A great fountain of white gossamer…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

From New Mexico with its sheer light, I descend back to April Vermont, where miniature daffodils push their yellow faces through last year’s leaf mulch. How well I know Vermont spring — the sunny breezy days where the wind tosses the lake and the water is bluer than blue, the footpath sprinkled with the gold gems of coltsfoot.

After the desert’s sweeping beauty, Vermont is a mossy box, a jumble of the paint peeling from the back of my house, the bin of empty cat food cans in barn (quit kicking that dump run into the next week), the niggling college financial aid forms yet to be corrected, the working hours I string together, making some decent use of my time.

April is a month that goes on too long, lingers brown in northern Vermont, with its tease of green trout lily leaves, the flourish of wild ramps. Paradoxically, April has always seemed the most hopeful of seasons, too, the nesting songbirds sweeping out winter’s silence.

In the evening, my daughter and I walk her dogs across the cemetery to the ballfields. Off leash, the three of them run while I stand in the field’s center, listening to the robins’ chatter in the white pines. Back at my house, we stand by the woodpile, talking about little things — who will take the leftover garlic bread, did the butterfly bush survive the winter. The rising moon illuminates the clouding-up horizon with a glowing shaft. We linger, watching the full moon sail confidently, unstoppably, over the horizon. Later, I linger on the back porch, sipping tea. The moon has removed the lid of shoebox Vermont. The air’s sweet with wet soil.

Springtime, 1998

Our upstate April
        is cold and gray.
                 Nevertheless

yesterday I found
        up in our old
                 woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
        standing around
                 and blooming

wisely. And by the edge
        of the Bo’s road at the far
                 side of the meadow

where the limestone ledge
        crops out our wild
                 cherry trees

were making a great fountain
        of white gossamer.
                 Joe-Anne went

and snipped a few small boughs
        and made a beautiful
                 arrangement

in the kitchen window
        where I sit now
                 surrounded.

— Hayden Carruth

Strangers’ sweetness, flying United.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In a sleepwalking haze, I make my way from Albuquerque’s sunny airport to slushy gray Denver (winter, again?!) On the cross-country flight, I make friends with my seatmate, tossing away the nap option for our conversation about camping at Zion National Park. We part ways at Dulles. Walking through the airport’s chaos, I remember that Zion trip in our green Jeep when I was a girl. We tubed down the river all day. I smacked my hip on a rock. That evening, we devoured sausages roasted over a fire, admired the moonrise. Such happy hours.

Later, descending into Burlington, Vermont, the plane cuts down through the brilliant clouds, the underbelly smoky gray, furled with nascent rain or snow. A crimson blush scrims over the mountains, the merest beginnings of tree buds. Dusk hovers. I think of my daughter waiting for me in the nearly empty airport, all grown up now, car keys in her hand. I’m hungry for whatever food she’s brought and, mostly, for the conversation on our drive home.

As the plane brakes on the tarmac, the young couple with the baby beside me remarks that this was their baby’s first plane trip. Around me, the passengers cheer, “What a baby!” but quietly, so the little one isn’t frightened. The parents glow with happiness, the baby coos contentedly, the crowd keeps on, “Great baby! Great baby!” Such a long journey this has been and will be; so happy I am to hear this joyful mantra.

…. Last, a little more about my mother.

What twenty bucks brings.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My father asked me to include the whole W.H. Auden poem I quoted in the previous post. The poem reads:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West, 
My working week and my Sunday rest, 
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; 
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; 
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; 
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; 
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I’ll add this, too: a stunning blossom year for the plum tree my parents planted years ago. They bought the tree for twenty bucks. Would a fruit tree take in the desert, my mother wondered. My father reasoned, Heck, it’s twenty bucks. The tree will grow, or not. The tree thrived.

Stop all the clocks.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments
Santa Fe, many years ago

In this space, I’ve stepped between the mossy threads of my own life. For many years, my mother who lived far from me kept up with my life through my blog. I’d started writing stonysoilvermont the summer my then-husband and I split up. I was about to publish my first book. Although I’ve considered quitting, I’ve kept on, the disciplined scraps of this writing feeding into my creative life.

So it seems right to acknowledge my mother’s passing over into the next realm. A woman of nearly indomitable strength, she was ill for many years and surmounted multiple surgeries and illnesses. But none of us are mortal. My mother, who was a nurse for decades, knew this more keenly than most people. When I was a girl, she returned every morning at breakfast with stories from the hospital, some funny and some heart-wrenching — a child with leukemia, a cab driver shot point-blank in his head. One July morning, she carried home an orange kitten. We named him Oliver, and he lived a long full cat life.

Same, too, with my mother, a woman whose strength and passion shaped my own. In her later years, disease made her wander back and forth in time, into places where none of us could follow. My mother would have wanted us to grieve the end of her life, but not to fall dramatically on our knees. Raised a Lutheran, she was imminently practical. Nonetheless, I remember when I was 21, and my mother grieved her own mother. She stopped all the clocks.

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”

A little Madness in the Spring.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Post-eclipse, rain moves in, balmy tinged with cold. Rain will force spring’s green. Our lives spin on — of course, of course — but the eclipse and all its radiant glory trails us, the collective experience of the cosmos’ unflinching steadiness and how the heavenly bodies align, majestically moving in their infinite complexity. No stasis in this life.

Someone recently asserted to me the caliber of her character — I’m a good person — and the phrase lingers with me, far more a reflection of my wavering self than of the speaker. We’re so unlike the celestial bodies, our mortal bodies driven by gravity and time, but our actions dominated by our uniquely strange brew of our jumbled lives, passions, weaknesses.

The eclipse’s profound beauty for a few moments swept away the pettiness of our thin ideas, our nattering chatter about so much that, in reality, amounts to scant little. Perhaps the eclipse unified us not only by its luminescent beauty, but tugged out the finer strands of us, too.

For a day or two, Vermont was jammed with visitors from so many places. Vermont’s not unique with much that’s happened in recent history — floods and wildfire smoke, the pandemic, and division and division and division. My state also has some of the greatest privileges on the planet: absence of warfare, significant wealth. Let the eclipse bloom last long, carry us through a muddy spring and into summer, keep us questioning what our own goodness might mean, and how goodness transmutes into action.

Last, not least: my giddy joy of gold crocuses. Chionodoxa, AKA glory of the snow, scattered over muddy hillsides, last year’s dull lawns.

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown—

Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole Experiment of Green—
As if it were his own!

— Emily Dickinson