Vermont

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Watermelon, Luck.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In this early July heat, there’s one clear path of wisdom: subsist on watermelon. So I’m opening my car door in the co-op parking lot when I glance over my shoulder and a friend from long ago is sitting in his pickup beside me, eating a sandwich. I set the melon on my driver’s seat and lean against my car, and we catch up, mostly about kids. I know, in the randomness of what my memory snaps tight, that he’s just about my age, 58, and between us we know plenty—about broken marriages and houses we’ve sold and a terrible tragedy in the town that now lies hovering beneath the surface. He is the kind of father who showed up at school board meetings in dirty t-shirts and wondered, existentially, what was transpiring.

He tells me that he’d just heard that I had (I suppose, technically, do not curse myself, yet still have) cancer. In the fierce sunlight, I cross my arms along his open truck window and tell him what that was like, news of metastatic cancer in the ER, my 19-year-old running out, her sister immediately following, and me in my sweater I’d knit and worn so hard it was felted, in my jeans, with these two strangers, an MD and an RN, and sorrow. Around me, the void. I had been naive for all of my life thus far: the Reaper always surrounds us, escorting us in and out of this world.

It’s July, and I’m well at the moment—so well—full of sass and merriment. The sorrow that wreaths me is not at all my unique terrain. In this parking lot, me still holding a tomato I’d bought, too, and he with that sandwich of shredded lettuce and mayonnaise, we linger, talking, about the ineffable joy of parenting little girls into grown women and its counterpart: grief.

On this eve of this American holiday, maybe lay down the slogans and dictums, speak up or be kind, the opinions and beliefs we hold so dearly. Maybe widen the frame.

He wishes me luck with my new book, and I wish him luck haying. My little town has temporary stoplights as a crew labors to guard against the next flood. Waiting, the scorching air blows into my car, and I blink. What luck. Another day of human life. And watermelon, too.

“Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.”
― Richard Brautigan

Eating Roses.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I’ve just finished stacking a fallen-down section of woodpile when a friend texts and asks if I’m interested in a twilight walk. Heck, yes. With my thumb and fingernail, I snip a rose and carry the fragrant pink beauty cupped in my hand as I walk towards my friend’s house, trailing tender petals.

We meet at a halfway point between our house. To my surprise and delight, she eats the rose.

In the lingering light — June’s gold and green beauty — we walk along the rail trail and pause at the bridge over the river. Leaning on the railing, we talk about all the things — family and money and loneliness — while the river runs over and around the boulders and bends around the forest, heading through the village.

Darkness drifts down when I finally head home through the scent of clipped lawns, the roses along the Catholic parsonage, the seduction of garlic from the downtown restaurant, its door propped open, a woman rubbing a cloth over the bar.

Vermont June. Mighty, magical month.

And…. book launch for Call It Madness, this Tuesday, 7 p.m., hosted by the Galaxy Bookshop at the Jeudevine Memorial Library’s amazing addition. If you’re around, come!

Looking into the Longevity of Our Stories.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Writer Tom McKone called me last week for a CALL IT MADNESS interview. We spoke for longer than either of us had expected, as I leaned over my back porch railings. His review ran in yesterday’s The Bridge. McKone is my ideal reader: curious, thoughtful, precise. Writing a book requires years—years of labor that has zero relevance to a time clock; labor that demands writing through doubt and kismet; labor that gleans from ebullience, nihilism, and that broad plain of gray uncertainty. There’s a splash when a book is released, a flurry, but the goal? The real desire? Have a reader sink into a hammock or lean against a swaying subway wall and read.

An excerpt follows.

“Our memories, where and when we’re born, and our family, social environment, and economic situation can shape who we are,” Stanciu said. Mentioning the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, she said it is very hard to “step out of that repetition of the past,” especially when that past is burdened with poverty and alcohol.

“One of the things I hope people get out of this book is the ability to ask questions (and) to be curious,” she said. “Why do people act the way they do? What do I not understand about them — both when they behave well and when they behave in infuriating ways? I think it’s always been a relevant question, but it’s super relevant right now — not to see each other in two-dimensional ways, but to really look into the longevity of our stories.”

On the Road…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My twenties were years of road tripping, Vermont to Washington state, lots of New Mexico, sleeping in the back of our black diesel VW Rabbit, 55 mpg, our Rand McNally shedding pages. Thirties were babies and learning to garden, raising high the roof beams, forties the scrambling decade of parenting alone and keeping kids shod and fed. Fifties, kids are paddling their own lives, and yet we’re tight, tight; cancer survivorship schooled us rapidly in what’s dear and what’s so easily lost.

Among these decades, my own unbroken thread of writing. Road trip with a self-made atlas.

A beloved friend hops into my car. We lived on the same dirt road for years. I would phone and say, It’s sleeting. Come walk with me. She was always game. This late afternoon, I drive south, that too familiar journey of Route 15 and I-91, heading towards Dartmouth-Hitchcock, but I park in pretty Hanover, NH, where I’ve been invited to read from Call It Madness — a title that reflects my own life — madness, madness, everywhere — both the crazy-making of divorce and cancer but also my own fierceness for my dear ones, for literature and the roses blooming around my house and the precipice I tread between ebullience and the frigid teeth of despair.

The loveliest of evenings at Still North Books. My reading companion, Shasta Grant, is true and gifted, the bookstore staff warm, the audience curious and kind. My friend and I are the last to leave, save for the cheery folks folding the chairs and emptying our water cups. I drive north into the night. The sun dwindles into gold and pink. We talk about cars and money, kids of course, drinking and books and death.

She gives me her apple. I eat and drive. Thirty years into our friendship, as the darkness folds around us, I think, What a long way we have come. In my driveway, we linger, the car’s engine clicking as it cools, the fireflies flickering. How happy I am to begin my own hand-crafted book tour for Call It Madness. In my youth, those decades when I leaned so hard into my life I hardly brushed my hair, I believed my life would flatten, temper into quietness. Oh friends, the world’s depths are revealed as bottomless crevasses and immense peaks, largely unknowable. What’s knowable is the stickiness of that apple’s juice on my fingers, the darting fireflies, the answer I gave to a stranger’s question at the end of the Still North Books reading: “My real flaw was cowardice.” I’ve long ago abandoned the flimsiness of that forgiveness concept, for myself or others. Life propels onward, word by word, sunset to sunrise, companionship in all weather.

A few things…. I’ll be on Bon Mot on Central Vermont Radio, Sunday, June 21, 5 p.m. Call It Madness book launch Tuesday, June 30, 7 p.m., at the Jeudevine Memorial Library in Hardwick, Vermont, sponsored of course by the hometown and most stellar Galaxy Bookshop.

Survive, professor! That’s all you really have to do. Keep the grass from creeping into eh carrots, deal with the woodchuck stealing the apples, patch up the pipes! — Makenna Goodman

Gravy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the town where I work, the summer folks haven’t yet returned. By chance, on a rural road around the lake, I meet a builder. “Hey!” he calls to me, and I can hear the surprise in his voice. You’re alive? I am, indeed, yes.

Around us, a sugar snow melts. Sunlight falls through the trees that are a month out, at least, from this year’s first nubs of leaves. Behind him, the silent snow-covered lake. We kick around, as Vermonters do, what it’s like to live in our Green Mountain state right now, how hot passions run, how immediately aid is given to a neighbor in need. What it’s like to live in the crumbling of the American Empire, a madman at the helm. In a copse of cedars, blackbirds chorus.

Precisely one year ago, I could not walk outside my house alone. Ravaged by cancer and chemo and hunger, I was so weak I trembled, on the verge of falling. A rattle of bones, scraps of flesh.

On this clearing day, on my way home, I stop by the co-op and buy two pears. I lay these on the seat of my car and dart across Main Street to the post office. Without realizing it, I’m running. As I leap onto the sidewalk, I marvel at the pleasure of movement, the sun in my short hair, my cheeks wind-burnt from a recent long walk along a muddy backroad. I took the time to stand before a tree of chittering goldfinches.

All this week I’ve been reading Robert Frost, perhaps my mother’s favorite poet. A poet who wrote of stone walls and apple picking and the ineffable darkness of human life. But here’s a poem to celebrate today, this day, no matter where or who you are, by Ray Carver who knew the great symphony of life, too.

Gravy

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”