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What’s in the News, What’s Not.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

No fooling here — no glossing over — in the past month there’s been two homicide/suicides, neither a domestic, all gunshot wounds, (that’s a total of four souls), right around where I live, then an early morning drug raid a few minutes’ walk from my house. I live in a middle class town, shabby around the edges, a little more spiffed up on some streets. In the evenings, I sometimes walk by the house my daughter’s friend bought. In the dark, he’s often on the roof, hammering or sometimes lying on his back, staring up at the stars. We talk for a bit, and I urge him, be careful.

I write this not out of salaciousness, but more to mark where I am, what’s happening in my state. Malcolm Gladwell wrote that planes never crash because of one reason. Likewise, there’s not one word, one single reason, one sole cause for any of this. These deaths and this raid isn’t my story, but it’s a piece of my story as our lives are all interconnected, the net that holds us together only as reliable as the weakest knots. Yet, as a whole — as a town, a state, a country, as the human story — we keep on.

On this balmy November afternoon, the elementary school kids run on the grass in their t-shirts. Magical insects hover — what my daughters called blue-glass bugs. Later, I stand talking with a friend in the grocery store. I’ve run out of the house, sockless in my Danskos, to replenish the coffee I finished that morning. I met this woman when I was writing Unstitched, so whenever I run into her, we keep talking and talking. What a joy it is to see her glowing and alive, this woman who had a life harder than anyone should ever endure. When I come out, darkness has fallen. The crescent moon hangs over the town, luminous.

Words: Tragedy, Unfairness, Fortune.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Word comes into my email inbox at the end of the day that the literary journal Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself has accepted an essay of mine for their Bad-Ass Mothers theme. This delights me immeasurably. My silliness aside, there’s nothing light about this essay.

My small concerns asides, it’s a week not to be flippant. Acquaintances in our world here have suffered a tragedy, in a house with small children. A friend of mine who knows the family rails at the unfairness of the world. I remind her of what she knows well, that unfairness is a human construct. I’ve never seen evidence that the laws of universe pay any heed to that notion.

After dark, I wander through the neighborhood where cats sometimes appear and brush up against your ankle, purring. The clouds rub away, and a crescent moon gleams, buffed up and shiny, as if newly minted. All my life, I’ve been following this moon, Lady Moon, acquainted with her numberless faces, as she has shed her silvery light on mine. The streets are nearly empty tonight. Ursa Major hangs over a house where a blown-up pumpkin glows in the front yard. These days, I imagine Lady Moon charming my long-ago relatives, in a time so long ago we humans hadn’t yet divided the earth into countries.

On this walk, I remember a favorite line from Ann Patchett: “There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.” That, perhaps, is its own koan.

FEMA Folks and Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last week, when the FEMA folks make their initial appearance in our town office, I step out and chat with a woman from Georgia. I intend to skip the meeting that’s about to transpire, but I’m interested to hear what these people are seeing around my state and how this whole FEMA thing works anyway. My new acquaintance tells me immediately that she’s exhausted. They’ve visited multiple towns, driving through rural Vermont.

She’s quite concerned about the impending cold, and I assure her that snow is (probably) not going to appear in October, almost certainly not accumulate. The FEMA folks are apparently working on the state’s natural deadline, putting as much of the state back together before the snow sets in.

By the time she heads up to the meeting about the FEMA portal and so much talk about culverts and more culverts, we’ve swapped stories about working and parenting and she’s shared her love of Atlanta.

On her way out, she leans in my door and says goodbye. It’s a moment: the handful of Vermonters and a few FEMA people — politeness all around — brought together by enormously complex events. A selectboard member says, We’re hoping for a nice fall so you can see Vermont at its best…

Last evening, I’m talking to my parents on the phone, standing on my porch and leaning against my house’s corner board, looking across the little valley that holds the town where I live, when I realize the world around me is pink. The light isn’t the streaming crimson of sunset. A soft pinkness suffuses our world: sky, valley, village, right down to my bare toes. September that feels like August, but is still definitely September. That’s where we are.

Putting the World Back Together, Again.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

By Thursday, I’ve lost track of days. A kind man stops by the town office with plates of cookies, still warm from the oven. I’ve been up for hours and hours by then, some working, some staring out the window at the dawn pushing up over the mountain, a spill of pink that widens into gold.

I haven’t been flooded. I know no one who’s injured. Yet, all around, the torn-up world, the folks who are seeking dry shelter, clean clothing, the next meal. The roads are our arteries, and slowly, gravel load by excavator sweep, the world is being put back together.

Thunderstorms and flash floods are in the forecast. Through all this, there’s the subtle underlying sense of how quickly the world turns.

Stores warn of early closings. We’re in this place I recognize immediately, almost giddy, slightly horrified, where people let down their guard, laugh at things that maybe aren’t that funny. Slowly, wrapping order around chaos.

“Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality – the source of all possible existence.”

— Mircea Eliade

Water, Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

These days, I’m working in a town clerk’s office, Greensboro, Vermont, population approximately 827. With summer folks, the population swells to three times.

Yesterday, the phone rang all day. We propped the door open, and people wandered in with questions.

Can I get to Craftsbury? Which roads are out? I have a dump truck; want me to haul fill? I’ve lost everything; do you have extra clothes, shoes, blankets?

Selectboard members set up a triage system to patch roads where anyone was stuck. Farm roads were prioritized for milk trucks. All day long, Vermont Public Radio updated us. Montpelier, beloved capital city, is underwater, threatened by a dam where waters rose precipitously.

Late afternoon, the selectboard chair rummaged for leftover potato chips from the July 4th celebration. By then, the sun had emerged. The July day was hot, redolent with blooming roses. I had my own petty worries: my car was low on gas, and I’ve kicked a front brake repair too far down the road, and I’ll need to find a mechanic stat, and who I’ll find isn’t yet clear to me. Later, I’ll call my brother and talk about my parents while weeding my neglected garden. For some time, though, we stood in the parking lot, breathing in sunlight, waiting for a contractor to look at one of the town’s paved roads that’s severed in multiple places, the asphalt broken into multiple chunks. When could he get here with an excavator and put that back together?

A friend drove up and told us about mutual friends in a nearby town. They had been out in the stormy night. Travelers on I-89 had been diverted off the interstate and wound up driving through the backroads of a rural town they didn’t know. By flashlight and headlamp, in a driving rain, water roaring down hillsides, the residents directed the strangers to a safe haven, where they weathered the night.

Conversation in the Moonlight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

At the open hatch of my car, I’m writing a mental grocery list, when something — what it is I don’t immediately know — happens. I’m fucked, I think. I’ve broken my hand.

A pneumatic hatch strut has broken, and is pinned between the hatch and taillight, the plastic light smashed. I turn my hand around and around. My hand suddenly seems very small, utterly familiar, a thing easily ruined.

People walk around me, going in and out of the co-op. Weirdly, I remember a car crash from my twenties when a Subaru Justy ran into my gold Rabbit. My Rabbit was knocked off the road. I got out and ran. The Justy had spun around and around and came to a stop, the wrong way in the middle of the road. No one was around. The Justy’s driver was crying, her window rolled down, saying, “I’ve killed you.” I begged her to get out of the car, leaning towards the Justy in the falling snow but not touching it, saying, “But I’m alive. I’m here.”

In a twist of great good fortune, my hand isn’t broken, only bruised. I go in the co-op and buy scallions and yogurt. The hatch and the strut are an irritation, another thing to sort out and solve, a fixable occurrence.

Later that week, after the dinner guests have left and it’s just me and my daughters and their friends, the five of us pull our chairs around the fire. The neighbors have taken their little kids into bed. The band in the village has quit by then, too, and the frogs are signing again, snippets of frog melodies.

In the darkness, we talk about relationships and marriage, what holds people together, what makes people endure. What makes people split. I toss another chunk of wood on the fire. A glistening half moon hangs over my house. Listening, I turn my hands around and around. So often, my hands are full and busy. Now, the moonlight falls in my open palms.

We keep talking and talking and talking. The moonlight is endless.