Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Complex People.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I was on a Claire Dederer reading jag, stepping into her island home, soaking up her kids and her questions and her fierce writing. Witty, smart, edgy. Which led to me to the father of those children and his books. 

Bruce Barcott writes in The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw:

 “… a good portion of my life I believed that a law of benevolent action held sway in the world. This law maintained that if you did the right thing and worked hard, eventually things would work out; that the world generally tended towards fairness, decency, and wisdom. But of course the world doesn’t work that way. The people who learn that lesson through crushing experience and still refuse to bow to it astound me. They go on fighting, again and again and again. These people aren’t perfect. They aren’t simple heroes. They are complex human beings. And we need them. Because without them the world would be lost.”

The Revenge Business.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Washing dishes this morning, I catch a little of NPR’s Morning Edition. Mandy Patinkin who starred in The Princess Bride says his famous line about avenging his father’s death. As I’m scrubbing out the coffee pot, Patinkin says the more important line is about how revenge never got anyone what they wanted. Ever.

For February, this Saturday is crazy warm. I hang the laundry outside to dry and open the windows. I finish up some work at the coffee shop and talk with a school board member from the board I quit, abruptly, last spring. A few raindrops are falling as we step outside on the sidewalk.

In the little rain, I walk home, thinking about that revenge line. Families, nations, epochs, have run on revenge. And the math always works out in its own calculation. Check out the NPR segment.

Boots on the Land, the Ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m meeting someone, late afternoon, who’s late, so I wait. The February sun has dropped into the horizon and clouds, and the day’s softening snow is tightening up, freezing again. I’m along one of the glacial lakes, a deep cut in the earth created by the planet’s unstoppable movements. It’s an old, old lake, not a newer pond formed by a human dam construction. Across from where I stand is the beach where I swam last fall, evenings and weekends. The water is shallow for a short stretch and then deepens quickly. My youngest had just gone to college. I would swim out as far as I could, then lie on the shore beneath the shaggy cedars, reading and watching the loons dive and reappear.

February exposes the bones of Vermont, the land’s steepness, the flatness of ice, the pale grace of a white birch in a hemlock forest. That afternoon, the stranger tells me a story of how the land was divided in families, re-divided and swapped, sold. Around this side of the lake, the state highway was built nearly on the water, and from here it’s easy to see the challenges of traffic and how the road hampers runoff from the mountains. It’s a familiar story that plays out in particulars in all but the wildest places.

On my way home, I stop at the town reservoir and walk a short distance over its ice. Walking on ice is always a kind of magic, a temporary thing. I don’t see the two bald eagles who live here: another day, perhaps.

‘I can feel my life start up again…’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

We’ve crossed the halfway point of winter and can, again, believe in the possibility of crocuses, the promise of pearly-and-pale-pink apple blossoms. Monday morning, my friend Brad Ferland invites me onto his WDEV radio program Vermont Viewpoint again. I’m lucky enough to ramble on for a bit about writing, and I spoke a little about this blog. For those of you who are new here, I often write about what the seasons in Vermont mean to me. July is the Swimming Season. September the Season of Fat Sunflowers. February, in my mind at least, is the Season of Hope.

The days suddenly widen and grow. A sunshiny stretch like this, and my state’s collective spirit rises. February is still deep in the Woodstove Season, however, which means, as a writer, no need to worry about missing a few fine gardening hours. The clouds will descend again, and surely I’ll complain (again), but for now, with two days of radiance, savor. Savor.

I feel my life start up again, 
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

— Jane Kenyon

Thin Ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On my way home, I walk down to the lake and stand at its edge. Such a warm winter this has been. There’s not a single ice fishing hut on the lake. Across the middle, two people walk, talking intently, their hands gesturing. As they stroll south, I head towards the center of the lake.

At the beginning of any year I’ve walked or skated on lakes, there’s an always initial angst, a discombobulation about the deep water beneath, the zone where I’ve kayaked or swam. Midwinter, the summer folks are faraway on beaches or cities. The walking pair disappears, and then it’s just me and a lone crow making its steady way across the sky. This winter has clouds and clouds and clouds. Out on the ice, however, the sky spreads wide, its permutations of blue dazzling.

Twenty-five years ago, I was descending into labor with my first daughter, a period when dawn and twilight intermingled, a space where time had no meaning for me. Near the labor’s end (and she came into this world courtesy of a surgeon’s scalpel), all light had vanished from my world save for a distant circle, like a full moon gleaming on still water at the bottom of a well. I saw my right hand reaching down, fingers outstretched, seeking that gleam.

In each of my daughters’ births, the world’s illusions were ripped back. The rawness of blood and tears, of the ineffable power of a newborn’s gaze, filled my world with sacred might.

The ice groaned, shifting. I was certain of its strength for no real reason at all. In my thin jacket, I stretched out on the ice, let the cold hold my bones and flesh, and that vast sky steal my breath.

Roadside View.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In these tail-end days of January, I’m alone midafternoon when I stop by the edge of the road. We’ve endured a cold for days that’s not so much bitter but a raw damp that my brother says reminds him of the ocean. The kind of weather for wearing wool sweaters all day, that make you wrap your hands around cups of coffee. So many years ago, I lived for a winter in an apartment on a brick Main Street building in Brattleboro. The building was heated by radiators, clanging and spewing steam all over that large building, in a heating design where I was mere witness, the grateful recipient.

This dreary afternoon, I follow three-toed turkey tracks down a driveway. In the snowy field, the large birds set up a clanging holler when they spy me, ruffling feathers and jostling. It’s just me, I’d like to tell them, a small woman who’s forgotten her mittens and hat. I stand for a bit. Down the hillside, the frozen lake spreads immensely around the spits and coves of the shoreline: breathtakingly awesome.

After a bit, the turkeys seem to care little about my dull presence, gleaning through the thin granular snow.