Vermont

Wild Apples: Details of Living.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The red of my friend’s daughter’s hair matches this autumn—sunshot red—remarkable. Walking along a dirt road flanked by immense maples, abundant with purple asters, the child races forward, drags behind, curious as heck about the world as she gathers stones from the road and wonders if we might follow this inviting path in the woods. Where does it go?

She’s curious, too, about me and what I might say. My dog loves to bite. (The dog does not.) She holds out her hand to illustrate that it looks like mine. Walking, talking with my friend who’s doing her own fascinating unique adult things, a line from Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air returns to me. Holed up in my hand-me-down chair from another friend, nearly incoherent with fatigue by the working week’s end, I’ve just reread this little gem. “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

In ways, the book is a meditation on that Buddhist proverb, for advice post-enlightenment: “Chop wood, carry water.”

One result of what appears to be a permanent stamp of intermittent fatigue (not a sleepiness alleviated by a nap) is a double-edged parsimony and generosity. I’ve refining a few simple sentences in email and meetings—that’s all I have for this—but I also often ignore the hours; I lose track of time in ways I never allowed myself before.

My friend climbs an apple tree and shakes the fruit loose. Her daughter considers an apple seriously. The tree was planted years ago and has now gone wild, unpruned, its branches an immense tree bouquet. The apple’s skin is crimson, tart, the flesh sweet. The child rubs her thumb over a bump in the skin and then bites into the apple. She eats gleefully.

If I timestamped this, I’d note, somewhere in Vermont, late September, gnawed apple cores tossed back into the wild.

The Garden You Can Reach.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Blue Lady, above, Dartmouth Hitchcock campus, the statute the DHMC nurses had told me about — elusive woman — when I was marooned in a hospital bed. The 2025 May afternoon before my second, brutally painful surgery, my daughters walked me outside, and we sat on a bench beneath a blooming apple tree. Mother’s Day. Visitors arrived with bouquets and flowerpots. I hadn’t the strength to walk around the building.

The next month, visiting again with my daughters for a follow-up visit, we walked slowly on a path, in the time between surgeon and oncologist consults. We passed the wooden playground that I had seen from the windows of the last room where I stayed. And then there she was — the Blue Lady. Those two weeks I’d passed in that room — in the many rooms where I stayed that winter and spring — she’d stood through the snow and the rain, the sunlight, in an evergreen forest, so nearby.

At Dartmouth again, yesterday (gratefully for no emergency), a leukemia survivor shares his story, a man stricken with disease in his thirties. He says the most remarkable thing: that his disease was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. His words make me tremble, this mirror of my own thinking. Afterwards, I step outside in the chilly September sunlight and lean against the building. Wracked by the disease and treatment’s fatigue that transforms my bones utterly inconveniently into stone, I’ve forced myself to make this drive down the interstate. Within me, at all moments, I hold that cleaver of lymphoma.

On this Sunday morning, near to the equinox, that’s about all. Remember, tend to the part of the garden you can reach.

Illumination of Constellations.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On the way home from a conference in Montpelier, I stop at #10 Pond. Late afternoon, there’s no one around, and I open my laptop and work, perched on a rock. For a good long while, it’s just me and two curious loons swimming by, the September sunlight dropping over the hillside full of hovering gravity-defying dust and damselflies.

A stellar autumn day.

I hadn’t intended to swim, but the afternoon turns sweaty. The water’s temperature hovers at perfection, the morning’s chill vanished this late in the day. Afterwards, I stand on the shore’s mud, drying off. A stranger appears and wades in. The sunlight moves between us, a great creature.

We talk about the clear water and the leaves turning gold, and waking in the post-midnight wee hours. The nights are cold, and we agree that we close our windows, now, to keep some warmth in our houses for the morning. A young mother and two small children scramble down the bank. The youngest child runs into the pond, splashing, hands outstretched.

19 years ago to this day, my youngest and I were at the ER, when my husband had a chainsaw accident. All’s well could be the pronunciation, nearly two decades later, but is that so? Another of these questions that only I seem to ponder—how much of our difficulties were caused by us, how much by fate? An impossible question with no answer. A human, not a loon, koan.

Mid-September, a day balmy-sweet. I drop my damp towel and wade out. I fear I may not swim again this year, maybe never, but as I stroke out further than I have this summer, far beyond shore, I let those fears sink down to the pond’s hidden bottom.

Much later, the day’s heat lingering, I lie on my splintering picnic table beneath the Milky Way and let the words wash out of my mind, sink down through the grass and sandy soil, the realm of worms and grubs and groundhog burrows. The constellations illuminate the darkness.

Practicing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Twice a month, I gather a Writer’s Circle at the Civic on Hardwick’s Main Street, about a six-minute walk from my back door. A simple notion—I offer a poem, we write, read, talk. A consistency in a fragmented world. Housed in the former Buffalo Mountain Co-op building, the Civic has three floors. A carpenter, my ex spent countless hours in this building. In those days, I had a key, too, and often used the top floor as a writing studio, slinking in with my laptop and writing in the dim space that stored baskets and yarn. I finished drafting my first book in an unswept corner.

Now, like the curiosity of a large family house, the space is pushed and used in different ways. In the cool September late afternoons, we claim the tables on the first floor, watching Hardwick’s foot and vehicle Main Street traffic. Dump trucks with firewood, trash haulers, pickups and SUVs, kids on bikes. My friends walk to a restaurant for dinner, then amble back, boxed leftover in hands.

We write on. Months in, we’re learning to know each other. Yet the writing is often a surprise. What will emerge?

I live in this town, work in the adjacent town, these complex organisms unique in their own ways, built upon layers of history and families. Endlessly riveting, sometimes maddening. Which, I suppose, is the human way.

And a little Kurt Vonnegut: “If you want to really hurt your parents… the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake… Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Solitary Sailboat.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I make a difficult phone call to a family member. Late afternoon, the perennial sunflowers stretch above my head in my garden. I’ve walked barefoot from my house through the grass that’s already cooling in the shadows to my garden, the soil warm from the day’s sun and so dry it’s verging near dusty. Afterwards, there’s a second call, then a third. I find two zucchinis that need picking, an onion I’d forgotten beneath the tansy. I gather these.

I’ve had this worldview of cause and effect: make a decision, or not a decision, and the consequences creep up or roar upon you. No stasis in this world. A selfish view. Meanwhile, of course, the transient world churns along, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ceaseless waves, the pollinators feasting lustily on these sunflowers whose petals are already beginning their autumn wilt-and-drop.

September: a month jammed with color and sadness, the fleetingness of this life. Two years ago, disease was rampaging in my blood. I did not yet know this, while already my ailing body was sailing me into faraway seas. That journey was me in a solitary life raft, cold winter starlight drenching my eyes. Swimmers tossed over the edge of that rickety inflatable boat the things that kept me alive: medicines of all kinds, tiny bowls of hot soup, books and money, the hands that propped me up and guided me on walks, the company of voices. Meals and kindness that sustained my daughters, and so sustained me.

Overhead, the bluest of a Vermont sky. I answer my phone again. What luck, immensity of good fortune, to be enmeshed in wildly unknown world, relishing fatty marrow.

Into My Own

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true. ~ Robert Frost

Good Soil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I read Wendell Berry for the first time the 20th century summer I lived in a tipi we set up in a wild blueberry field. The land was owned by the widow of the well-known ecologist Robert MacArthur. Nights, when it rained, I stowed the library books in the VW Rabbit we drove all over the country, often sleeping in the back, from Montana to Arkansas. Recently, from an upstairs closet, I pulled out a photo of myself, circa the 20th century summer before grad school, when I painted houses and drank Genny beer. My best friend had taken up with a schizophrenic who collected rocks, so many he eventually buried his mustard-yellow Toyota Corolla beneath a pile of rocks from fist-to-large-dog-sized. I’ve long ago lost track of these people. They went their way, and I was swimming along in the current of my life, so young I didn’t realize the rising waters. I was headed out on my own long journey across the country, returning years later to the sweet and cold soil of Vermont to sink my roots deep.

Wendell Berry, Gloria Steinem, Dolly Parton… in their own unique way, each exuded pragmatism and optimism, perhaps the best of American qualities. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America? Still ringing true….

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”