On the Road…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My twenties were years of road tripping, Vermont to Washington state, lots of New Mexico, sleeping in the back of our black diesel VW Rabbit, 55 mpg, our Rand McNally shedding pages. Thirties were babies and learning to garden, raising high the roof beams, forties the scrambling decade of parenting alone and keeping kids shod and fed. Fifties, kids are paddling their own lives, and yet we’re tight, tight; cancer survivorship schooled us rapidly in what’s dear and what’s so easily lost.

Among these decades, my own unbroken thread of writing. Road trip with a self-made atlas.

A beloved friend hops into my car. We lived on the same dirt road for years. I would phone and say, It’s sleeting. Come walk with me. She was always game. This late afternoon, I drive south, that too familiar journey of Route 15 and I-91, heading towards Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but I park in pretty Hanover, NH, where I’ve been invited to read from Call It Madness — a title that reflects my own life — madness, madness, everywhere — both the crazy-making of divorce and cancer but also my own fierceness for my dear ones, for literature and the roses blooming around my house and the precipice I tread between ebullience and the frigid teeth of despair.

The loveliest of evenings at Still North Books. My reading companion, Shasta Grant, is true and gifted, the bookstore staff warm, the audience curious and kind. My friend and I are the last to leave, save for the cheery folks folding the chairs and emptying our water cups. I drive north into the night. The sun dwindles into gold and pink. We talk about cars and money, kids of course, drinking and books and death.

She gives me her apple. I eat and drive. Thirty years into our friendship, as the darkness folds around us, I think, What a long way we have come. In my driveway, we linger, the car’s engine clicking as it cools, the fireflies flickering. How happy I am to begin my own hand-crafted book tour for Call It Madness. In my youth, those decades when I leaned so hard into my life I hardly brushed my hair, I believed my life would flatten, temper into quietness. Oh friends, the world’s depths are revealed as bottomless crevasses and immense peaks, largely unknowable. What’s knowable is the stickiness of that apple’s juice on my fingers, the darting fireflies, the answer I gave to a stranger’s question at the end of the Still North Books reading: “My real flaw was cowardice.” I’ve long ago abandoned the flimsiness of that forgiveness concept, for myself or others. Life propels onward, word by word, sunset to sunrise, companionship in all weather.

A few things…. I’ll be on Bon Mot on Central Vermont Radio, Sunday, June 21, 5 p.m. Call It Madness book launch Tuesday, June 30, 7 p.m., at the Jeudevine Memorial Library in Hardwick, Vermont, sponsored of course by the hometown and most stellar Galaxy Bookshop.

Survive, professor! That’s all you really have to do. Keep the grass from creeping into eh carrots, deal with the woodchuck stealing the apples, patch up the pipes! — Makenna Goodman

Multitudes.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A friend comes for cheese sandwiches and raspberries, and we walk through the hydrangeas and across the cemetery and downtown to the Galaxy Bookshop where Garret Keizer launches his new book. The evening is illuminated with sunlight. Keizer reads well, and at the end, my hands folded over my knitting in my lap, I feel how this room of friends and strangers leans together, yoked by the intensity and compassion of his words. He thanks the audience and says drive home carefully.

Over those sweet raspberries, we’d talked about the curious threads that knot through communities, the connections between people known in segments. Likewise, we comprehend this universe in all its radiance and brutality through a smudged lens. This week, in a nearby town, an unimaginable car crash.

Lingering at the bookstore’s door, two old friends and I muse about these strange political days. One friend ventures that collective celebrations, like the recent Knicks’ win, keep us buoyant. As a writer, I’ve always leaned into words, the shelter of creation, the force of imagination. Yet, there are realms where language no longer suffices. Nine years ago, we moved into this house. I opened the living room windows, and the perfume of roses washed through the rooms. Nine years? a friend asks. What does that feel like?

It feels like multitudes.

… Last, grateful for this nice write-up of Call It Madness in the Times Argus.

Always, the question, which way?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

For readers who haven’t lived in northern Vermont, here’s a keyhole view of June: heat and humidity move in, and the earth thrusts out into leaf and bloom. Overnight, the loosestrife blooms yellow, the chard gains an inch in leaf. The lilacs fade. The Siberian irises spread purple.

In the heat, listening to terrible news of the American Empire’s spread, I finish stacking next winter’s firewood. Sweaty and dirty, the cats and I admire my work, contemplating the frosty fall evenings. The cats, perhaps, are merely curious about my labor, or the next meal’s arrival, or perhaps a cat calculus I don’t imagine.

June, the songbirds serenade exquisitely. I mow the grass around the woodpile, the pink roses beginning to bloom, the brushy compass flowers that are now knee-high. Will the ancient mock orange leaf and bloom? Will the woodchuck devour the sunflower seedlings? Will I unclench my knotted heart and let myself fall in love, tumble into the next phase of whatever I may have in this lifetime?

Rain falls and the heat breaks as I finish mowing. I wander around, drinking a glass of water, the rain running through salt and chaff on my cheeks and biceps. 21 years ago, a friend labored to bring her baby into the world. I sat in her kitchen while our six-year-olds played under her front yard maples. Her mother-in-law made chicken soup that I ate while I nursed my own wee infant.

The world isn’t filled with ten thousand things. In the June afternoon’s rain, a rainbow elusive, math welds no teeth. A hopping robin in search of sustenance, unfolding hydrangea leaves, the bounce of a child’s basketball, the scent of sap bleeding from winter’s firewood.

For local folks…. I’ll be reading at Still North Books in Hanover, NH, Wednesday, June 17, 7 p.m. Yes — a lovely bookstore — and yes, a non-cancer visit to this lovely village.

Is not all the summer akin to a paradise? — Henry David Thoreau

On not splitting.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A number of years ago, I was eating lunch in a friend’s kitchen while the kids played in the yard or barn or spread out on the living room floor with some game involving shards of bark from firewood. Whatever the kids were doing.

A man I had just met was eating lunch, too. His wife was expecting her first baby, and he was eating his quesadilla nervously. My friend’s husband counseled him: You’re going to feel like splitting at some point during the labor, but whatever you do, don’t do that. Stick around.

My god, the work that goes into parenting. My oldest married her beloved last weekend. Life is so many things: long as an hourless day, short as an inhale. Changeable. I had expected joy. What I had not expected was profound contentment, like an afternoon of sunlight. There’s all those platitudes — of watching this daughter learn to run and walk, the years of mothering through all weather — but for this afternoon, our world paused. For a moment, just two families at a round table, raising drinking glasses, cheering life.

Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness

Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired

Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow…

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly

Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears

Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes

Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you

Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days — Jane Hirshfield

June Love.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

First copies of Call It Madness in the Galaxy Bookshop.

After my long trip to northern New Mexico — sand and yucca, family in all its myriadness, green chili, and the sweet juniper breath of the desert night — I lean into Vermont’s lush early summer. Mostly, I keep to myself, planting my garden before this morning’s warm rain, stacking wood piece by piece, savoring the forget-me-nots that have appeared this year beneath the dwarf apple tree that is no longer any small thing. These days are a living Impressionist painting, lilac-scented pastels. In the night, my bones worn satisfyingly with hours of labor in the sun, I lie on my weather-splintered picnic table, the frogs singing, the Milky Way a celestial arc. I am not a piece in this puzzle, but a strand in the tapestry.

“Go down through the garden, dig up the radishes! Root up everything! Eat grass! Look for corn! Look for oats! Run all over! Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place.” E. B. White

Visitors from the Animal Realm.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A yearling bear, black as country midnight, appears through the hostas and checks out my back porch. The bear and I appraise each other through the glass door. Then the bear slips over the porch into the raspberry canes and heads off. My little street, with not even a handful of houses, quickens in the texting world. I am not the only one awake this early.

Later, midday, on the Dartmouth College campus for a lit mag launch, I’m standing on a street corner, talking with a woman I’ve just met, and a deer walks by. It’s Hanover, a New Hampshire town, and students raise their phones to record. The deer runs across the road, its heels click-clicking on the pavement.

Early June, a heady time in northern New England, the lilacs as dense and profuse as I’ve ever seen these beauties. My neighbor and I walk along these fragrant blossoms, then head into town for the community meal where, in the noisy space, the group of old and new friends that I join put our heads near, the conversation rising and twirling with that spring ebullience.

As the evening cools but doesn’t cloud, my neighbor and I walk home and linger on her veranda. Hummingbirds sip at her feeders. I’ve been moving the remainder of this year’s firewood, readying to stack next year’s wood, and the weight of this work lies in my shoulders, exhausting and yet welcome. This moving of firewood may take me weeks. We talk about phlox and columbine, about sex and money and house painting. These days are long. I slip off my sandals and wander home in my bare feet.