Vermont

The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In a gray drizzle/not quite drizzle, I stop outside the co-op to talk, my hands full with peaches, mozzarella, and Clif bars for my daughter’s hike the next day. The prediction is for temps at high elevation in the thirties.

My conversation companion is a woman I run into randomly, usually on the sidewalk, and inevitably we jump right into talking. It’s August and dreary with wildfire smoke and a sudden cold rain. My hands are full with those peaches and sweets, so I’m blinking in the misting rain. I’m laughing a little, because why not? but I sharpened up quickly as she’s not laughing at all. The strange thing is she’s listing some things that have been rattling around in my mind for months now – the collective frustration that bends dialogue to anger or sarcasm, the way the town’s Center Road is so unkempt grass grows through its middle, and the recent property tax bills that are are you kidding me?

And even though my daughter is at home waiting for the cheese for that pizza we’ll make from onions and basil and tomatoes I’ll snag from the garden, I leave my few groceries in my Subaru and follow my companion through the damp woody patch behind the co-op. We stand at the river’s edge. She leans far out over the water. Look, she says.

It’s drizzling, and even though I’d gone running just before stopping in for what I thought would be a few minutes’ worth of shopping I’m starting to shiver a little. But I have this sudden vision of what’s happening with this town where I live, how the river threatens to wash away this downtown of brick and granite and asphalt, trees and roses. Years ago I realized that brokenness is never one thing; all these unfixable things – climate swings and decades (centuries?) of ill-use and reliance on the Feds to fund these fixes, when that amorphous federal government… well, why say more there?

A few years back, I interviewed a well-known writer who advised me that a writer should always acknowledge her time and place. The rain’s fattening. The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible. At home, our kitchen is warm and bright, and the cats are half-sleeping as cats do on the rug before the kitchen sink. I’ve always believed in domesticity as the antidote to the world’s inevitable callousness. Later, I wander over to the neighbor’s house and lean in her doorway for a bit. We talk randomly about nothing much at all, catbirds and rose thorns, no repair, but a strengthening of heart, surely.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it….

“Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney

Immensity taps at your life…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Nearing the end of August, the wild around our village house is mightily fortressing. The path behind our house has been given up this summer by friends; those who visit arrive via the street where the grass has broken the pavement, too, crisscrossed the gray with emerald. In the ravine behind our house, the foxes have kitted again this year. Randomly, the youngsters come out to chase each other. My daughter, who unexpectedly met the hissing mama fox, gave up that path a few years back. Only I now claw my way through the blackberry brambles, whistling, scraping my bare knees in some kind of penance for passing through their realm.

This year, while the human world on a great and local level has worked at its less admirable traits, the natural world has flourished. My daughters and I hold the apples and pears, gauging not yet, not yet. All around, a rioting of blossom and vine of what I’ve sown — sunflowers and morning glories, love lies bleeding — and the lushness of goldenrod, wild honeysuckle, creeping cucumber.

Oh, sweet illusion of Vermont’s August, as if stark November will skip her own visit this year….. On this dewy morning, smoke-drenched from wildfires so far distantly north, a favorite poem from Jane Hirshfield.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield

Keeping On….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

I drive home from a Selectboard meeting with my friend the moon who hangs over the dark mountain ridge, a creamy misshapen teardrop shot-through with crimson. It’s me and her. The clouds have scrimmed low enough that the Milky Way does not join our duet.

My house glows when I return home. The girls have chopped up the cherry tomatoes I left on the table and added these sweet chunks to couscous they bought in Santa Fe and cooked on their camping trip (and why do I never cook couscous, anyway?) The girls are familiar with the town and the people where I work. I tell stories about who’s there and what’s happening — the nuts-and-bolts of local truckers who’ve appeared for the bid openings, hoping to score more work — a man who lives nearby, has no electricity, comes to use the internet, and wanders in and out, curious, offering a few comments. People are angry about all kinds of things, the sheriff’s there and then not-there, a man yells, the chair regains control, decisions are made, bids are granted, that FEMA word with its trailing uncertainties rises and falls. There’s a pause about a bridge washed out in last year’s flood with a replacement price tag that’s beyond comprehension. A board member and I whisper commiseratingly about the days when we shared homemade cookies at meetings while kicking around decisions. He’s heading fishing this week.

The girls eat up my stories, share their own stories of their day. In the humid night, we stand on the back deck, listening to the foxes bark in the ravine, the crickets sizzle away these final summer days. The girls head out for a walk, in search of the moon and some adventure. My cat follows me as I walk around the house picking up dropped socks and empty bowls, clattering forks in the kitchen sink. Forget about national politics for a bit. It’s the same human stories: the mixture of ego and thrumming anger, a knight-like determination to serve others, the uncertainties of how do we get along?

The foxes keep at it. Eventually, I sleep, too, wake in the murky darkness, fed my cats, and then I keep on, too….

A real clusterfuck of thinking…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Hurrying from one thing to another, I detour to my favorite swimming pond, under these overcast skies. A woman and a little girl are swimming. There’s no one else around, and the woman and I chat about the fish nibbling our toes. The girl sits on a floatie shaped like a chocolate ice cream cone and looks skeptically at us, as if her mother and I might be making up everything. Maybe, in truth, our toes are bleeding from fish fangs. The child is taking no chances. She leans back on the floatie and stares up at the sky. Her mother gently pushes her from shore.

I swim out.

My head is jammed with the conversation I just had over Pad Thai, three of us women, about writing and Vermont and friendships, about money, of course, always about money, how money winds into decisions we make. These are old conversations, worked out in new ways. As I drift out in the cold water, I keep thinking about all the material I’ve been reading about rivers and history, about farming and logging hands on the land, 100, 200 years ago, how what made sense then (sense? perhaps even seemed downright innovative, bordering darn smart) has piled up over these generations of rivers, now dredged too deep, the roads and the towns built far too near.

Because my mind works in metaphors, I keep thinking how years pile up mistakes, one after another, a real clusterfuck of thinking. There’s no one else around in the water save for me and the mother and girl. They’re both lying on their backs on the ice cream floatie now, circling around, the mother’s heels trailing in the water. All those summer days I spent at the beach with my daughters, with plastic shovels and buckets, with the sleeves of red cups that I used at the farmers’ market back in the days when I sold homemade root beer floats, $2.75 per cup…. The kids are now all (mostly) grownup, as happens. Maybe those years were nothing more than a light way to pass the days, insubstantial as dreams.

I swim out as far as I can bear in the cold water. When I return, the beach is empty. Clouds have pushed down low, and the sand is clammy. On my short walk back, two bikers ask me for directions. Go west, I advise. That’s the way out of here.

All kinds of summer rains…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Too stormy to swim on Sunday, I take up a new friend’s offer to walk the trails she’s cut on her property. Her property is off a back road, with a gorgeous view into the valley where the Lamoille River is barely beginning to fatten its strength.

The trails wind down through the woods, studded with white quartz on either side, so gleaming the rocks appear to have been freshly washed. On the verge of rain, the forest is still. In a kind of labyrinth, I walk over springy moss, beneath leaning cedars, around a former beaver pond now dense with green. At the far end, I lean against a great pine, bark rough through my t-shirt.

Rain begins, pattering through the canopy, then soaking me by the time I’ve returned to my Subaru parked at the edge of the road. I’m so soaked the windshield scrims over with fog. But the time the glass clears and I’m on my way, the rain has stopped, the sun burst through the pearly clouds. In no rush, I pull over and walk along the road, admiring the luminescent rainbow, one end in a leafy hedgerow of maples.

Sunday afternoon, rural Vermont, there’s no one around. I keep walking, thinking about a conversation I had recently with a geologist about what’s happening in Vermont. He’d stepped away from a conference to answer my questions for an essay I’m writing, and gently pointed out that the concatenation of flooding and heavy rainfalls and the great shifting around of debris has been human-caused, not by the folks who live on slopes or streams, but collectively.

His voice is persistent, filled with facts, but also not despair; we need to be cognizant, wide awake, look lively. His voice reminded me of what a good summer’s rainstorm used to be, not so long ago. You might sit on the covered steps of your back porch, listening to the rain gather strength to satisfy your kale and broccoli, the thirsty hydrangeas.

The rainbow winks out, and I head home, carrying with me the memory of those silvery cedars, a few chips of pine bark nestled in my hair.

A sense of urgency…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My youngest and I are watching a track-and-field race in the Olympics when a commentator remarks that a runner needs to up her sense of urgency to medal. In the humid night, the fan whirring through the crickets’ amped-up August songs, I keep riffing on the sense of urgency… My god, what does that actually mean?

Early August, and I always remember Hayden Carruth’s poem “August 1,” its line: The world is a/complex fatigue. Which perhaps sums up these days, so humid the yellow coreopsis flowers gleam, the cats sprawl on the kitchen floor, hungry for coolness. This summer has been fat with growth, the butternut and walnut trees I planted seven years ago spreading into their own canopy, already offering shade for me to lie beneath, as I read in the late afternoons.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll look back at this year as it’s own of kind of waiting — which way will this world tip? Even as I’m busy, busy with my urgency of work and gardening, my perpetual lists, of finish these three projects and then paint the back of the house, the outside world burrows in. Some of this is our own story, as my daughter heads back to college soon, but some are my own observations — the two battered cars crammed along the riverbank from the last flood, the perpetual national dialogue — and my wondering, which way might this go?

Urgency, raw want. At the farmers market, I see my daughters’ father across the field, appeared again from wherever he’s hidden. I hold a hot cardboard box of dumplings while the market crowd swirls around me. I turn to talk with a friend and when I look back again, he’s disappeared. Meanwhile, dumplings and curry in my hands: the urgency of eating, the words and life we’ll share over this savory meal, this evening, these moments.

August First

Late night on the porch, thinking

of old poems. Another day’s

work, another evening’s,

done. A large moth, probably

Catocala, batters the screen,

but lazily, its strength spent,

its wings tattered. It perches

trembling on the sill. The sky

is hot dark summer, neither

moon nor stars, air unstirring,

darkness complete; and the brook

sounds low, a discourse fumbling

among obstinate stones. I

remember a poem I wrote 

years ago when my wife and

I had been married twenty-

two days, an exuberant

poem of love, death, the white

snow, personal purity. now

I look without seeing at

a geranium on the sill;

and, still full of day and evening,

of what to do for money,

I wonder what became of

purity. The world is a 

complex fatigue. The moth tries

once more, wavering desperately

up the screen, beating, insane,

behind the geranium. It is an

immense geranium,

the biggest I’ve ever seen,

with a stem like a small tree

branching, so that the two thick arms

rise against the blackness of

this summer sky, and hold up

ten blossom clusters, bright bursts

of color. What is it — coral,

mallow? Isn’t there a color

called “geranium”? No matter.

They are clusters of richness

held against the night in quiet

exultation, five on each branch,

upraised. I bought it myself

and gave it to my young wife

years ago, in a plastic cup

with a 19cent seedling

from the supermarket, now

so thick, leathery-stemmed,

and bountiful with blossom.

The moth rests again, clinging.

The brook talks. The night listens.