art

Real v. Unreal, Doorway in Seasons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Evening, I visit with a friend on her porch. I’ve forced myself from the couch, leaving behind a Carl Hoffman book. My friend talk about little things—knitting mittens, a curry recipe—and the submerged currents that drive our lives—poetry and sex and a vision to transform my side yard into perennials. The daylight dwindles. Today, foliage colors hum at their radiant best, and I say goodbye, gather my hat, and head out on a walk into the twilight. That afternoon, I’d stopped along the Rail Trail to run. A man had parked a long RV in the otherwise empty lot, watercolors and an easel propped on the granite block wall. When I returned, gasping and sweaty, we talked for a bit. I just want to be here, he says, outside. Which mirrors my own sentiment.

There’s no one else out this night, but two boys on bicycles, racing and shouting, crossing the nearly empty road.

Twice, today, I’ve had that otherworldly sense of déjà-vu. While listening to this stranger with his watercoloring and my friend with her library book in her lap, I’m also in a consultation room and the oncologist tells me the lymphoma has returned. I understand the seriousness in his voice; we’ve laughed about many other things, but there’s no laughing now. In this strange state, I leap up and stand in the doorway, one foot in the room, one in the halfway. Real, or not?

For years, I’ve endeavored to hone my discipline, to keep writing, keep working, read, walk, pay attention, listen to the story around you, for goodness sake, but the physical pain of cancer forced me to be here now, in ways I didn’t want. Nonetheless. And that’s one enormous nonetheless.

I loop around the village and return up my short steep road in the darkness. I’ve been on that threshold for years, half in, half out, always running for the woods and the trails along the river, the mountain path, gathering little scraps of conversations and friendships into my pockets, never trusting their radiance, like this foliage, won’t fade. Cancer, of course, as disease will, rendered running impossible. Across that lawn where I intend to sow a wider garden, a fox streaks, shadowy in the night. For a few moments, I stand in the surprisingly warm end-of-September night, breathing in the fragrance of fallen apples, juice sweetening the earth.

And that Hoffman book about the Asmat? The shifting realm of what’s real and what’s not? Unlearn the questions.

“But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment…”
― Carl Hoffman

Illumination of Constellations.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On the way home from a conference in Montpelier, I stop at #10 Pond. Late afternoon, there’s no one around, and I open my laptop and work, perched on a rock. For a good long while, it’s just me and two curious loons swimming by, the September sunlight dropping over the hillside full of hovering gravity-defying dust and damselflies.

A stellar autumn day.

I hadn’t intended to swim, but the afternoon turns sweaty. The water’s temperature hovers at perfection, the morning’s chill vanished this late in the day. Afterwards, I stand on the shore’s mud, drying off. A stranger appears and wades in. The sunlight moves between us, a great creature.

We talk about the clear water and the leaves turning gold, and waking in the post-midnight wee hours. The nights are cold, and we agree that we close our windows, now, to keep some warmth in our houses for the morning. A young mother and two small children scramble down the bank. The youngest child runs into the pond, splashing, hands outstretched.

19 years ago to this day, my youngest and I were at the ER, when my husband had a chainsaw accident. All’s well could be the pronunciation, nearly two decades later, but is that so? Another of these questions that only I seem to ponder—how much of our difficulties were caused by us, how much by fate? An impossible question with no answer. A human, not a loon, koan.

Mid-September, a day balmy-sweet. I drop my damp towel and wade out. I fear I may not swim again this year, maybe never, but as I stroke out further than I have this summer, far beyond shore, I let those fears sink down to the pond’s hidden bottom.

Much later, the day’s heat lingering, I lie on my splintering picnic table beneath the Milky Way and let the words wash out of my mind, sink down through the grass and sandy soil, the realm of worms and grubs and groundhog burrows. The constellations illuminate the darkness.

“…living according to the rhythms of others…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My ex and I were remarkably unsuited for each other in many ways; in particular was his ability to live without plans. I—in what’s surely irritating, too—lean into rhythms and patterns. This long holiday weekend, I wake hours before dawn, busily tearing apart a manuscript draft and rearranging, stitching, adding, cutting, cutting, cutting…

These early autumn days are sunny, with real heat yet. Afternoons, I park at the rail trail, stretch, and run. In the parking lot, there’s always that SUV with a youngster who’s on a different economic path, and an assortment of Subarus and Volvos with bike racks. These runs are short, a few miles perhaps. Sometimes, I make the four-mile loop. Ending, I often leave the path for the pasture along the river, the Joe Pye weed and purple asters and goldenrod dense. The pollinators eat hungrily.

An orderly life depends on a tenor of privilege, a gift I didn’t have in those years of in-the-thick mothering. Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle wrote about “living according to the rhythms of others”—a line I’ve considered for years. Nearly all my life I’ve lived in the sway of family, gleaning writing time where I could. Now, just a few years into the children-are-adults phase of my life, my companions are sweet fat housecats but also the unremitting remains of cancer and treatment: the mighty beast of fatigue. I lean into it and push; the fatigue pushes back. As in any family, you make your agreements. You learn to get on.

Late afternoon, we build a fire and linger. Long past dark, we huddle around the flames, the cold nipping in. I tilt my head back. Overhead, stars appear between patches of clouds. From the trees, apples have already fallen into the long grass, sweetly rotting from the day’s heat. I’ve left the kitchen light glowing over the table spread with pages and my scrawled notes. Tomorrow’s labor.

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

— Galway Kinnell

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Tangled Wild.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little rain falls when I’m done with work for the day, nearly seven in an evening filled with August’s sultriness. There’s no one in the electric department parking lot where I swap jeans for running shorts, and then head on the stony trail through the woods and down to the river.

August, the growing of weed and tended garden finished for this season. The apples are reddening. The blackberries that remain on the vine burst with juice, sweetness on the verge of rot.

I cross the river. Raindrops pebble its slow surface. I loop behind the old yellow barn that houses a warehouse of local cheese, then circle around the osprey nests where the Black River pools behind an old dam. My t-shirt is damp with sprinkles of rain and my sweat. Grateful I am to a friend who appeared with a glass cup of echinacea this week. In the spring, I’d mused that, a year out from cancer treatment, that was as far back as I would come. “Really?” she mused quietly. “You might question that.” Now here I am, running around the edges of this village, along this rain-kissed goldenrod.

Anne Sexton wrote about “the awful rowing towards God,” a poet I read in grad school, a woman crazed by not one simple cause. For so many years, I clenched my wooden oars, my rowboat with my children circling in eddies, plunged through rapids, in a journey breathcatching sometimes from fear and uncertainty, sometimes through the sheer awesomeness of the vaulting night sky, the companions of swimming dolphins.

Much as I chafe against a linear view of time, I see myself running around the brackish reservoir, then along the gentle slope back to my car and the mason jar of water I’ve left there to quench my thirst. I run with my whole story a whirlwind in my body and mind, known and unknown. Surely, as we rush headlong forwards, we’re always going backwards, too. And yet we row on, the work of this mortal life.

Oh, Anne Sexton, with her unhappy demise. Two years ago, I often ran along this path and discovered wild grapes down an embankment. The rain paused, I scramble through weeds. The grapes are there again this late summer. I gather these sweetly tart beauties in the hem of my t-shirt. Eating, I walk along the path, studying the soot-stained clouds. My friend with a new baby in a stroller appears around a bend. I offer this young mother a handful of grapes, and she spits seeds into the trailside milkweed. Sweaty from August and running, I bend down to admire the babe. Scuttling clouds are reflected in the child’s luminescent eyes, her smile quicksilver as a rainbow trout in a rushing mountain stream.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet…
This story ends with me still rowing. — Anne Sexton

Natural resurrection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air . . . It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Friday begins raw and shivery. I’ve shed my long underwear and regret it. By mid-afternoon, the sun’s emerged. I park along a muddy road and hike up through a soggy pasture to the stone cellar holes. A hundred years ago, a farm must have been rooted on this hillside, bracing against winter’s snowy wind, full of summer sun. A view of mountains and the Lamoille River Valley. Sugar maples dominate what remains.

As I approach, robins flutter, fly, resettle, their singing unbroken. I tie my coat around my waist, cram my hat in my pocket. At home, green nubs of lilies and crocuses emerge, just beginning their greening. Among the lilacs, I look for those daffodils.

Mighty spring, season of healing. The winter’s debris of compost and spent woodpile and last fall’s unclipped perennials emerge. Every year, spring rushes in with a surprise. A certain reminder of mortality, but so lovely, so marvelously endearing…