empty nest

Hard, Sweet Pears.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The couple who owned this house before me planted two pear trees in the front yard. The runt leans into the lilac hedge, as if hiding its crown. The taller has expanded into a pear tree version of pirouetting ballerina. Late afternoon, after pulling out withered lily leaves from the flowerbeds, I pluck two hard sweet pears and head over to the neighbor.

She’s created an unusual little garden with little pools of running water, so the delight is for your ears, too. I hadn’t realized it was the anniversary of her husband’s passing. We sit in her garden while the sun sinks down, talking about random things — work and the school board and gardens. The little boys across the street bike into her driveway. She’s parked as far back as possible to give the children a little more space on our tiny street.

When chilly shadows cover the garden, I stand, throw my pear core into her weeds, say goodnight. The boys have been called in for the night. As the cold edges in, mist thickens in the valley below. I watch how those cloud layers drift, cushioning the village, layered work just for the night. Then I pick another pear for breakfast.

Some days I find myself wondering how I’ve landed in this town, what random circumstances drove me here. There’s that trite old phase that the only constant is change, but of course that’s not true, either. All around us flow the steadiness of children, of loss, of those ripening pears.

September: such a pretty, sweet month.

Blackberry Eating

By Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Imagining a fox, two strangers in a canoe…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A fox runs out in front of me as I leave the library, so quick the creature might have been my imaginings in the night. Upstairs, people are still talking and laughing, remnants from the Selectboard meeting. Behind me, the man who lives down the road, with neither water nor electricity and is often at the library at night, his phone plugged into an outlet in the foyer that’s left unlocked, perhaps for this reason, says, “Saw it, huh? Fox.”

The sunset has simmered down to a liquified gold spill in the darkness. I pull into the beach. I’m alone here, and I get out of my Subaru and lie down on the wet sand. I can feel the damp sand clump into my hair. The waves lap. The spill of light shrinks. The crickets are doing their sizzling thing, and goddamn, here it is again, end of August, a goodbye to the sunflowers not far in the offing.

I spent so many hours of my mothering life at this beach, and now this summer has slipped by without a single visit to this particular beach. The sun goes down. And here’s the weird thing: while I’m lying there, dampening, dampening, wondering what’s up with the universe anyway? Why does it always feel like loss, loss, loss, a canoe paddles by. In a funk, I don’t bother to sit up and chat with strangers, but the couple steers their craft right onto the shore and asks what’s up with me….

So, I sit up and talk.

Turns out, even strangers, we have strangely similar intersecting points. In the dark, the lake lapping at their canoe, we stand talking while the stars blink on, just a few, in the cloudy night. Then, instinctively, as if in some kind of pact, we reach out and shake hands. Then I’m off to my home and my hungry cats, and the couple paddles on…. maybe an imagining, maybe not….

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”