Vermont

No Going Back.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

July 1: I’m driving on a back road to a nearby town where there’ll be the traditional New England small town Independence Day festivities, when I suddenly realize I can no longer see the road before me. The road dips down and then rises up. I know this, because I’ve driven this road so many times. I know precisely where to swerve around the persistent pothole where the stream runs under the lowest point of the road. But the rise is hidden in smoke.

The day marks a line for me, a place I won’t forget. I’ve been here before; this is familiar territory. I remember the precise afternoon I knew I would severe my marriage. Likewise, today, it’s clear to me that this smoke, in what will likely be one unimaginable variation after another, will remain.

Nonetheless, I go on into the day, watch the parade with an old acquaintance and we catch up about kids, ruminate about our old college days. I talk to a woman who’s built a house of cans and bottles and tires. She asks me to stop by sometime. Heck, who could pass that up? Of course I will.

Then I’m back home again, working, working, on this third book, taking it apart, sewing it back together, phrase by phrase. I wind in how it feels to walk along the edge of a lake that may not be frozen and thread through the Himalayan blue poppy, a child’s nightgown, pebbles under a clear running stream. I’m after those same old things: how to salvage order and beauty from chaos and destruction and despair. A river of sadness is not the torrents of despair.

Swim. Bartzella peonies. My neighbor leaning out her door, green curlers in her hair, saying hello.

Wildfire Smoke, Vermont.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Smoke from Canadian wildfires suffuses our world, the briefest intimation of so much happening so far away. Sunday afternoon, I crouch in my garden, weeding, while talking on the phone to my brother. When I stand, the sun is a pool, the hue of fresh blood.

Later, before twilight, we swim with a friend, the smoke like a mist. On our way home, my daughter and I drive up the hill across our town, to the hillside where we often walk and look for the sunset. It’s after eight, but these are the longest days of our Vermont year. The sun is utterly absent, swallowed up in smoke and humidity, the light meager as November.

This, she says, is not good.

The following morning, our air clears. At dinner on our porch, a light rain patters. We keep eating, talking a bit here and there, lacing together our days. As for the humidity, I keep thinking…. bring it on. The myriad leaves and blossoms reach out, sucking it up, summer in all its messy intensity.

Ordinary Contentment.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Standing on the street in Greensboro Village, a pickup truck with a trailer full of hay slowly passes by, creaking through the tight curve. In the sultry sunlight, I wait, a shower of chaff drifting over my face, blinding me for just a moment. As I close my eyes, I see one sunburned arm waving through the open pickup window at me.

June. There’s plenty adversity that happens in this month, I’m sure, but the roses are blooming, the fields freshly shorn and growing again, the fledgling robins already swooping from the nest.

Some lines from the incomparable Jane Kenyon this Friday afternoon:

High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Loons, Wiser Than Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Back when my girls were in the early sand bucket age, loons were a rare sight on the lake. The grownups would knock off whatever chat we had going when we spied those distinctive birds — spotted backs, red-eyed. I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw a loon as a girl.

But even now, those calls — how eerie, how utterly mesmerizing, how definitively not of the human world. This afternoon, before a planning commission meeting and just as a little light rain begins, I walk over to that beach where we drank so much coffee. There’s two cars in the parking lot, people staring at the lake and the sky that’s bruised with storm. The loons holler across the rippling water. Vacation in Vermont and you might think summer is all sweetness and ice cream — but here’s a slice of cold rain, those two black-necked beauties, and an infinity of sky.

Conversation in the Moonlight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

At the open hatch of my car, I’m writing a mental grocery list, when something — what it is I don’t immediately know — happens. I’m fucked, I think. I’ve broken my hand.

A pneumatic hatch strut has broken, and is pinned between the hatch and taillight, the plastic light smashed. I turn my hand around and around. My hand suddenly seems very small, utterly familiar, a thing easily ruined.

People walk around me, going in and out of the co-op. Weirdly, I remember a car crash from my twenties when a Subaru Justy ran into my gold Rabbit. My Rabbit was knocked off the road. I got out and ran. The Justy had spun around and around and came to a stop, the wrong way in the middle of the road. No one was around. The Justy’s driver was crying, her window rolled down, saying, “I’ve killed you.” I begged her to get out of the car, leaning towards the Justy in the falling snow but not touching it, saying, “But I’m alive. I’m here.”

In a twist of great good fortune, my hand isn’t broken, only bruised. I go in the co-op and buy scallions and yogurt. The hatch and the strut are an irritation, another thing to sort out and solve, a fixable occurrence.

Later that week, after the dinner guests have left and it’s just me and my daughters and their friends, the five of us pull our chairs around the fire. The neighbors have taken their little kids into bed. The band in the village has quit by then, too, and the frogs are signing again, snippets of frog melodies.

In the darkness, we talk about relationships and marriage, what holds people together, what makes people endure. What makes people split. I toss another chunk of wood on the fire. A glistening half moon hangs over my house. Listening, I turn my hands around and around. So often, my hands are full and busy. Now, the moonlight falls in my open palms.

We keep talking and talking and talking. The moonlight is endless.

Birds are a Kind of Souls.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I’m sitting at the kitchen table talking with my daughter about past, present, future — one or all of those mixed in together; it’s late adolescent talk; the future hovers around us all the time, all day long — when I see a robin swoop up to our porch beam, its beak full of limp weed.

For the first time in the half dozen years we’ve lived here, robins are building a nest a few feet from our kitchen door.

In our other house, robins crafted fat nests in our sugarhouse and under our balcony. We witnessed baby beak feedings and collected blue ragged shells. Twice, a hawk ate fledglings — the course of nature, but sorrowful.

Rain has fallen all day. There’s an underlying promise of deepening green with the rain, but the hours have been cheerless and cold, filled not with any bad news but the accrual of petty things that drag at all our lives.

A robin stands on the porch railing, eyeing us through the glass door. Its mate flies in quickly, busy busy in the nest. Time is of the essence in bird movement. The robins are a little story come to stay with us for a short while.

Build and thrive, I think. Thrive.

“I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls. Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again.” 

— Howard Norman