Vermont

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.”

Tangled Wild.

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A little rain falls when I’m done with work for the day, nearly seven in an evening filled with August’s sultriness. There’s no one in the electric department parking lot where I swap jeans for running shorts, and then head on the stony trail through the woods and down to the river.

August, the growing of weed and tended garden finished for this season. The apples are reddening. The blackberries that remain on the vine burst with juice, sweetness on the verge of rot.

I cross the river. Raindrops pebble its slow surface. I loop behind the old yellow barn that houses a warehouse of local cheese, then circle around the osprey nests where the Black River pools behind an old dam. My t-shirt is damp with sprinkles of rain and my sweat. Grateful I am to a friend who appeared with a glass cup of echinacea this week. In the spring, I’d mused that, a year out from cancer treatment, that was as far back as I would come. “Really?” she mused quietly. “You might question that.” Now here I am, running around the edges of this village, along this rain-kissed goldenrod.

Anne Sexton wrote about “the awful rowing towards God,” a poet I read in grad school, a woman crazed by not one simple cause. For so many years, I clenched my wooden oars, my rowboat with my children circling in eddies, plunged through rapids, in a journey breathcatching sometimes from fear and uncertainty, sometimes through the sheer awesomeness of the vaulting night sky, the companions of swimming dolphins.

Much as I chafe against a linear view of time, I see myself running around the brackish reservoir, then along the gentle slope back to my car and the mason jar of water I’ve left there to quench my thirst. I run with my whole story a whirlwind in my body and mind, known and unknown. Surely, as we rush headlong forwards, we’re always going backwards, too. And yet we row on, the work of this mortal life.

Oh, Anne Sexton, with her unhappy demise. Two years ago, I often ran along this path and discovered wild grapes down an embankment. The rain paused, I scramble through weeds. The grapes are there again this late summer. I gather these sweetly tart beauties in the hem of my t-shirt. Eating, I walk along the path, studying the soot-stained clouds. My friend with a new baby in a stroller appears around a bend. I offer this young mother a handful of grapes, and she spits seeds into the trailside milkweed. Sweaty from August and running, I bend down to admire the babe. Scuttling clouds are reflected in the child’s luminescent eyes, her smile quicksilver as a rainbow trout in a rushing mountain stream.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet…
This story ends with me still rowing. — Anne Sexton

Courage Crumbs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I began my Call It Madness book tour on a steamy June evening, traveled all summer around the state and into New Hampshire, and ended in Greensboro, a ten-minute drive north of where I live, on a late afternoon, the August day promising coolness as the day ended, a room full of people I know and some I don’t know. I was graced with affection and curiosity.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family make this trek with me, take time from their lives — and sometimes I traveled alone — that well of solitude that both sustains and sometimes frightens me.

At this last reading, in the town where I walked around the lake, beginning to write Call It Madness in my mind, think through this story of a farm lost four generations ago and a young, rough-edged woman seeking her own salvation, the audience asked thoughtful questions. At one point, I heard myself say, when I had cancer, and of course that is not true. The pronunciation of cure, if I am so fortunate, is far yet in the future. But looking around the room, I knew pieces of so many people’s lives — losses of their own dear ones, of addiction and financial duress, of the persistence of juggling a creative life and earning a living.

This morning, reading David Biro‘s One Hundred Days, I chance upon his words (as a physician and patient of a rare blood disorder) that medicine is art and science. I benefitted from both: decades and decades of painstaking research provided me treatment and the complex art of my oncologist ushered me through the nightmare of that treatment. In the deepest nadir, he appeared at my bedside at a time when numbers meant nothing to me: before dawn or late evening, or maybe noon. I told him I didn’t think I could continue, and he simply studied me, silently, while I scraped down into that threadbare pocket of my courage and pulled out another crumb. He waited for my resolve to thicken.

Likewise — and yet utterly different — writing. Late August, the crickets singing down the end of summer, I’ve lucky to have a house of family and friends this weekend, and then perhaps some lying in the sun, reading my way through the stack of books I’ve acquired on my bookstore tour. I’d imagined my fifties as a decade of some calm after kid-rearing, divorce and the scramble to set my girls and myself steadily in a beloved house, on a financial footing where I was not always chewing a thumbnail. Instead: a life like a bouquet of sunflowers, staggeringly beautiful, the leaves’ edges fading.

After reading, I stood in the parking lot with a friend, our conversation continuing in the way of friends who have known each other for years. For this moment, I relished how I felt held in this Vermont village, one blossom in a handful of so much.

“At these moments sufferers desperately want to escape from their holes, the silence and loneliness, and return to the world we share with others…” David Biro

Jam of August…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My youngest and I hike in a nearby state park that, as a family, we’ve visited for years—Elmore Mountain. Mid-August, in frothy opulence, does not disappoint: rocky mountain path surrounded by leafy forest, summit view, lake, the nearby store where I once bought my daughters ice cream cones and we now eat sandwiches. The trueness of hunger, the satisfaction of satiation.

Fellow novelist Catherine Tudish and I make the long trek to Manchester, Vermont, to read at Northshire Bookstore. There and back, hours filled with writing talk, life stories, the fried dumplings we eat at a fancy bar, the lingering hours at the bookstore’s closing, me buying one and then two books, stashing these in my bag. We talk and talk as the twilight slides into darkness. I laugh and say two days from now maybe we’ll still be driving around Vermont, and Catherine gently prods me to turn left, go right…

Later, after I leave her at her farmhouse and the massive hydrangea — white shot through with pink — shimmering in my headlights, I listen to the Rolling Stones, and now I am keenly intent on the back road through the darkness, cell-free Vermont, navigating by the few road signs I pass. I’ve driven here, but never in the impenetrable darkness. The night is hourless, and I’m giddy, sunroof open, car heater on, giddy not with any kind of writerly fame but enmeshed in this road and this darkness that I know will of course inevitably end somewhere. Giddy with the joy of my third book that has now reached bookshelves, the story of my troublesome main character Avah Lavoie a rough-edged young woman in search of her own coarse salvation. The novel begins in a sour hangover and ends in hunger: appetite.

Home, gracious I’m tired, but I stand holding my books and wallet and looking up at the constellations in their complex gauze, the Milky Way’s arc, bridged over my house and garden, apple trees and that giant goatsbeard and compass flowers shadowy creatures. The thin thread of crickets. I’m furiously hungry.

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner