Four Feet of Mud.

July 29, 2023July 30, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Friday afternoon, when the Fed Ex man drops off a package, I ask what he’s seen on his route, his perception of flood damage and how folks are faring. In places, he says, nearly nothing. In others, houses perch over streams.

This stranger keeps going — and I keep asking questions — about his experience in the national guard, a tour in Iraq, and then a month in New Orleans after Katrina.

We’re back in blistering July, and I’m sweaty and dirty from weeding in the garden. On our sandy hillside, this summer the grass flourishes, a benefit of months of rain. I’ve finally mowed the grass (hardly a top priority these days in our house), and that ineffable and sweetly delicious summer scent of cut grass washes around us.

Our conversation bends back to Vermont and our washed-out valleys, how Hardwick’s Walgreens had four feet of mud. He looks at me and ask how tall I am. It’s true; I’m not that much taller than four feet. For a moment, we stand there, two strangers, contemplating four feet of mud. Then he heads to his truck.

Which pieces of our world will go back together, and which won’t? It’s a metaphor for many of us, perhaps.

All the way I have come

all the way I am going

here in the summer field
— Buson

Experiencing the Unprecedented.

July 26, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In the night, lightning again.

Restless, I stand outside, the few lights of the village scattered like electric breadcrumbs. Long past midnight, a lone semi grinds along Route 14. Otherwise, no one.

July, balmy, sweet with the scent of the neighbors’ newly cut lawn. Again, I’ll reiterate how I’m lucky to have bought a house on a hill, that the Vermont’s floods haven’t so much as cut a channel through my garden.

And yet here’s the thing: I’ve spent years of my life wandering the unevenness of riverbanks, beginning with the mighty Nooksack when I lived in Washington. I’ve spent hours now wandering the silty Lamoille banks, its edges and bridges and trees crammed with tangled branches and uprooted trees, with every imaginable broken bit of junk: kids’ toys and potty seats, tarpapered walls, tires, pipes and plastic bags and slews of clothing. Two cars, one flipped upside down, hammered by boulders, not easily identified as a car.

There’s nothing for me to gain or find here, save for the chance conversations with strangers and acquaintances who appear driven in the same way I am, wading through muddy weeds and beneath fallen trees, insects devouring my ankles. This is the edge territory, where dismal human activity bleeds into the roar of nature. I scramble up the bank and take the long way back to the pavement so I can pass through a thicket of blooming cup flowers, green stalks and golden blossoms taking in my body.

In the New Yorker:

We keep experiencing things that are unprecedented, worse than anything anyone can remember, even as we’re told that they will become common.

Swimming with Goose.

July 23, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I was warned about the sole goose who’s been swimming around the public beach in Caspian. This higher-elevation glacial lake escaped the flood debris.

On the hidden side where I drop my towel, there’s only a couple of teenagers making out on a rock. When I slip into the water, I hear the families and crowds of teens on the distant public beach, the laughing rowdiness of a July Sunday.

The water is far deeper than I’ve ever seen it, choppier, too, but clear and lovely. Although I’m not a strong swimmer, I head far out, beyond the buoyed sailboats into the open lake. The goose bobs along. At first, I hardly notice the long-necked bird, but the floating creature follows me. Our paths nearly collide. We’re so near to each other I’m mesmerized by the bird’s size, its bent neck, the clop and chop of the water against my kicking feet. The beach, the blue sky, the rocky shoreline, vanish. It’s just me and this bird, so real, so unbrokenly true.

Wreckage, Human & Otherwise.

July 21, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

There’s no one around the edges of town on Friday evening, save for a stranger in a brand-new leather jacket. He walks ahead of me.

Two weeks past the July flood, there’s stand-out heroes, and a lot of folks who stepped up in ways that are amazing, admirable, kind of jaw-dropping, honestly. But the flood unearthed all that pandemic misery, and so much more that we’d stuffed down, too. Similar — and yet, different, too. Piece by piece, my state is cleaning, hammering lives back together.

A young fox hurries along the jagged riverbank where lawn now meets abyss. The creature pauses, listens. I’m no threat, me with my hands sunk in my pockets, leaning back on my heels. The fox trots along.

The evening threatens more thunderstorms. I keep thinking of childbirth labor, how those waves of contractions bore me along mightily. Childbirth was the first time I’d understood so inherently that I’m as much a part of the universe as famed Helen of Troy, as that stranger walking ahead of me and disappearing around a broken-down scrapheap of a motel, as you reader, and my dear cats pawing a dropped ball of red yarn. Rain and more rain. Rising rivers. Even as the rain began pelting, I stood there, awestruck.

After the Floods, the Human Conundrum.

July 20, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

This week, I’m driving around a back road, far over the left-hand side, eyeing how a third of the road no longer exists. I’m far off the beaten path, so I don’t hesitate to stop, turn off the Subaru engine, and get out. The road, indeed, has washed elsewhere. The air is thick, sultry in a July way, but suffused with the wildfire smoke we’ve been breathing all summer.

I drive a little further and then drift into a driveway. I know the road drops steeply, and I’ve no intention of heading there. The homeowner is outside, and we talk for a bit, kicking around his view and his calm acceptance of the road’s condition. He asks where all the gravel to repair these roads comes from.

I’m stuck on his thought after this: it’s the human endeavor, the human conundrum. We’re always moving stuff from here to there: in my realm, moving plants from garden to pot, laundry from clothesline to drawers, and then the far larger realm — trees to boards to houses, gravel from pits in the earth to roads. And then the roads wash out.

At home, later that night, I’m still moving things, wool from sheep, to my knitting needles.

Joyous Interlude.

July 18, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

I don’t often post pictures of myself (or family anymore) but here’s a shot of myself and my brother at his brewery in Conway, New Hampshire. For this record, yes, I am this short (and my brother isn’t especially tall, either). In the midst of so much — floods, rains, wildfire smoke, the endless varieties of chaos that track all of us — I’m always happy to head out on a restorative hike.

That evening, we raced ahead of yet more thunderstorms to get to brother’s house, my daughter driving, me in the passenger seat prattling on about whatever, whatever. But isn’t that the way of family? Thank goodness for joyful moments….