Promises.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A thunderstorm rumbles in early Saturday morning, in that darkest spot before dawn. We’re nearly at the solstice, and the days are long and lovely, full of just the right amount of warmth. Our Vermont world is in bloom.

The rain this morning is welcome. When the downpour passes, I lie in bed beside the open window, listening to the pattering of a gentle rainfall on the leaves of the mock orange below my window. In bloom now, its flowers are white as snow.

In my memory runs a few lines from an Eric Clapton song. The day before, I had driven to St. Johnsbury, a road I had often driven when I was first married. As I crested a mountain, VPR cut out, and that song came over my radio, scratchy. Long ago, we had a second-hand turntable, and a few cast-off records, and that album we played over and over.

The thing is, I didn’t like the album much at all, but I gradually came to like it, maybe simply through habit. That one sweet song had always been my favorite. Now, over the radio, my past returned, fuzzy and unclear, but never forgotten.

A year ago, George Floyd had recently been murdered, his death replayed endlessly around the planet. Riots erupted around the country. Now, under a different administration, Juneteenth is honored.

So much. All that great wash of the past — from immense societal waves to the tiny trickles of our own lives — pushes us along. And yet, sweet rain on this quiet morning. Even the hungry cats press their whiskers against the screen, welcoming in the morning.

Random Tuesday Moment

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late afternoon, shaking off the day’s chaos, a light and very welcome rain sprinkles down.

I’m drinking a glass of water and picking a few rouge leaves from here and there in the garden, when I look up and see a rainbow, a gem, tucked over the hill.

I stand, the rain falling ever so slightly. We need rain in a serious way, in a way that makes me worried about gardening. Every evening, I give little sips of water to my plants. But for this moment: water and color.

The rainbow never tells me

That gust and storm are by,

Yet is she more convincing

Than Philosophy.

— Emily Dickinson

Ceremony.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

High school graduation this year is under an enormous white tent, surrounded by the community. Not everyone is pleased with the arrangement — that’s pretty much a given — but the tent looks regal, the weather is magnificent, and, well, we’re still pulling out of a pandemic.

I chose a seat in the sun just under the edge of the tent. The principal’s speech goes on and on, and I begin to wonder, where are you headed with this, David, when suddenly I begin to guess. He’s facing the sixty or so graduates, speaking directly to them, about the hard year and a half they’ve endured. A few months before the pandemic, a member of their class committed suicide. Shortly afternoon, the pandemic shut down our world.

Looking through the tent and over the soccer field, I see people I know in one way or another, and many more I don’t know at all. Listening, I feel the principal’s speech pulling us together, acknowledging the difficulty of these past 15 months without bitterness or regret, the layers of isolation and anxiety, of political division, of frustration with a world turned awry.

He asks us to breathe in deeply, collectively.

Around us, the sunlight sparkles on the grass. A tiny girl stands outside the tent, her long hair unbrushed, staring in.

The strange thing is, I can’t breathe in deeply; I’ve been holding my breath for so long. But looking around, I realize these friends and acquaintances and strangers are collectively here for one reason — to champion our youth forward — and for the first time, I begin to feel (not think, not believe, but feel) that the way forward is indeed opening.

Chaos, Roses, Life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Friday morning, I’m washing the breakfast dishes when warm liquid runs over my bare toes. For the briefest moment, I think I’m standing in the edge of a warm ocean, and then I realize my kitchen sink drain has broken apart. Gallons of dishwater flow over the floor. 

I’ve cobbled the drain together before, but this time, I’ll actually need to fix it.

My daughter picks up a worried cat and assures him that, indeed, the drain will be fixed.

Midday, when I’ve finished work at my desk, I drive to the hardware store with a section of PVC. I’ve forgotten a mask; those cloths are at home, drying on the clothesline. I sigh, irritated. I have a six other things I want to do, besides drive around. 

But the thing is, I see a huge sign outside the store: masks are no longer required for the fully vaccinated. For the first time in however long, I walk into a store without a mask.

This has been a week of chaos. We all have these days or weeks, or maybe even decades. Who doesn’t? We’re humans, who live in a material world that’s constantly shifting (even if only incrementally) from well-put-together to chaos. The flip side, I suppose, is that sometimes we manage to arrange chaos back to order.

As in my kitchen sink: after dinner, I wash the dishes, and no flood alarms the cats.

By evening, I haven’t bought to tickets from Vermont to New Mexico to visit my parents, as I’m unable to surmount the chaos of the airline world. I haven’t eradicated my fears about my 16-year-old, driving around, heading into the adult world in what’s practically a heartbeat. The woodchucks are still doggedly determined to rise up around my gardening realm.

From the tangle of rosebushes someone planted long ago, I clip a single blossom. A thorn pricks my thumb, and a thin line of blood wells up. I touch the blossom to my blood and wipe my thumb clean.

Rain

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Just before dawn, a brief thunderstorm breaks apart and cools our world, followed by a dawn suffused with rosy and gold light. Much of the town might be sleeping, but the birds aren’t.

The clouds move in again and swallow up the colorful dawn with gray.

The human world around us unfolds in its uniquely human way, clumsy and jerking as vaccination rates rises. There’s a larger story of who contributes to herd immunity and who’s riding unvaxxed along the vaccinated wave. It’s a very, very complex story, with outcomes that aren’t even approaching murky yet. At the heart of this is that eternal koan, How do we know anything?

A koan the pandemic hasn’t made any easier.

I open all our house’s windows and the cool, rain-washed air rushes through.

Vermont Respite

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

While the daughters tie their kayaks on roof racks, I sit in the grass, keeping company with hungry bumblebees in the rhododendrons.

This hardy plant is doing its thing now, a visual symphony of color.

Spring crickets, garden soil under my toenails, pond water in my hair. And still, early June.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.

— Gretel Ehrlich