Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

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.

After the Floods, the Human Conundrum.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments
View from the back steps…

This week, I’m driving around a back road, far over the left-hand side, eyeing how a third of the road no longer exists. I’m far off the beaten path, so I don’t hesitate to stop, turn off the Subaru engine, and get out. The road, indeed, has washed elsewhere. The air is thick, sultry in a July way, but suffused with the wildfire smoke we’ve been breathing all summer.

I drive a little further and then drift into a driveway. I know the road drops steeply, and I’ve no intention of heading there. The homeowner is outside, and we talk for a bit, kicking around his view and his calm acceptance of the road’s condition. He asks where all the gravel to repair these roads comes from.

I’m stuck on his thought after this: it’s the human endeavor, the human conundrum. We’re always moving stuff from here to there: in my realm, moving plants from garden to pot, laundry from clothesline to drawers, and then the far larger realm — trees to boards to houses, gravel from pits in the earth to roads. And then the roads wash out.

At home, later that night, I’m still moving things, wool from sheep, to my knitting needles.

Joyous Interlude.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

I don’t often post pictures of myself (or family anymore) but here’s a shot of myself and my brother at his brewery in Conway, New Hampshire. For this record, yes, I am this short (and my brother isn’t especially tall, either). In the midst of so much — floods, rains, wildfire smoke, the endless varieties of chaos that track all of us — I’m always happy to head out on a restorative hike.

That evening, we raced ahead of yet more thunderstorms to get to brother’s house, my daughter driving, me in the passenger seat prattling on about whatever, whatever. But isn’t that the way of family? Thank goodness for joyful moments….

“Be joyful because it is humanly possible.” 

— Wendell Berry

Post-Flood, More Rain.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Nearly a week into Vermont’s floods, I’m surely not the only one in this town awake at night, listening to rain through my open windows. Lush, lush, our world is. Sunday, I trim the rose bushes that thornily cover a window, then discover moss creeping towards the house. I snip and scrape, then dash inside beneath a sudden downpour.

Sunday, I walk along the Lamoille riverbanks, silty and sandy where the river rose far above its usual path. Red metal lies in twisted sheets, remnants I’m guessing from the motel that tumbled into the river. Twisted towels and clothing, tires, a stepladder are jammed into tree trunks and roots. Cassette tapes of bible stories lie in a puddle, oddly more or less intact. Down the river, smoke churns into the sky where a flooded sawmill has burned debris for days.

There’s an odd kind of quiet hovering around here. What I’ve witnessed is shock and disbelief, a heady kind of euphoria to fix and repair, and now a sodden dullness, the earth as drenched as I’ve ever seen it. My pink poppies have blackened before they’ve bloomed.

We keep on, of course. Our beloved capital city, Montpelier, hoes and bleaches. Word goes around and around about passable and impassable roads, who needs helps, who’s yet marooned by great rifts in the earth.

In the late afternoon, I buy poppyseeds at the co-op and pay off my tab. The staff is out-of-sorts there, too, grousing about a broken cooler and the mud we’re all tracking in. Rain falls, quits, but the day doesn’t cool. I bake a cake and listen to someone on VPR talk about the Buddha. In the evening, that fat woodchuck darts among my gardens. A flock of starlings scatter on the lawn. Robins and rain. The daylilies are brilliant, the flowers poet David Budbill called coarse and beautiful.

As I said, it’s coarse and ordinary and it’s beautiful because
it’s ordinary. A plant gone wild and therefore become
rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,
like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.

— David Budbill