divorce

Rough-Hewn Grace

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been scavenging donations to my library’s yearly book sale, digging through stuff I’d never read (but others may deeply love) for some real gems. In one not-so-hot memoir I skimmed, I found a reference to a Flannery O’Connor line from one of her letters. The line — such a good one — also depicts this Vermont March.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

I skied over the pine-needle-strewn ice, took off my skis and crossed an oozy mud road. Then the snow gave out. Here’s a photo of an empty house along the road, once a farm beside Big Hosmer Pond, now padlocked up, with a For Sale sign in the front yard, waiting for new inhabitation.

In its online listing, a black-and-white photo from the 1950s shows a woman in a dress standing beside what might have been a fancy new car. Who? Where have you gone? Did you love living in this house? And did the loons sing then, too?

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Craftsbury, Vermont

Levity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughters and I drove north over snowy roads to have dinner with friends who were staying for a few days at a house built by a ship captain in the 1800s. The house is on exquisitely beautiful Lake Willoughby, deep into what I consider “way out there” in Vermont — but that’s all in one’s perspective, isn’t it?

I would have walked around that three-story house for a day and a half, just looking at room upon room, like an enormous treasure or jewel box. Fortunately, my friends know me and were nonplussed when I rubbed my hands over the peacock tails in the downstairs wallpaper. My teenager sprawled before the fireplace and said, We’re not leaving.

An oak table spanned the length of a long room that must have originally been a veranda. At dinner, the kids filled their plates and sat in a row on one side. I walked around the table and sat with my back to the wall of windows. It’s December and darn cold, and the kids, being kids, had likely sized up the draft on that side and chosen the warmer one. Or maybe they just wanted to be closer to the berry pies…

My friend’s elderly father sat beside me, and, after precisely cutting his meat, said very pleasantly, A bit of air conditioning tonight, isn’t there?

Driving home in the dark, around Runaway Pond, through the Bend, past dairy farms hazily illuminated by the moon darting in and out of scudding clouds, I thought of all the stories that house must contain, how all our lives are clumsily packed sieves of so much jumbled living — radiant happiness, crushing misery, sometimes dullness, aching and unmet desire — and then the levity of that sweet sentence rose again into my thinking.

One terrible thing about divorce is losing the person who holds the other half of your shared secrets. That highway north was studded with memories from the very earliest days of my marriage. Driving north, I passed those places and said nothing, knowing the only way to continue is to create.

So when my daughters asked why I was laughing as I drove those final miles home, I told them I aspire to have that gentleman’s light grace when I’m a little old lady, with — God willing — many more miles traveled.

I have one of those very loud, stupid laughs. I mean if I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.

— Holden Caulfield

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Daughter at work, home, Hardwick, Vermont

This.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

There’s a place in Maughm’s Of Human Bondage where the main character, Philip Carey, sits down and eats dinner with a family in a London tenement. Although I haven’t read this section in years, it stuck with me, because Carey eats happily with the family, no longer squeamish about accepting food cooked in less than pristine conditions. Not so many years ago, I might have written what Carey learned was “humility.” Perhaps. But maybe he had been hungry often enough in his life to appreciate company and shared food, and had no fear about poverty’s uncleanliness.

I first read this novel when I was 22. I was living in a downtown Brattleboro apartment where a running box fan fell out of our second-floor window to the sidewalk below, and, by fate’s luck, missed pedestrians on that busy Friday sidewalk. Paired up with Walden, these two dissimilar books have become the books of my adult life.

Sitting in the Washington County Courthouse, where I have become a known woman, I thought of clubfooted Philip Carey, knocking around poor and rainy London, homeless at times, desperate to become a doctor. It was fitting to think of him, in that enormous and ugly building, filled with an apparently ceaseless flow of human misery. What would be the point of all this, really, if you didn’t pass through, and, on the other side, cherish pulling up a chair and eating with others, no matter what the circumstance?

He was always seeking for a meaning in life… He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.

– W. Somerset Maugham

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Leaf by Petal

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Bit by bit, color rubs into our muddy world. My younger daughter remembers bulbs we planted, late last fall, and runs with her friend to find them: snow glories, grape hyacinths, the deep blue Siberian squills. Tiny clusters of emerging mysteries. Where, again, did we bury those knobby roots, and what will appear?

Out of school this week, my daughter and her friend switch back and forth between houses and parents, sometimes complaining there’s nothing to do, and almost immediately wandering away into one of their myriad projects.

Easter night, the peepers sang in profusion as the four girls and I walked down the dirt road in the dusk and then stood at the crossroads near a stand of old maples. In summer, tiny sparkles of birds often burst from their leafy branches in a radiance of soaring yellow. Rain began falling.

History, especially a family’s, is elusive, and memory is, as it is often said, a poor guide…. History is made in what appears to be at first glance mundane and ordinary ways. It’s written at kitchen tables and printed in the small boxes of calendar days… Sometimes in life it may seem as if nothing of consequence happens except the small acts of routine that occupy countless hours and ultimately frame our short lives. But I want you to know: Everything counts.

– Stephen L. Lyon, Landscape of the Heart: Writing on Daughters and Journeys, whom I discovered through his essay in Full Grown People

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Hardwick, Vermont

Dede’s Book

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A day of cold rain, when I think of Janisse Ray’s line: Some days, all day, rain falls.  Driving home, I take a detour and follow the river, swollen threateningly along its banks, grabbing at trees still barren with winter.

All through graduate school in Bellingham, Washington, I wrote of flooding rivers, clogged septic tanks, the persistence of moisture.

In Montpelier this afternoon, the lights are already glowing on, and it’s poetry month. Poetry: not of sterilized honey, but nourishing, sweet and yet filled with the debris of dead bees.

At Bear Pond Books, I buy Dede Cummings’ beautiful new book of poetry. Oh Dede. On this April day fattening itself with water, wisely using the sodden gloom, readying for the splendor of blooms, I stand in the aisle, devouring her words. A friend of mine, reading a new book of Mary Oliver’s, said she always found poems she knew were written just for her. Then she said, But maybe many others think that way, too.

Marriage

I am not the cause of your misery
I am peepers in springtime in the dark pond
I am footsteps and shadow approaching on the dark road
I watch for salamanders but none of them are crossing on this dry night.

I measure my steps, and I count my dreams:
I am driven home by drizzle, by children.

A small vase of crocus blossoms
you left on the cutting board this morning
reminds me of what we once had.

– Dede Cummings, To Look Out From

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Writing Lists

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At a meeting recently, the person beside me pulled out a handwritten list and flipped it over a few times, reading. Because I’m me, I naturally tried to read that list. In between crossed out items, I read fold laundry.

A serious list-writer myself, that particular chore has appeared numerous times on my lists, along with buy cooking oil and go to dump. Isn’t a list a written map, in some ways, of who we are? Years ago, in between buy toilet paper and teach Molly to read, I had  find publisher for novel. I’ve now crossed that item off my list, and now, simply, on every list I begin is write every day. While lists are inherently interesting, what may be more interesting is what doesn’t make lists. For years, while my marriage was disintegrating, I likely should have written either fix this or file divorce papers.

At this point, in my forties, I’d far prefer my lists to read write and fold laundry. I would have scoffed at that simple normalcy in my twenties, but now – a little more steady everydayness goes a very long way. That’s one more reason to savor homemade pickles – although here I am, writing, among veritable mounds of unfolded laundry…..

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

– Alice Walker

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Woodbury, Vermont