Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Getting Lost & Found.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

There’s that old saying You can’t get there from here, which in Vermont means, It’s not easy to get there, but use your wits and you can. Yesterday afternoon, leaving for a Vermont town I’d never visited I hedged bets on the map, avoiding the route that I guessed had wash-outs and detours yet, and headed down two-lane blacktop through villages where hydrangeas are just beginning to bloom.

I was invited to read with Alexander Chee at the Meadow Meeting House, a righteous 1830s former Baptist Church. The ceiling was stenciled in original colors, over straight-backed wooden pews not designed for the listeners’ comfort. The entryway has two wood stoves. The black pipes extend over the pews before exiting. That would have sufficed for heat.

By chance (or maybe not), Alexander Chee and I each read about spaces — churches and homes — particularly apt in that lovely building that had its own generations-long story. It’s a question that fascinates me: how do we hold the past and also make our lives anew? The question links inexorably to the physical places where we live.

Afterward, in a sunlit house surrounded by gardens and apple trees heavy with fruit, I met a woman who’s the daughter of a long-ago friend of my father. Our conversation pulled me back to my college days. (How would I ever explain that I first fell in love with rural Marlboro College lying in fields, awestruck at the undiluted Milky Way and constellations?)

Driving home, threading my way back along unfamiliar roads, I had the strange sensation I held that afternoon and that conversation in my ribcage. Outside of my town, Hardwick, I had a long wait at a temporary red light on the broken highway. The asphalt washed down the Lamoille River. I stood up and leaned out my Subaru sunroof. In the gloaming, I saw how the river had cut a new course, its old path a great swath of boulders.

In the cavern of my ribs: wildfire smoke. The stories of my past, that afternoon, the future, too.

Promising Sign.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Mist lies on the valley these mornings, indicative more of mid-August than this tail-end of July. 2023, the Vermont year with scant summer, thus far.

Nonetheless, on a ravishingly beautiful Sunday morning, we walk along the rail trail beside the Lamoille River. The trail is closed due to the flood’s multiple wash-outs, and there’s no bikers, but by foot and dog paw the walking is easy enough. The debris along the river is appalling. Two by fours with outlets lodge in treetops. We follow the silt and gravel, studying the way the river lifted, changed its course.

This morning, thrush chortle, and the cicadas hum their midsummer serenade. Distantly, across the river and hayfields, traffic grinds along Route 15. Where we stand, my daughter and I would have drowned, three weeks ago, as the river howled and smashed its way west, and then north to the sea.

Now, easy-going end of July.

I glean a washed-sparkling piece of white quartz, half the length of my thumb, in the shape of Vermont, and slip it into my pocket. I’d written exactly this rock and shape and size into the beginning and end of my novel. An auspicious sign — imagination incarnate — or hopeful dreaming at least.

…. Last, I’ve been generously invited to read at Meadow Meeting House, Corinth, Vermont, with the esteemed Alexander Chee, this Wednesday, August 2, 4:30 p.m. Please come if you can.

Four Feet of Mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Friday afternoon, when the Fed Ex man drops off a package, I ask what he’s seen on his route, his perception of flood damage and how folks are faring. In places, he says, nearly nothing. In others, houses perch over streams.

This stranger keeps going — and I keep asking questions — about his experience in the national guard, a tour in Iraq, and then a month in New Orleans after Katrina.

We’re back in blistering July, and I’m sweaty and dirty from weeding in the garden. On our sandy hillside, this summer the grass flourishes, a benefit of months of rain. I’ve finally mowed the grass (hardly a top priority these days in our house), and that ineffable and sweetly delicious summer scent of cut grass washes around us.

Our conversation bends back to Vermont and our washed-out valleys, how Hardwick’s Walgreens had four feet of mud. He looks at me and ask how tall I am. It’s true; I’m not that much taller than four feet. For a moment, we stand there, two strangers, contemplating four feet of mud. Then he heads to his truck.

Which pieces of our world will go back together, and which won’t? It’s a metaphor for many of us, perhaps.

All the way I have come

all the way I am going

here in the summer field

— Buson

Experiencing the Unprecedented.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In the night, lightning again.

Restless, I stand outside, the few lights of the village scattered like electric breadcrumbs. Long past midnight, a lone semi grinds along Route 14. Otherwise, no one.

July, balmy, sweet with the scent of the neighbors’ newly cut lawn. Again, I’ll reiterate how I’m lucky to have bought a house on a hill, that the Vermont’s floods haven’t so much as cut a channel through my garden.

And yet here’s the thing: I’ve spent years of my life wandering the unevenness of riverbanks, beginning with the mighty Nooksack when I lived in Washington. I’ve spent hours now wandering the silty Lamoille banks, its edges and bridges and trees crammed with tangled branches and uprooted trees, with every imaginable broken bit of junk: kids’ toys and potty seats, tarpapered walls, tires, pipes and plastic bags and slews of clothing. Two cars, one flipped upside down, hammered by boulders, not easily identified as a car.

There’s nothing for me to gain or find here, save for the chance conversations with strangers and acquaintances who appear driven in the same way I am, wading through muddy weeds and beneath fallen trees, insects devouring my ankles. This is the edge territory, where dismal human activity bleeds into the roar of nature. I scramble up the bank and take the long way back to the pavement so I can pass through a thicket of blooming cup flowers, green stalks and golden blossoms taking in my body.

In the New Yorker:

We keep experiencing things that are unprecedented, worse than anything anyone can remember, even as we’re told that they will become common. 

Swimming with Goose.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I was warned about the sole goose who’s been swimming around the public beach in Caspian. This higher-elevation glacial lake escaped the flood debris.

On the hidden side where I drop my towel, there’s only a couple of teenagers making out on a rock. When I slip into the water, I hear the families and crowds of teens on the distant public beach, the laughing rowdiness of a July Sunday.

The water is far deeper than I’ve ever seen it, choppier, too, but clear and lovely. Although I’m not a strong swimmer, I head far out, beyond the buoyed sailboats into the open lake. The goose bobs along. At first, I hardly notice the long-necked bird, but the floating creature follows me. Our paths nearly collide. We’re so near to each other I’m mesmerized by the bird’s size, its bent neck, the clop and chop of the water against my kicking feet. The beach, the blue sky, the rocky shoreline, vanish. It’s just me and this bird, so real, so unbrokenly true.

Wreckage, Human & Otherwise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

There’s no one around the edges of town on Friday evening, save for a stranger in a brand-new leather jacket. He walks ahead of me.

Two weeks past the July flood, there’s stand-out heroes, and a lot of folks who stepped up in ways that are amazing, admirable, kind of jaw-dropping, honestly. But the flood unearthed all that pandemic misery, and so much more that we’d stuffed down, too. Similar — and yet, different, too. Piece by piece, my state is cleaning, hammering lives back together.

A young fox hurries along the jagged riverbank where lawn now meets abyss. The creature pauses, listens. I’m no threat, me with my hands sunk in my pockets, leaning back on my heels. The fox trots along.

The evening threatens more thunderstorms. I keep thinking of childbirth labor, how those waves of contractions bore me along mightily. Childbirth was the first time I’d understood so inherently that I’m as much a part of the universe as famed Helen of Troy, as that stranger walking ahead of me and disappearing around a broken-down scrapheap of a motel, as you reader, and my dear cats pawing a dropped ball of red yarn. Rain and more rain. Rising rivers. Even as the rain began pelting, I stood there, awestruck.