our days short enough? In this warm space, a companion offers me her aioli, which I eat. We gently cheer on a friend as she follows her heart’s path. Home again, I take a long walk through the village and into the woods. These days are discrete things, each its own marvel shot through with toasted sandwiches, the creeping in of Winter. Each day touches the next, an Impressionist painting, Autumn in Vermont, turn of the clock again.

Prayer 

Whatever happens. Whatever  
what is is is what 
I want. Only that. But that. ~ Galway Kinnell