dogs

A great fountain of white gossamer…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

From New Mexico with its sheer light, I descend back to April Vermont, where miniature daffodils push their yellow faces through last year’s leaf mulch. How well I know Vermont spring — the sunny breezy days where the wind tosses the lake and the water is bluer than blue, the footpath sprinkled with the gold gems of coltsfoot.

After the desert’s sweeping beauty, Vermont is a mossy box, a jumble of the paint peeling from the back of my house, the bin of empty cat food cans in barn (quit kicking that dump run into the next week), the niggling college financial aid forms yet to be corrected, the working hours I string together, making some decent use of my time.

April is a month that goes on too long, lingers brown in northern Vermont, with its tease of green trout lily leaves, the flourish of wild ramps. Paradoxically, April has always seemed the most hopeful of seasons, too, the nesting songbirds sweeping out winter’s silence.

In the evening, my daughter and I walk her dogs across the cemetery to the ballfields. Off leash, the three of them run while I stand in the field’s center, listening to the robins’ chatter in the white pines. Back at my house, we stand by the woodpile, talking about little things — who will take the leftover garlic bread, did the butterfly bush survive the winter. The rising moon illuminates the clouding-up horizon with a glowing shaft. We linger, watching the full moon sail confidently, unstoppably, over the horizon. Later, I linger on the back porch, sipping tea. The moon has removed the lid of shoebox Vermont. The air’s sweet with wet soil.

Springtime, 1998

Our upstate April
        is cold and gray.
                 Nevertheless

yesterday I found
        up in our old
                 woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
        standing around
                 and blooming

wisely. And by the edge
        of the Bo’s road at the far
                 side of the meadow

where the limestone ledge
        crops out our wild
                 cherry trees

were making a great fountain
        of white gossamer.
                 Joe-Anne went

and snipped a few small boughs
        and made a beautiful
                 arrangement

in the kitchen window
        where I sit now
                 surrounded.

— Hayden Carruth

The sound of wind.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Seems a little early, pre-solstice and all, to be citing winter haiku, but the thing is, winter haiku is just so darn good. In so many ways, winter brings out the New Englander in each of us, as we ramble on about previous winters (the year back in the mid-90s when antifreeze froze, or the year school was cancelled was for three days straight). Or how to survive with savviness: long quilted coat, chop wood, frying pan on the sheets. When a few strands of sun tumbled out of the clouds this afternoon, I dashed outside to fill my eyes with light. Hope the weather’s keeping you more interested than inconvenienced…..

Winter solitude—

In a world of one color

The sound of wind.

— Bashō

Family Stories.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The cats eye the dog with disdain. The dog considers the cats a potential meal or simple annoyance; we don’t know. The dog sneaks into the kitchen and steals the bowl of chocolate covered stars which horrifies my daughters. In that tussle, the braver cat slinks behind the wood stove and regains his favored position.

My oldest has no heat in her apartment, worries about her houseplants, has heat and then again has no heat. She texts me before five in the morning, and then my brother and I lie awake and text each other through the bedroom wall. I write, looks rough in Buffalo. I make endless pots of coffee. My brother, the brewery owner, drinks beer. We play Concentration, Chinese Checkers, Wordle.

The bathroom needs painting, and we discuss paint options, how Steam might pair with Orange Juice like our father’s study. The remains could be used in our tiny dining room.

After he’s home, he sends me three photos. In one, my youngest as a tiny girl stands in a borrowed homemade dress with mud smeared to her elbows and daubed on her face. My oldest leans down from an apple tree, sunlight in the leaves over her head. My brother pedals a tricycle. I remember the summer day I took that photo of my youngest. We had stopped by a site where her father was building a house. So much mud, so much pleasure for this child. Years later, I saw that homeowner ice skating with his young daughter. How much I wanted to know if he still lived in that house. How well had it held up for him? Instead, we exchanged chit-chat about the ice, and I never learned his story.

In the dog’s absence, the cats retake their rug and wood stove territory, protagonists in their own cat-language drama.

Reading. Fear of Dogs. Starlight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The July after I graduated from college, I stayed in a cabin a short walk through the woods on a back road. The one-room space had been built as a studio with a wall of windows that faced what had once been a view and now was shaded by leafy maples. In winter, the cabin was heated by a woodstove. An outhouse had been dug behind the cabin. My friend was visiting her mother in California. I stayed in the cabin and fed her dog. The dog didn’t listen to me at all. He ran off and chased the sheep down the road, whose owners claimed they could shoot the dog. I was twenty-two and knew nothing about farming, but I was afraid of the angry farmer and didn’t argue. The dog still didn’t listen to me.

Despite the dog and the farmer, I loved the cabin. The economy was terrible; there were few jobs, and I was trying to figure out my next step. I read a lot of Ann Beattie who was popular in the 1990s. I remembered that small paperback Chilly Scenes of Winter I owned for years, when I stepped outside yesterday evening. I had been reading Tess Gunty‘s The Rabbit Hutch, a novel a far stylistic throw from Beattie. In the dark, a truck towing an empty trailer rattled by.

Down the sidewalk, a dog growled. A man tugged the dog’s leash. No: the dog snarled. I knew the mutually unhappy pair, the man’s sole dominance apparently through that leash. I crossed the street and cut down along the brook through the log yard, walking quickly in the tepid night. On my living room rug, that Gunty library book waited, spread pages-down, spine up. Sure, the world changes, moment by moment. And yet, sometimes not so. Overhead, stars and no moon.

“What will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for Grace.”

— Ann Beattie