Vermont

Cat, hand, breeze.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Morning after the election, I stop in the food co-op on my way to work. The air is balmy sweet as early September; the light is November thin. Cheeriness this morning.

My car’s hatch is jammed with castoffs. My youngest is a college senior, and only now am I tackling a shifting around of our upstairs. It’s not a large house (there’s two closets on the second floor), but her first college year I pretty much missed her terribly, wrote and worked and wept. Then a year of lymphoma, a year of recovery, which brings beaten me to now. Imprinted in my bones is the memory that, two years ago, I couldn’t walk up my stairs. (Things went down from there, then up, fortunately.)

I open the windows in her bedroom. The warm breeze that smells of apples and wet wood drifts around my little cat sitting on the windowsill. My little cat thinks cat thoughts, or maybe not thoughts at all, but something wiser: pure perception of the pleasure of moving air on whiskers, of wonderment at a rustling in the dried leaves below, maybe a squirrel foraging for dried seeds in the flowerbed.

When I first became a mother, I was surprised at how the parenting landscape shifted constantly. Just when I figured out that I needed to raise things like boxes of empty canning jars above the crawling baby, the baby began running (she skipped the shaky walking phase). Now, a kind of relief at the normality of what I’m doing: ordinary empty nesting (ache, ache) and not profound disease.

I am a woman who appreciates a plan, even if the plans are going to break. Paint the walls blue? My cat mews for a caress on his chin. He and I sit on the windowsill for a long while. I let the words go. Cat, hand, breeze: these become one.

Moon Shadow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A line an acquaintance wrote recently sticks with me….. how the world feels increasingly artificial and the antidote is to chop wood. That Zen phrase — chop wood, carry water — certainly not written for late Vermont autumn, but yet… apt. Early mornings in the dark, I boil water for coffee, the wood floor chilly beneath my bare feet. Not painful, simply something to note. Flesh, wood, temperature. The cats, thinking otherwise, sleep in the stray ash beneath the woodstove.

As the country rushes towards yet another election, late autumn moves in conversely slowly, balmy and verging on warm. Barefoot, I stack wood on my back porch, gather the summer’s garden debris of emptied flower pots, my watering can. Nearing November, the sky is sooty with the remains of sunlight. I rake leaves over the garden, gather apples and bake a pie, write everyday, do billable hours. I think: paint a bedroom before Thanksgiving. In all of this, time races through from that pre-dawn coffee to the evenings I lie on couch, reading. One cat emerges from pre-winter hibernation to nestle against my hip.

The nights are cold. Walking under the full Hunter’s Moon, a friend asks why we always seem to walking beneath the shining moon. The moonlight is so brilliant my cupped hands hold moonbeams. The bare branches are shadows across my boots. At dinner, we’d talked about what’s real, what’s not, and the national trend to make up your own narrative, facts be damned. In the witchy, enchanting moonlight, the whole thing seems real: fact, lie, shadow, brilliance, health and disease, the near and faraway. The evolving story.

To be well again, what might that mean?

The flowering plum sprung from late snow… ~ Meena Alexander

Ursa Major, companion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.

In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.

My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams

“…hear your whole existence…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I hole up at my kitchen table to work, then go for a run in the late afternoon, then circle back to work. This work is a spreadsheet where I’m sewing and ripping out and stitching again numbers and more numbers. Numbers that signify things and actions. I use my same writing approach: ask questions (what does this mean?), be precise, question myself, care about what I’m doing.

Early October. I veer off my running path and wander along the seam of fallow field and riverbank. Geese wing south, honking. Inexorable.

I grew up in New Hampshire. Autumn, how apples on the trees smell both sweet and rotting, reminds me of childhood, when time meant nothing. Now, one of my oldest friends arrives for dinner, and she shares her retirement plan, a number not-so-far in the distance. She taught me the name of the flower closed gentian. I haven’t seen her in weeks, yet she sits down, and we pick up, talking. Inexorable, the motion of this material world.

In this dry spell, the river runs low, unkempt, crammed with human debris. Wild and human intersect: shorn cornfield, wild asters, bridges, the eagles I’ve spied here, all summer. I keep thinking not of those numbers and the mathematical patterns of addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, but of a recent New Yorker essay about writing and illness, the flimsiness of words in the wake of wrenching pain. Words upon words. The signifier and the signified. I crouch down and tie my shoe. Overhead, all that sky. Underfoot, the immensity of earth. I’ve five things I think I should be doing. The geese slice through the afternoon, then vanish, leaving me in this dusty field. The slow spin of this planet.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

…. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

— Galway Kinnell

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.”

Wild Apples: Details of Living.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 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.