#books

‘I can feel my life start up again…’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

We’ve crossed the halfway point of winter and can, again, believe in the possibility of crocuses, the promise of pearly-and-pale-pink apple blossoms. Monday morning, my friend Brad Ferland invites me onto his WDEV radio program Vermont Viewpoint again. I’m lucky enough to ramble on for a bit about writing, and I spoke a little about this blog. For those of you who are new here, I often write about what the seasons in Vermont mean to me. July is the Swimming Season. September the Season of Fat Sunflowers. February, in my mind at least, is the Season of Hope.

The days suddenly widen and grow. A sunshiny stretch like this, and my state’s collective spirit rises. February is still deep in the Woodstove Season, however, which means, as a writer, no need to worry about missing a few fine gardening hours. The clouds will descend again, and surely I’ll complain (again), but for now, with two days of radiance, savor. Savor.

I feel my life start up again, 
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

— Jane Kenyon

January: wonder & diligence.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Twenty-five years ago, on a frigid January night, I went to a birthday party and ate chocolate cake. I would have my first baby in a week, and I had gone at that pregnancy with wonder and diligence, heavy on kale and broccoli, scant on refined sugar. The cake was marvelous.

In this warm January, a friend lingers with me over coffee. Melting snow drips from the porch roof as we talk about travel, making art and making a living, parenting. I’m reminded of a line from Raymond Carver that the mightiest force in his life was his two children, Carver who wrote brilliantly about laundromat hours. Wonder and diligence. Our conversation winds around to The List, the eternal draft of chores and visions, the crossing off and adding on, the drafting and revising, the diligence that strings our days together, a crude framework of parenting.

End of January: the weather is slushy and icy, sunbeams a rarity, hardly the season of wonder. My firewood holds the month’s damp, as if resistant, too, to the lousy weather. I lay chunks of wood beneath my stove, drying them a little before I chuck them in, burn the wood to ash.

My little cat flicks his tail. A cardinal nestles in the mock orange’s bare branches, crimson feathers in the muted world. I lay my hand on my cat’s silky back, murmuring, “Well, what do you know….”

And a Raymond Carver poem:

“Happiness”

So early it’s still almost dark out.

I’m near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other’s arm.

It’s early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.

Are you for real?!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The other night, I’m leaving a meeting in the high school library devoted, more or less, to hashing out what community means (nothing to be solved in a few hours). In the parking lot, a woman says Goodbye, Brett — and quicksilver, I shout, Are you for real?!

As the other folks empty out of the school into the spitting snow, she and I talk beneath the ghostly streetlamp. Very quickly, it’s clear to me how utterly wrong I am about this woman. What I believed was true was not. I once ate chocolate covered strawberries in her house with my youngest daughter. The woman packed up a bowl of these delicacies for one sister to give to another.

In ten minutes, we are speaking animatedly of matters of our hearts. We’re both shivering by then in the damp snow. We hug and head to our homes.

I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the country, and I surely can’t speak for anyone else, but how glad I am that I called out in anger. And how much more grateful I am that she took the time to listen to me, to lend me her shoulder, and I could do the same for her. Indeed: real.

A community… is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

— Wendell Berry

Onset of Pre-Cabin Fever.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I shake stunningly beautiful snow from my mittens onto my cats. Mid-January. Winter’s loveliness has just arrived. My house is again the three of us, two fluent in Cat and one marginally fluent in Human. The one who speaks Human gets the deciding vote, so we get up very early. The Cat speakers are wholly in favor of this, as the wood fire is fed and the cat kibble rationed into bowls. Eventually, the dawn finds us, and the rest of the world creeps in.

If this keeps us, the prognosis is mad-as-a-hatter by Honest Abe’s birthday. No fear of that. Any hermiting is constrained around here. Two small excerpts from my novel are accepted by journals. The cats and I nestle into our narrative. I let them lick butter from my fingers. Snow silently fluffs around us, concealing the stars, the sunflower stalks, the ash bucket I left by the step.

A little chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I call the mechanic back about my car who says it’s all good news, a replaced muffler, and the car looks fine.

Finally. Something repaired in the chain of a dying range, a done-in washing machine, my own washed-out and piss-poor attitude.

In one of the few sunny days I’ve seen recently, I’m standing on my back porch, listening to water dripping. We talk a little about the shitstorm of this decade so far, the election roaring up in nearby New Hampshire. He mentions he doesn’t know my political leanings, and I laugh. I’ve been writing him checks for years now, and I’m certain it’s no surprise who I didn’t vote for. But he bends our conversation a little further, kicking the standard gloom-and-doom away and remarks that we might as salvage some happiness in this life.

On this rainy midwinter day, I convince my youngest to drive north to a library in search of a Claire Dederer book. Here’s a few lines from the last chapter of Monsters.

Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason….

Music = flowers = courage.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Nearly a decade ago, my then-husband and I attended an improv poetry reading and concert in a church in Cabot, Vermont — an afternoon I later remembered as the last good thing we did together as a couple. Later that afternoon, news arrived of illness in our family. Although there was no way I could have predicted it at the time, the stress of disease further fractured our fragile marriage.

This weekend, I returned to that church with its high-ceilinged rough beams and unadorned crucifix for a performance with native flutes and storytelling as part of the town’s Twelfth Night celebration. Before the performance, the storyteller remarked about a flute, tens of thousands of years old, made from the rib of a cave bear. Flute music, like the drum which mirrors our mothers’ heartbeats, is bound into our DNA. With a rattle of shells, he began with the Chippewa’s creation story of the flute and expanded into a meditation about music as auditory flowers. Not Hallmark’s pastels: flowers are the rugged beauty that propagate our world. The music poured my heart full with courage.

Outside, a light snow sprinkled. Somewhere in the pandemic, my youngest played spring soccer in this town. In that time, no one was carpooling, and so I always drove. While she played, I walked along the river, early enough in spring that the peepers were singing but the black flies hadn’t hatched.

I had left my hat on the pew. When I walked back in, I met the poet’s wife. The poet, who was once so kind to me, has passed on now. His wife and I spoke for a few minutes, and then I went out, hat in my hand, snowflakes falling into my hair.

“… the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”

— Loren Eiseley