Hefty Lifting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In my first pregnancy, I developed a fear of the transition phase of labor. Even without experiencing labor, I knew that would be my point of trial and terror. As it turned out, that so dreaded transition was but a moment or two. I had my single place of easy breathing. I looked at an analog clock, the time of 3:14 pm lodging in my memory. Sunlight streamed through an enormous window.

Moving, as Ben Hewitt once told me, sucks. As usual, Ben is succinct and dead-on right. Moving is the transition phase I dreaded in labor, the leaving one place and not-yet-in-another.

In days of acute stress, like the times my former husband was arrested, I wrote notes to guide myself through days – call this person or buy coffee, but also fragments of dialogue, or the state’s attorney’s ironed, lavender shirt – anchoring those moments in my notebook, hungry writer that I am, to return to that time later, when the miasma dissipated, and glean.

I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.

Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.

– Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

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Searching by Starlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Three summers ago, we returned from a three days long Amtrak ride – Lamy, New Mexico to Albany, New York, and then a three-hour drive home – and I ran into the garden through the car headlights, before coming into the house. The hydrangea had spread magnificently; the tomatoes lay tucked in their leaves, heavy, ripe.

We had been gone for most of the summer, nearly six weeks, first to stay with my sister who was not well that summer, and then on the only trip I’ve taken with both my daughters to the southwest, where I was born. Under intense pressure that summer, by our return of the four of us, it was clear our marriage was fissured.

Nearly three years later, I was in the garden by starlight last night, the fireflies flickering so high in the surrounding treetops they merged with the constellations. Even in the dark, my feet know this path intimately.

After midnight, I finished Alice Hendan-Zuckermayer’s book, about the willing and unwilling moves of her family, driven by economics, which I know so well, and by a world at war, which I have been so fortunately spared. Why read anyway? You might as well ask why think? why desire? why LIVE? In my midnight garden, with the bursts of dandelions already going to seed, it was me and Alice. She ended her book with these lines from Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…. a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get and a time lose, a time to keep…

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Why I Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Saturday evening in June….

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak….
From Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us”
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Elmore Mountain from West Woodbury, Vermont

Giggles, Girls, Growing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After a week of just too much, I sat knitting in the back row at the Galaxy Bookshop last night, surrounded by some adults I knew, and some I didn’t, listening to the four poets read in a round robin. The poetry and the poets all flowed into each other – stanzas about Garage Sale DayZ and an expectant father slid into a particularly exquisite love poem by Sean Prentiss.

Afterward, I spoke with his wife and admired how their baby girl smiles with her whole tiny, joyful body. In the warm June evening, scented with the town’s profuse lilacs, I lay on the grass under a sugar maple at the elementary school, waiting for my sixth grader at her first dance.

June’s blooming beauty – Siberian iris, deep purple lupine – and the children are happy. Beneath my palms, I could feel the earth herself, free from winter’s grip, breathing.

Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever….
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever;
the wide dry field of geese…
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

– Ruth Stone, from “Train Ride”

Confluence

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In the next week, my older daughter will graduate from high school. My younger ends her elementary grades in the beloved red schoolhouse. I will sell one house and buy another; my daughters and I will move seven miles or so from one county to another, all our earthly belongings packed up in cardboard boxes and transported by friends and relatives. I will shut the door one final time on a house my former husband and I built, and metaphorically step away from that marriage. Friends from long ago are coming to visit. My daughters and I will come to know how and when sunlight enters our new house, what the water tastes like, where on the horizon the moon rises.

My daughters good-naturedly roll their eyes when I talk about houses being alive, but our house now will pass into hands better able to care for its keen needs. In the sky over our new house, graceful and eternally patient turkey vultures spread their wings in spirals of air currents. All life is change; we’re in the spin of confluence this week – and likely the next – but then I intend to have a good long summer, listening to the birdsong, swimming in Vermont’s cold lakes, and studying those vultures, our new neighbors.

Sometimes when we lose, we gain, and when we gain, we lose. Our fears and joys are bound up inextricably, pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure. Our efforts to untangle and isolate human experience can leave us confused and depressed. Happiness means choosing to be productive and optimistic, recognizing despair for the ancient parasite that it is and outsmarting it.

– Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains

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Unexpected Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A naturalist did a program at my small library last night, appearing with a red-tailed hawk, a rabbit, a wood turtle, a frog, a snake, and a curved-beak raven. As the room was packed, I stood by the door, watching when he offered to let my daughters touch that gorgeous snake. Wincing – but polite – both declined.

The library is one of those essential places in our society, where everyone is welcome to drink a cup of hot tea in an evening after it has rained – hard, all day – browse the books, listen. Simply come out of our rural Vermont homes and realize the rest of the town is sodden with spring rain, too.

Closing up, I stepped outside, and the clouds had cleared. The sky was pink at the horizon, and an enormous rainbow bent over the library, the small building constructed with volunteer labor, years before I arrived at the scene. My daughter remarked about a pot of gold somewhere, maybe down by the school’s garden. The air was swept clean, already warming, promising sunnier skies. Robins sang.

My daughters walked across the field, oohing and ahhing, my older daughter with her camera, while along the path an older man moved step by step, making his steady way under those clearing skies, going from here to there.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

– James Baldwin

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