Vermont

Seven years ago…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Seven years ago, my daughters and I moved from a rural hillside down to a village, about five miles away. I’d closed midweek, with plans to rally help for a Sunday move. The evening that I closed, two friends who had followed the jagged path of my divorce loaded up my car and their cars, and we carried in the first load of my family’s belongings.

It was heavenly June, warm without undue heat. I had no furniture. A friend had brought dinner, and we sat on the back deck, eating and talking. I wondered, which way would my story go? Last night, I remembered this first meal here, when a neighbor stopped by with cake and rhubarb sauce: how complicated life is and, sometimes, how very simple.

Now, in this beginning to a lush summer, I water my seedlings in these early mornings, listening to the birds and spring crickets, the drenching dew over my bare toes. The spinach is already wilting. The tithonia drooped dramatically, beginning for extra water. The blueberries have hard knots nestled among their leaves.

So much of life seems impossible — birth a baby, endure a divorce, survive a death, write a book, write another, pack up a house and move (bring the beloved tricycle, too) — and yet we do these things. We all do these things.

Seven years ago, would I have seen myself watering the sprouting green beans and listening to a woman on my neighbors’ porch sing the blues, the sky streaked with turquoise and crimson? I gathered a bowl of strawberries from plants I’ve let run rampart all through my garden beds. Messy, weedy. My youngest was given these plants when she weeded as an odd job in middle school. This year, the plants have given us so much sweetness.

Record temps are moving into Vermont, the world shifting rapidly. Around the globe and in my town, people are on the move. Which way will this story go? For a moment, I gather berries in the dewy morning. So much more day to come. But a steady start, my soles on the damp soil.

Bone Marrow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The co-op cashier confides to me as she rings up my tomato and a loaf of bread that she loves this weather — brilliant sun interspersed with downpours. “Must be the Irish in me.”

The past few weeks have been a kind of July bonus: great growth in early June. My apple trees brushed out. I’ve placed an old desk and weathered chair on my covered porch. Recently, carrying out my laptop, I saw the desk sprinkled with gold pollen as if magic had swept through in the night. What luck, I thought, sat down and sneezed, worked.

I am of the wary bent, not to crow, don’t reveal a royal flush, a full house, for god’s sake don’t invite in bad fortune. At the little farmstand around Woodbury Lake, I park and walk behind the dilapidated barn towards the greenhouses, in search of a few more flowers for my garden, to fatten out the echinacea the groundhogs ate last year. In the tiny house, a dog barks. The farmer steps out and calls to me, my former library patron. He sings, “I’m saying it! I’m loving this.”

His words, not mine. Mine are this: in this northern realm, take in the sun and the green, store these gems in your marrow.

Don’t confuse hunger with greed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At breakfast, I mention to my daughter that June 6, today, is D-Day. I’ll write what perhaps she would not want me to write: that she’s standing at the counter making avocado toast and drinking yesterday’s cold coffee. She pours sriracha over the cut avocado. She’s 19, and, lord, a sheer miracle of youth, this gorgeous young woman.

I say, The soldiers were your age. Younger.

We stand staring at each other in our small kitchen of June sunlight. On our table lies a pile of unopened mail, our tabby cat Acer grooming his whiskers, car keys and lip balm, a hunting knife that could extract a man’s heart.

In the evening, I’m at the local arts center to see Nora Jacobson‘s documentary about poet Ruth Stone. The evening is still light when I drive home. I take the long way and pull over beside a field to admire the ragged robin, its pink spreading where the dandelions have gone to seed and green. In my Subaru, it’s me and that box of my mother’s ashes. I once knew a woman who kept her stepfather’s ashes for three years in a Datsun. Impossible, I thought. Now, I think, Sure, possible.

A day of such historical might, such profound sorrow. Yet, our own domestic dramas, the kitchen table stories: how real and meaningful these are, too. As a woman, as a writer, I’ve been thinking for weeks about Ruth Stone’s admonition: “Don’t confuse hunger with greed;/And don’t wait until you are dead.” In my garden, I grab a branch of lilac – the goregous white double blossoms, withering with rot – and breathe in the sweet fragrance.

There is only the wearing away,

The changing of means.

From Ruth Stone’s “Speculation”

Pay it forward: a debt.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the local coffeeshop, a stranger kicks up a conversation, and we bat around our mutual appreciation for this early summer – the blossoms profuse. He buys his order and adds my coffee, too. Pay it forward, he says, and vanishes into the morning.

I take my coffee to the courtyard down the street, empty at this time of day. Ahead of me, after this bench work stint, the day sprawls. I move from eddy to eddy.

In the late morning, a friend I haven’t seen in a few years calls. I’m now in a dim basement room. As we talk, our conversation dips into the past. I feel as if I’m lifting silty strands of stories, stringing them through my hands, searching for clues to tie pieces together.

All day long, I ponder our conversation, how the actions of one person ripple through friends and acquaintances, shift through strangers’ lives, how I’ve always been interested in this since I was a teenager, holed up in my parents’ hammock, reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Later in the day, still stuck on this, I stack firewood, listening to news about the Trump trial. In the hot June sunlight, the freshly cut wood is redolent with sap. An earthworm wriggles. The neighbor boys bike into my driveway, circle around through the grass, ever curious about whatever mundane thing I’m doing. Overhead, those turkey vultures circle their late afternoon sweep, ever hungry. Little snapshot of my terrain.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story.

— John Steinbeck

Playing cards, considering remains.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the darkness, I slide the barn door shut. The world is redolent with cut grass, the wet earth where I watered grape vines. Embers flicker in the fire pit; low laughter moves through the night. June, oh loveliest June, endless varieties of leaf and blossom.

On a hike, we meet a stranger from Maine, and we swap stories about climate change and marriage. He sees my brother’s dog has no water, and shares what he’s carried for his dog. The afternoon gleams with storybook colors of emerald, cobalt, gold. We drive to the lake, to the general store, to a brewery where we sit outside. My brother drinks beer. My daughter and I sip lemon sodas from stemmed glasses, so sweetly yellow I imagine my hand cups sunlight.

I have my mother’s ashes in my possession. Our conversation bends back again and again to her ashes and her life, and the very different relationship that each of us had with her. Lacking a religious framework, I’m treading in open water. My mother, in fact, might have been fiercely opposed to the chain of circumstances that landed me keeper of her remains, or not. I am her second daughter, her match in stubbornness.

All day long, this tender beginning to June, we do the things we love to do. We drink coffee and eat buttered toast, play cards. The sunlight crosses over my house. The day is both chilly and hot. The days spin on, rich with the illusion that there is no finality. Mercy, I think, shutting the barn door to keep the raccoons from the recycling. Another day, the nightsongs of frogs serenading.

Garden, fence, lilacs, vultures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Last spring, a late frost ate the lilacs, death-knelled a young apple tree. Not so, this year. All morning, I work on the back porch, the pollen sifting over my keyboard and laptop screen, the scent of lilacs surrounding our house. May is the brand-new season of pea shoots and asparagus, of peony buds and bleeding hearts.

In the late afternoon, my daughter finds me in garden and salvages the fence from bedstraw and witchgrass. Our garden abuts a town cemetery, fenced by metal and lilacs. On this holiday weekend, the cemetery is busy. As we work, talking, we spy folks wandering through, some tending graves, others gathering handfuls of lilacs or wandering about some other business.

I’m at the early summer gardening place of great good cheer: so much is possible this year. My daughter — a grownup now, but a young grownup — works easily and happily. We’ll share dinner soon, feed our two tabbies, and my daughter will disappear with friends and her swimming suit. I’ll walk into the cemetery and, lured by the scent of lilacs, keep on for a bit. The turkey vultures, maybe a few dozen, will circle low over my head. Then eventually I’ll head down to the village, and the birds and I will part ways.

In these early summer days, I think about my mother all the time. I live in a house that she visited only once. I live a life she did not understand at all. And yet, as I scissor bouquets of lilacs to bring to a friend, as I stand barefoot in my garden deciding to sow sunflowers here, plant basil there, I know these are things my mother loved keenly: the lushness of blossoms, the vim to create a garden.