Human chaos, the desert.

July 18, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughter sends word of rain and more rain in our Vermont world. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, visiting my father in New Mexico, we’re amazed by the hues of green. The desert’s rainy this year, too. In the afternoon, I work outside while a storm blows in. In New Mexico’s wide skies, sooty clouds may lower and threaten and yield not a drop of water, blowing elsewhere, breaking or not.

In this quiet, edge-of-the-greenbelt place, news comes to us, the President now ill, an election teetering any which way. We do the everyday familiar things — drink coffee and eat dinner, play cards, talk about my mother’s recent death, about each one of us. After dark, the two girls and I stand outside in the dark in the cool rain, breathing in that ineffably sweet fragrance of the rain-damp desert. Wind shakes the junipers. Here, at fifty, I seem to be carrying a goblet of my life, the wind in the junipers one of the very first sounds I remember as a little girl, so many trips crisscross between Vermont and the desert, the enthusiasm of these young women with me who have seen so much of this world already, so eager they are for more, more of life. Later, when the girls are whispering and laughing in bed, the rain falling, the breeze blowing through the window, I feel that endless ancient desert around me, the calling coyotes, dwarfing for this moment even our human chaos.

Travel in Out-of-Everyday Places.

February 17, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

In the quietest hours of the night, driving by the twinkling line of Santa Fe’s lights in the immense desert, a crimson half moon cupped in the firmament like a bowl full of mystery, I have the strange sense of transmogrifying into a Russian novel. Maybe in part because of the Bulgakov novel from my sister crammed in my backpack with my laptop and half-written notebook, or maybe it’s my family story unfurling simultaneously at lightspeed and also breath by labored breath.

At the Albuquerque airport, the shuttle bus holds just me and the driver who says he’s from the Chicago suburbs. He remarks that I’m shivering and wonders how that can be, as I’ve told him I’m flying back to Vermont. I’m tell him I’m just tired. Perhaps. But the illuminated city and the airport floodlights and mundane directional signs for United and Alaska Air bedazzle my 3 a.m. eyes: there’s so much of the world, so many people and stories braiding and twisting, from the sweet simplicity of a child cradling a beloved doll to an old woman gasping her way to the end of her life.

The driver asks me about the church scene in Vermont. I rattle off about white steeples in every town. Driving incredibly slowly, he launches into his story of knowing that he wanted to be a better man but kept falling into sin, and then a page in the book of his life turned. I can see this is doubtlessly headed to a pamphlet he wants to hand me. Yet, as he speaks, I wonder what that really means: Knock, and Jesus will open the door.

Later, in the terminal, drinking coffee, I sit in a space crowded with strangers, all on their meaningful journeys. My heart swells full with so many things: the robins singing in my parents’ aspen, last night’s dream of wandering through a sugarbush, forest floor sprinkled with spring beauties, the luminous crimson bowl of the moon in the infinite darkness. Nature never builds a door. Maybe those doors and windows we’re forever using as metaphors are illusions.

The driver had forgotten his bag, so the pamphlet was a no go. I take his words and tuck the sliver of his story into my writer’s mind with the hard-boiled egg I’d split down the middle and shared with a young woman yesterday morning. While we ate, she told me about her son’s heart surgery, and the surgeons who saved the boy’s life. With my fingers, I sweep the eggshells into a pile on the plate we’ve shared.

Complex People.

February 12, 2024 / 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 Might of Imagination.

November 5, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The geese fly overhead in great Vs, chattering in geese-speak as they align themselves, tugging their flock together. In my garden, I rip out the frost-blackened tithonia, the dry fronds of bachelor buttons.

The migratory geese are rhythm, nothing clichéd about their brassy calls. As I steadily work at my annual chores — burying more daffodil bulbs, the candy-like crocuses I’ll happily search for, months from now — I let my body do this work, my boots on the earth, a few spits of rain falling from the clouds, listening, listening.

In the town office where I work, stories surge through, as in any small town. Having lived through scads of my own drama, I know too well how the private seeps into the public, any truth strewn carelessly among chatter. For the most part, I endeavor to do my work and head out; yet, like anyone, I’m always listening, listening, wondering about motive and desire, curious about betrayal and courage, and the ineffable complexities of human behavior. In a conversation with a friend about a couple we jointly know, my friend said, For anyone who’s been following the story, this shouldn’t be a surprise… In a similar vein, I realize I’ve long been quietly following the story of the world where I live.

On my way to visit my daughter, I detour slightly and walk around Richmond’s round barn, shuttered up until dandelion season returns. The afternoon is especially balmy, sunlight bright even in the scarcity of November. I marvel at how mightily humans can create, mixing utility and beauty. How well we can do this.

“Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal.”
— Helen Garner

Starlight Walking, a Pause, a Choice.

October 3, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Walking back from a library program after dark, I cut through the cemetery. The cemetery is unlit, and I’m walking slowly, staring at the Milky Way sprawled overhead, the enormous immensity of the cosmos. In the dark, I hear a cough. I haven’t been paying attention. At first, I think the cough has come from the person smoking on the balcony not far from me, in the house chopped into apartments at the dead-end road, or the people coughing might be around the gap in the fence surrounding the cemetery. I’m headed that way; the gap leads to the woodsy path that will lead me home. That particular place in the path often has trash – Little Debbie’s wrappers and empty Twisted Tea cans.

So here’s the thing: I’m not at all afraid. Despite the village around me, the night is deep. I’m well-hidden, so concealed I stand there thinking, staring up and seeing a shooting star.

I’ve written a fair amount about being a single mother, a broken half, the jilted family, the rage of abandonment. But it’s equally true that I’ve been single for so long now in a society that seems so devoted to coupleness, that I rarely speak of my solitary life. I know very few single parents, at all, for whatever reason. So this night, I do what I’ve taught myself all these years: I drink in my fill of starlight, that piercing Ursa Major hung over the black horizon of the mountains, let her drench me with her power. I make my choice and retrace a few steps, see my friend and her partner on the street below driving along in the dark, friends who would have happily given me a ride, had I asked. But these nights are still balmy and the bitter cold hasn’t set in yet.

The Pouring Glory of the World.

October 2, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Saturday, I’m on the bridge in Winooski taking pictures of my daughters, in a strange, almost dreamy smoke-tinged sunset, the kind that’s become more par for the course than not these days. The river snakes through Winooski, a former mill town beside Burlington. Such effort has gone into this town, converting mills to upscale housing, the downtown bustling with restaurants that spread onto the sidewalks. My brother asks me if the town is on the rise. Wrong question, I think.

We’re at the end of a day of walking and sunlight. My brother owns a brewery, and so, while it’s been many years now since my drinking days ended, we’ve gone in and out of bars and breweries, and I’m reminded that the bars I once loved were such good places, full of the people and their stories, their weariness and joy, these things that have always tugged me.

Oh Vermont, my beloved state, in the gem of October. Walking through the woods with friends, golden light falls through the trees. Roads defined my twenties, mountains and rivers my decades after that. I’m well aware that living in Vermont, living in my hillside house with one foot in the village, the other hidden in a wild ravine, is a kind of undeserved luck. Yet the rivers, jammed with debris of broken buildings and busted vehicles, human junk, are a visible siren call of so much and so many things.

Sunday morning, we drink coffee and eat cornbread on my back porch, and solve, as my brother says, not one whit of the world’s problems. October: redolent of wet soil, broken leaf. Yellow and scarlet, a finale of gray. The month when the leaves will fall, the world open up.

From Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief: