Vermont

The Pleasures of Creation.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

An old friend and I walk through the hilly town forest, sharing the tenor of stories that are manna for my soul: which ways our lives have turned and bent, what are the elements that shape us and our families. A little sleet or maybe rain patters down on what remains of the leaves.

On my way home, I stop at the coffee shop and drink espresso in my damp sweater smelling of sheep — a lovely barnyard smell or a repulsive one, depending on the person I suppose. I carry my laptop and my notebook back home to my wood stove and my cats who remind me their needs are few and the most reasonable constant in this house.

By five, it’s dark as the inside of a pocket. Public radio spins in the greater world. In my tiny dining room, I pull a book from shelf and set it on the table, then another and another. In an hour or so, by then listening to This American Life about rats, I’m in the basement searching for the half-full can of Sunshine paint I used in the bathroom last winter.

Three more walls await me. I’m out of paint and decide a lime-lemon will suffice. I’ll need to drive that half-mile to the hardware store, which annoys me as I have brand-new studs on my snow tires, and why waste those on dry pavement?

All this: it’s that old familiar question, that rub between creation and destruction. Espresso and sunshine-yellow paint have never cured the world’s ills, but a slice of pleasure can’t harm.

In my bookshelves, I find a poem I printed out shortly before the pandemic nailed shut Vermont, still utterly relevant today:

Blackbirds
by Julie Cadwallader Staub

I am 52 years old, and have spent
truly the better part
of my life out-of-doors
but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward
I saw a flock of blackbirds
rounding a curve I didn’t know was there
and the sound was simply all those wings,
all those feathers against air, against gravity
and such a beautiful winning:
the whole flock taking a long, wide turn
as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

If we lived only in human society
what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
that is not our own
so when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

Fresh Lilacs, Late October.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My daughter sends me a photo of an apple blossom she discovered in Montpelier, Vermont, just this weekend, end of October. For anyone not a Vermonter, this is odd news that evokes suspicion and distrust. In New Englanders, distrust is a carefully curated character trait. Good lord, don’t be naïve. Naïve people don’t put on snow tires, and those people drive off roads.

Later that same afternoon, we walk through a pasture and then cut through a town cemetery. There, the lilac bushes are sticks, as you’d expect at this time of year. But at the very top of one bush, lavender flowers bloom. My daughter stands on her tiptoes and gently pulls down a branch. My house is surrounded on three sides by lilacs; late May is a joy. But this year, there were hardly any blossoms. Now: lilacs in late October in northern Vermont? Any sane person would look at this askance.

Nonetheless, I stand on tiptoes, too, and breathe in that ineffable scent of fresh lilacs.

Here’s a few lines from poet Amy Lowell:

Even the iris bends

When a butterfly lights upon it.

The Power of Maples.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This year, my extended world includes widows, including women mentors I looked to when I was a young mother. These women are all somewhat older than me, with long marriages. It wasn’t that long ago I was in the world of the new babies, the swapping of baby clothes, the intent to get the low-down about cloth diapers versus disposable.

There’s a line from one of my most favorite novels, Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford, about a woman widowed in World War II. Like a teacup, she would crack, but not break. Same.

Rain’s washed our world last night, and the sun is radiant this morning. While hanging out the laundry, I think of an acquaintance who says he’s still trying to figure out his life. But aren’t we all as grownup now as we’re ever going to get? The birds and squirrels scavenge in my flower garden, gathering for their families.

Here’s “The Power of Maples” by Gerald Stern which seems apt on myriad levels today:

If you want to live in the country
you have to understand the power of maples.
You have to see them sink their teeth
into the roots of the old locusts.
You have to see them force the sycamores to gasp for air.
You have to see them move their thick hairs into the cellar.
And when you cut your great green shad pole
you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;
you have to place your table under its leaves and begin eating.

Impossible Zen.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

There was a time in my life where I didn’t yet know about the tamaracks. It’s an odd thing to think about: there was a time in my life when I hadn’t yet met my daughters, either, when I hadn’t read a novel, kissed a boy, slept under the constellations.

I head up through the woods to the tamaracks’ marshy place where I’ve never seen anyone else, a swampy patch off a road. In the gray afternoon gloaming, I wander off the path. I’ve forgotten my boots. I trip on a rock and fall on one knee. The twilight settles in silently.

On my way home, I stop in at the co-op. The co-op’s not really a co-op any longer, the handwritten baby announcements and politics scrubbed out in this new business model. In the produce area, an acquaintance is buying peppers. We stand at the wall of produce, kicking around a few thoughts. We agree, this has been a year of unbelievable things; there’s no need to list. I offer my micro philosophy I’ve mulling around, very Zen. As I’m talking, I remember the whole problem with Zen, anyway, is its impossibility.

At the register, the cashier can’t figure out a bag of greens. But what is it? he asks. The man in front of me says he liked the sunflower sprouts, so he’s trying the radish ones now. Micro greens?

Through the wide windows, I realize I’ve been out for much longer than I realized. Darkness is falling quickly now, car headlights sweeping through the village. The man lifts his bag of slender greens, crimson roots, and turns it around and around.

Good luck, I offer.

He nods, and then disappears into the night.

“Our stories from around here…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I convince a friend to pull on her raincoat and meet me along the rail trail. The story this summer and fall has been rain, rain, more rain; the river runs high. Grabbing alders, we stumble along the edges, marvel that the two cars rammed deep into a bank have finally been removed. What remains is a sandy patch.

This amble is not conducive to talking: we toss bits of our lives between us as we struggle through the mud. Eventually, we make our way back to the trail. The bridge there is intact from July’s flood, but where the river rewrote its course the bridge hangs over the river, the bank jagged black earth. The rain falls hard now, streaming down my cheeks.

Vermonter Kenneth Cadow’s novel Gather (just named a finalist for the National Book Award) is fresh in my mind, a contemporary version of Huck Finn. Walking back in the rain that’s determined not to let up, my friend and I talk about growing up in New England: how powerful the autumn is, redolent with the scent of rotting leaves, the earth shaking off her pretty leaves, exposing the bones of mountains, rocks, the hungry rivers. Another friend sent word recently of this particular date’s power for him: the date his world shifted, spun from destruction to creation.

Walk finished, I’m grateful, ever so grateful, to return to my hot hearth, my wool sweater steaming, redolent of the sheep and grass that gave me these materials to knit….. and so it goes….

From Gather:

But I feel like you need to understand this. Our stories from around here come out like the way we keep our work shed: you go in there, see what you have lying around, some of it being old as hell, some of it being stuff you might even have had the money to buy for yourself. You move something, you find something else. You brush it off a little, then you use it or set it back down. But you need it all to piece together how things come to be the way they are now, how you come to be who you are.

Words: Tragedy, Unfairness, Fortune.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Word comes into my email inbox at the end of the day that the literary journal Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself has accepted an essay of mine for their Bad-Ass Mothers theme. This delights me immeasurably. My silliness aside, there’s nothing light about this essay.

My small concerns asides, it’s a week not to be flippant. Acquaintances in our world here have suffered a tragedy, in a house with small children. A friend of mine who knows the family rails at the unfairness of the world. I remind her of what she knows well, that unfairness is a human construct. I’ve never seen evidence that the laws of universe pay any heed to that notion.

After dark, I wander through the neighborhood where cats sometimes appear and brush up against your ankle, purring. The clouds rub away, and a crescent moon gleams, buffed up and shiny, as if newly minted. All my life, I’ve been following this moon, Lady Moon, acquainted with her numberless faces, as she has shed her silvery light on mine. The streets are nearly empty tonight. Ursa Major hangs over a house where a blown-up pumpkin glows in the front yard. These days, I imagine Lady Moon charming my long-ago relatives, in a time so long ago we humans hadn’t yet divided the earth into countries.

On this walk, I remember a favorite line from Ann Patchett: “There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.” That, perhaps, is its own koan.