writing

Geometry.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Strangely warm weather prevails. 28 years ago when I moved northward from southern Vermont, snow fell by the end of October and stayed until April. That April, I walked in a warm rain and wondered if I had made a mistake.

This afternoon, red clover in the fields, Johnny-jump-ups in the garden. I walked to the co-op and paid my tab and bought a loaf of bread for dinner with a crosshatch baked into its crust. At the register, we talked about the mysteries of calculus. Someone wondered if a radius calculation — r = √(A / π) — meant the center would never reach the edge of the circle, as π is an infinity? I volunteered to phone my brother or father and then steered the conversation to the surely more pressing question of color. Through the co-op’s wide windows, the autumn twilight sprinkled down in its charming way that intimated of the night’s stars yet to come, its gray scattershot with the remnants of this summer’s lingering gold leaves.

I went out and slipped through the side streets and up the hill behind the house that was once a nursery school. A woman with New York plates sat in her car at the ballfields, talking on her phone, staring up through the windshield at the turkey vultures circling over the pines where they nest.

Home again, I stood on the back porch and drank a glass of water. Dead curled leaves sprinkled the back deck.

Will the center reach the edge? Surely, a question of importance.

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” 

— Van Gogh

Stitch, Stitch.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the days shorten, I appraise my woodpile. Borrow knitting needles. Read outside in my coat, the sun on my face. Our cats sprawl before the wood stove, savoring radiant feline bliss.

My brother comes to visit for my daughter’s final soccer game. Nine years of games and uniform washing, and I still don’t understand fully the rules of the game. Vs of geese cross the sky. As we idle afterwards, talking, a flock of starlings sweeps low over our heads and disappears around the school.

Back at our house, I gather my things from the car — my jacket, her gifts of balloons and chocolates, the signs her sister made. Photographs. Near sunset, the sky is a luminescent pink that will endure for a few minutes, no more. Their coach, son of glassblowers, made each of the senior girls a glass. In our kitchen, we admire my daughter’s beautiful gift. I wonder how she will fill it.

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” 

― Vincent Van Gogh

Voyages, Tiny & Massive.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As has been noted repeatedly in our house — the cats live in their own sleeping and dreaming schedule, small world within our world. My daughter, heading out early to work, remarks about this again.

October, and the days shorten daily. I’m awake in the dark with the full moon and a radiance of clouds passing over our house. The cats appreciate their full bowls, and I stir the wood stove’s ashes, grateful for the bone-dry wood I lay on the embers.

As I make coffee, I remember strands of a conversation I had yesterday with someone I’ve known peripherally for years. His parents met in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. We swap stories for a bit, and I tell him about my grandparents who immigrated from Romania. He spoke Hungarian as a child and later returned to the country and relearned, to an extent, his original language.

My cats oversee what I’m doing with the wood stove (proprietary as always about their heat source). The acquaintance and I mused for a bit about the loss of language in the Great American Empire, the great push for conformity. But that’s facile, too. Our ancestors lived in harder times and sought reasonable things — a steadier life, a solid home, maybe even peace.

All afternoon, I pull up frost-killed flower stalks and bury hard knots of bulbs — narcissus and crocus. My hands stain with soil. The sunlight is radiant but thin now, scant. The fatness of spring looms so distantly that these bulbs I plant don’t even seem a promise. Walking around, appraising, I note the barn needs painting. Next spring, I think. Get on it then.

…. And a quote from Laurence Bergreen’s phenomenal book Columbus: The Four Voyages.

To his Sovereigns and their ministers, it was intended as a landgrab and a way to plunder gold. Instead, it became, through forces Columbus inadvertently set in motion and only dimly understood, the most important voyage of its kind ever made.

Autumn, Moon, Small Town.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

While my daughter washes the dinner dishes, I head out for coffee. That morning, I finished the last of the grounds. I pull on a sweater and cut through the back woods to the cemetery. A gibbous waxing moon hangs like a splash of cream over the cemetery and keeps me company as I cut through the elementary kids’ ballfield.

As I walk down a side street, I see the co-op below, lit in the falling twilight. Last year, the co-op moved from its tiny Main Street store — packed literally to the ceiling with stuff — to a much larger boxy grocery store around the corner. A number of years ago, the co-op quit selling bottled water after a staff member complied compelling reasons to quit. Instead, the co-op offered cups of free water. Now, the co-op sells local veggies and cheese and meat and wine and so on — and Cocoa Puffs.

As a long-term co-op shopper, I’ll simply note that people don’t know how to use this larger parking lot. For whatever reason, we keep tangling up ourselves, backing out into Route 15, nearly colliding.

In the parking lot, I stand for a moment, admiring the moon and the scent of autumn. All day, the sun has shone brilliantly, unseasonably hot, and rain will be pushing in Friday. The man who lives in the apartment across the street opens the co-op door and gestures for me to walk in ahead of him. We stand talking for a few moments about that drop-of-cream moon and how the scent of fallen leaves reminds us of childhood.

Peak Foliage, Thursday 1:35 p.m.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

… or so I predict. Such a silly thing. The branches of some trees have already blown bare, others are just beginning their radiance. It’s later that the torches of tamaracks will begin.

On these stunningly beautiful autumn days, the cats and I wake early. They’re easily satisfied with a few morsels of cat food, a rub on their furry heads, a few more sticks in the wood stove. The two of them stretch on the rug before the stove, worshipping.

Daughter and I go about our day. Coffee and dishes and firewood. At night, I dream of spring peepers.

Here’s not the famous lines from Robert Frost that rattle through my mind these days. Instead, Ezra Pound:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Gifts.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Before I leave for the North Danville Library on Tuesday, I sit for a moment with my daughter at our kitchen table. She eats a quesadilla, and we talk about things that matter — who’s behaving in what way and why that might be. The rain has knocked off for a bit, and I drive the way I often knit, more by feel and memory than anything else.

At this time of year, the farm fields are their deepest green. Sunflowers appear in gardens and along houses, their yellow leaves weathered by cold nights. I passed the house where my former sister-in-law lived when her four children were little. In the backyard, we built a playhouse. Her oldest daughter slept in the upstairs bedroom, and milk trucks rumbled down the road in the very early mornings.

The Brainerd library is housed in a former schoolhouse. I parked and stood for a moment in the lot shared by the library and a church. Cows ambled in the field behind the parking lot. Across the street, children pushed each other in a swing hung in an enormous tree. I imagined these were a few after-dinner moments gleaned in the falling twilight before bedtime.

I had been generously invited to talk and read a little about my book Unstitched. Driving over, I remembered the two years I spent writing this book, much of these hours at my kitchen table. Writing a book can be such a long and lonely process. So these moments of connection and resonance, of meeting readers and other writers, are manna to my soul. The library was well-cared for and had a real sense of so much living that had happened in those walls.

Unstitched is about hard things — addiction and guilt, poverty and illness. But I left that night and drove back home along the roads that had no traffic with my heart full of happiness kindled by an evening of literature and discussion and homemade cookies in a beautiful library with kind people. At home, the stars sprinkled over the sky, and the night was still warm enough that I could pretend winter was not in the near offing. Inside, my daughter and I picked up our conversation where we had left off.