#books

Vectoring….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Autumn has stretched out in Vermont into days of balminess, the warm air shot-through with the gold that lingers on the trees. It’s so warm, I keep at my makeshift back porch deck, a table I moved out this summer that’s become a place of succor, resting my bare feet on a wooden crate of those onions I pulled from the garden.

I’m taking a class with the unmatchable Lauren Markham about structure in writing, one of the hardest challenges. Online, there’s attendees from California (what? you get sun and ocean?) and Phoenix and Boston. Signing in, I leave my laptop camera on. I throw a chunk of wood in my stove from sheer laziness so I won’t need to rekindle the fire as the colder night creeps in, but I open the back window so my cats can sit on the sill and enjoy this sweet October breeze. When I join, the group is admiring the view of my clapboard house and frost-killed morning glories vines. I tell them my chore which doubtlessly immediately marks me as…. quaint rural.

Late afternoon, I pull out the dead basil plants and then lie down under an apple tree. Her leaves, blacked with frost spots, spiral down, one by one, to the unmown grass. It wasn’t until I had babies and was forced to slow down (all those nursing hours beneath apple trees, milk-sweet baby in my arms) that I realized every leaf takes its own precise trajectory, from spring bud to the autumn dive earthward. Around me, rotting apples, persistent slow-flying wasps.

I might have slept; when I open my eyes, the sky is already draining of blue. Thinking of Markham’s words, I suddenly see the taunt arc of this fourth, yet unfinished book, the map that holds this story, the treasure at the reader’s end far from a Hallmark card. Vector is the word she used. Indeed, all story, all life, is motion. The chill rising up from the earth, I vector myself indoors….

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. 

— Thoreau

Rowing in autumn…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In a cold rain, my friend and I set off walking. It’s a joke between us. When we were neighbors, I would call and ask her to meet me for a walk.

It’s sleeting, she’d say.

Only a little.

Invariably, she’d join me, gung-ho.

The rain lets up, though, as we walk up a muddy path, cross streams, pause to admire where a view might be through dense mist. The woods are gold and black, redolent with the humus-y scent of fallen leaves, this summer’s bounty already turning back into the damp soil. I remember her oldest son, now a teacher himself, standing on a chair in my kitchen, rolling out dough for sugar cookies, happy. Rain or snow probably fell then, too.

This is familiar forest to me, as I lived here for so many years. But I grew up surrounded by New Hampshire forest, and the exquisite beauty of New England fall, its sharp bite reminding us of winter, is as familiar to me as the backs of my hands. While the greater political world is utterly unfamiliar — which way will this go? — this path, our conversation, is balm for my soul. Both our lives have gone rocky ways, and yet here we are in rain, pressing on, pocketing especially pretty leaves.

On my way home from our soggy walk, I stop at the coffee shop and spread out my papers and laptop on a table. I’m standing there, thinking (or maybe dreaming), when a long-ago acquaintance appears. We sit and talk for a bit. There was a quarrel in the past between us. As she speaks, I feel the blood quickening in my rain-damp flesh, from my cheeks to my sodden toes. Here it is again, how experience shapes and changes us. Our culture pushes us, pushes us as women, to smooth the edges, say all’s well, be polite, diminish ourselves and pretend we’re still in the land of childhood, when the grownup woman world is a vast sea of star and moonlight, treacherous waves, radiant beauty, and the great unknown. At the end of our conversation, there’s no conclusion, no tidy wrap-up, just the two of us rowing together for a bit, handing the oar back and forth.

October: where are we going?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This weekend cleaves the summer, the marker where the light changes.

As the leaves drop, the light sharpens and thins. I’ve been here before, so many times, knowing full well how the sun will continue to dwindle. October is a season of brilliant contrasts: emerald hayfields, swaddles of mist, orange remnants of zinnias.

The season mirrors the human realm, too, such a lusciously lovely summer this has been. Now I yank out spent tomato vines, stow away my garden rake and hoe. I gather a handful of kindling, an armful of wood. So much winter, so far to go.

In the co-op’s baking aisle, I run into an old friend, and we chat while her daughter shops. I’m certain we mark different sides of the ballot, but our friendship is hard-tested, solid. Our conversation swirls. Through the window, yellow leaves scatter and leap in a breeze. I lean towards her, listening to a thread of her story.

Change of season is never the same. My youngest daughter tumbles towards womanhood, our lives shift, stretch. Within, always the constants, the long threads of conversation, the joy of the natural world, my ever-present marvel at the world’s flux: where are we going? why? Is it true that other people live these steady, predictable lives? Who knows?

Overhead, those geese, honking their way out of here. And us, here, for now at least.


Each fall in New Hampshire, on the farmwhere my mother grew up, a girl in the country, my grandfather and grandmother finished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables in from the cold fields, canning, storing roots and apples in the cellar under the kitchen. Then my grandfather raked leaves against the house as the final chore of autumn.

— Donald Hall, String Too Short to be Saved

Evening gathering….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the spring, I moved my remaining hollyhocks into the fenced vegetable garden to save these flowers from feasting groundhogs. Spring, summer churned along. Now autumn, my garden still blooms its rainbow. Gathering tomatoes and basil for dinner, scraps of birch bark and kindling to start a fire, I pause for a moment in the drizzle, soaking in the delicate petals, the mist brushing in for the night, the trees already doing each their own foliage thing — some gold and orange, some already shaken down to bare twigs, others green, green, as if in defiance of winter.

Across the valley, the coyotes call, once, twice, as if testing their voices.

I snip bunchy orange marigolds for my table, their centers spicy. Overhead, the geese are always winging away these days, gathering their Vs, heading for their winter quarters, elsewhere. The clustered sunflowers, in their different heights and states of disarray from gold petal to curled brown leaf, rustle with the fat little chickadees dipping in and out, scavenging. Oh, sunflowers, so easily grown: scattered seeds, my palms pressing soil, water and sunlight. For me and the birds I imagine I sow these beauties, but of course that’s not true at all. The sunflowers are the waving prayer flags of my garden, this small territory.

The neighbor boys pile their sweatshirts and run in their t-shirts, the smallest hustling in and out of the lilac bushes, hide-and-seek. Rain pitters on leaves. A T.S. Eliot line runs through my memory, that graceful dismal poet, “…music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all…”

A few snippets of autumn.

Two autumns…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I leave the garden to do its final hallelujah of the season, the tithonia and sunflowers and cosmos fraying now, the basil still slipping into my cooking pot. September 11, the morning I stood in my sun-filled kitchen watching my toddler tricycle around the table, listening to public radio and wondering what was happening. My youngest was not yet born. Now, 23 years later, my daughters and I text during the debate. My cats are curled at my feet, in their usual, wise cat-disdain way, thinking their feline thoughts, savoring like any smart creature the warmth from the wood stove.

On my evening walk, I meandered the long way home. A half moon hung in the sky, sweet as maple pudding, so near I imagined I could reach out and lay my fingertips on its smooth sheen. Early autumn. So much more to come.

for me going

for you staying—

two autumns

– Buson

Messy democracy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

So this whole democracy thing? Since we’re in an election year and all?

I work in a small town for a Selectboard. Monday morning, I pull into work (late, again), and a Selectboard member is eating a blueberry muffin as fast as he can in the parking lot, a muffin I’m certain the town clerk made. I get out and make some comment roughly along the lines of it’s a good thing I don’t do drugs anymore because Your Town….

He counters with, Let’s get serious. What’s your cucumber and zucchini situation? I’m coming back at noon with four full boxes.

Monday morning, it’s revealed that people have stolen signs. People have written letters to the Selectboard and newspapers and the Sheriff about the theft. People arrive in the office with dogs and laptops and questions, eat muffins and disappear. I walk outside with the phone. It’s possible that the thief arrives. It’s also possible there’s some laughter. Or maybe I’m making all this up.

Democracy is messy, chaotic, often brutal. People arrive who look as though they’ve slept in ditches for their entire adult lives and complain about the flood. People complain about their neighbors. People run for election. In all of this, I take off my shoes and walk around barefoot. I do all the things I’m supposed to do and I keep wondering if I’m doing any of these right. I give an old woman a bottle of water. I am always trying to leave, disappearing into the asters around the lake, into the rooms upstairs where it’s just me and the wasps and the open windows. I am always trying to sew the pieces of my life together. Sometimes I crumple paper and throw it at my coworkers, which is not really at all charming or funny.

As a writer, I learned from reading. I learned so much from sugaring — the majesty of the world, the inarguableness of cause and consequence. I learned joy and love as a parent. I learned grief as a broken wife. Working for a small town, I’ve learned the peculiar American craziness of little towns and politics, of gossip. How to spy cowardice and when to lean against the courageous.

There’s not one damn thing perfect about any of this. Here I am as usual, half in, my head and heart filled with my garden gone rampart with rudbeckia and coneflowers. But we’re all that way…. July is the season of joy, January the season of despondence and loneliness. In the heart of midwinter, I leap from the snowy shore to the frozen lake. Far out, I sometimes lie down in the middle of the day, the ice a bed between my bones and the sludgy lightless waters. Overhead, the infinity of the heavens.

But today it’s Good Old July. In the afternoon, I walk with a woman along the forest trails she’s cut. She’s eased white quartz from the soil. The rocks gleam, as if freshly scrubbed with rain.