famiily

Pre-election. Cows.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November 2, and chatter is all about midterms and the lingering balmy and dry weather. Variables.

For whatever mysterious reason, I keep thinking of Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” poem, which I’ve surely quoted here, perhaps numerous times over the years. This weekend, the moon waning, I drove home on a back road after dinner with friends. In the rural dark, I passed intermittent houses, windows glowing. Where I’d been was hot, so I drove with the sunroof open, in my thin sweater, the scent of woodsmoke drifting in with the breeze, my head filled with a killer live blues band. But where my road parts left, I kept driving, through the village mostly closed up, and to the town forest where I parked.

I’m mostly not afraid of the dark except when I’m terrified. I’ve lived a whole adult life to write this—mostly not afraid except when I tremble with fear—for the immeshed reasons of experience and will and desire that spiral into all our lives. In the thin starlight, I walked along the path, the woods redolent with fallen leaves. Where the path edged along a field, I paused and placed my hand against a white pine, listening, listening. Were the cows yet in the field? The night opened my eyes wide. Yes, indeed, the cows, shifting and chewing, steady.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

Good Writers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I rarely show my face here, a few author or event photos, myself in New Mexico a summer ago, in a dress patterned with lemons I’d bought for my oldest daughter, the photo she took of me in a hospital elevator, two days before surgeons took a scalpel to my belly and cut.

Here, on the advent of yet another stick season, I paused and snapped photos of my reflection in the dirty windows of a nearly abandoned town grange. Two in one post? How’s that for nonsensical? November, a season I’ve often met with dread. This year, a welcome respite, the lengthening nights that encourage waking in the darkness, as in a secret. Finally, after a struggling summer, I’m writing hard about grief and illness, death’s foggy abyss, fear. My youngest had just headed to college, the sting of her absence barely scabbing over, when I was overcome with cancer, and my daughters flocked back. Now, we are all well, all healthy, so I am learning again to live without what Tillie Olsen called moving according to the rhythms of others. The deep pleasure of connecting with old friends, the sweetness of new people that chance and writing and disease have brought my way.

November is the twilight’s gloaming beauty, the sharpening of cold, warmth of woodstove, the pleasure of light. I’ve lucked upon reading the Lieke Marsman, who writes:

Are there writers who can succeed without melancholy?

Good writers, I mean.

Writers without fury?

Good writers, I mean.

Night Wanders.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late autumn means shortening days which means a reacquaintance with darkness. In sooty twilight, I slip through the narrow path in the pines and into the cemetery, a letter in my hand. Quickly, night settles in.

At the bottom of the hill where this back street joins Main Street, an elderly man leans against the railings on a second-floor landing. The storefront has six apartments above it, and the tenants linger on the covered back stairs in all weather, all times of the year. I pause, and we talk about the balmy fall, the fattening half moon. Then I wish him a good evening and head along.

In the way of small towns, I know pieces of his story—he’s a veteran who served in a war that may seem forever ago, or perhaps just a few breathfuls of air in the past—and he may know snippets of my life, too. I drop my letter in the mailbox and circle through the village. Darkness settles in, and I follow the sidewalk home, not tromping through the woods and the cemetery. Save for passing cars, there’s no one out, house windows filled with people moving about their chores. Ordinary evening under the splendid night sky.

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
― Alan Watts

Intertwining: Beauty and Broken.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Three afternoons in a row, I run along the rail trail and pause at this ox bow in the river. The Lamoille is beginning to gather its water might here, a handful of miles from its northern headwaters at Horse Pond. The dry air smells of pine needles heating in the sunlight, a scent that reminds me of camping in childhood. My parents, rich with wanderlust, never hesitated to tie sleeping bags and tents on our old green Jeep’s luggage rack, pack a family duffel bag, and head out for a month or two of open air living. Those days, a dollar would get us a night in a national forest.

This run is a flat span, nothing remarkable in distance, a path through evergreens, along farms, across a few dirt roads. Late afternoon, I’ve seen no one here but little yellow butterflies, the crows of course gleaning in the cornfields, three swimming otters. The tourist at the trailhead with his watercolors and brush.

I’m a collection of shoulders, hip bones, ankles, a jostle of organs and tendons and my own unceasing thoughts, curious to see this river in the foliage that shifts and mutates each afternoon. Again, disease taught me how strength can fetter me, fetter you, more fiercely to this mortal world.

Returning, sweaty, I pause at the bridge where the man is painting. Each afternoon, we admire this season’s extraordinary beauty: gold and crimson. “Little patch of Vermont wild,” he says.

The night before, under a waning moon, a friend and I walked along this trail. The night folded around us. The starlight thin threads on the running river. How far will we go? we asked each other. Owls called. The night spread around us, infinite. Forever, I thought.

….. and thanks to another walking companion who introduced me to Lyanda Lynn Haupt:

“Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.”

“…living according to the rhythms of others…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My ex and I were remarkably unsuited for each other in many ways; in particular was his ability to live without plans. I—in what’s surely irritating, too—lean into rhythms and patterns. This long holiday weekend, I wake hours before dawn, busily tearing apart a manuscript draft and rearranging, stitching, adding, cutting, cutting, cutting…

These early autumn days are sunny, with real heat yet. Afternoons, I park at the rail trail, stretch, and run. In the parking lot, there’s always that SUV with a youngster who’s on a different economic path, and an assortment of Subarus and Volvos with bike racks. These runs are short, a few miles perhaps. Sometimes, I make the four-mile loop. Ending, I often leave the path for the pasture along the river, the Joe Pye weed and purple asters and goldenrod dense. The pollinators eat hungrily.

An orderly life depends on a tenor of privilege, a gift I didn’t have in those years of in-the-thick mothering. Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle wrote about “living according to the rhythms of others”—a line I’ve considered for years. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in the sway of family, gleaning writing time where I could. Now, just a few years into the children-are-adults phase of my life, my companions are sweet fat housecats but also the unremitting remains of cancer and treatment: the mighty beast of fatigue. I lean into it and push; the fatigue pushes back. As in any family, you make your agreements. You learn to get on.

Late afternoon, we build a fire and linger. Long past dark, we huddle around the flames, the cold nipping in. I tilt my head back. Overhead, stars appear between patches of clouds. From the trees, apples have already fallen into the long grass, sweetly rotting from the day’s heat. I’ve left the kitchen light glowing over the table spread with pages and my scrawled notes. Tomorrow’s labor.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

— Galway Kinnell

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.