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Snapshot. Vermont Thursday.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In Newport, at the Vermont/Canadian border, a woman in a bubble-gum pink blazer strikes up a conversation with me in a parking lot about the snow falling into Lake Memphremagog. Mid-morning, dense clouds, fat snowflakes disappearing into the gray lake. I’ve never been around the Canadian edges of this lake.

In Newport, I stopped first to visit my new acquaintance Lila Bennett to check out the work she and her colleagues are doing at the Journey to Recovery Community Center. The center is suffused with natural light, alive with plants and colors, and it’s immediately obvious that they’re engaged in that old-fashioned phrase, “the good fight,” work that saves and salvages lives. Lila shows me the stack of my books, too, that the center is giving away for free, to anyone who wants to read it. I thank her profusely.

I’m in Newport, too, to find my way into a state building, up through a reverse rabbit warren into a large and light-filled room where the state’s staff tells Selectboard members and volunteers from Vermont’s tiny Northeast Kingdom towns about the chunks of federal money in the state’s coffers and asks how to get that money to the needy and broken places in our rural communities.

The room is packed. I sit in the back beside a state senator who offers me advice while I knit a sweater cuff. My blue and orange balls of fingerling yarn roll beneath a stranger’s chair.

The snow falls all morning. A woman I knew 25 years ago comes up and reintroduces herself and launches into her enthusiasm for the rail trail. I chat with the Department of Libraries staff member who reads my blog.

Finished, I hurry down to the lake’s boardwalk before I leave, to breathe in some of that cold wet air. Years ago, my little girl lost a flipflop in this lake. I was talking to someone from the farmers market where I worked, and I turned around when my daughter cried out. She had stuck her foot through the railings and lost her shoe. My friend tried to save her shoe with a stick, but the pink- and purple-flowered flipflop bobbed away, headed northward.

I can’t see my future clearly…

The road becomes itself

single stone after single stone

made of limitless possibility,

endless awe.

— Jacqueline Suskin

Sunday.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My father emails me a Chris Hedges’ article, “Death of an Oracle,” about the recent death of poet Gerald Stern. I toss a few slivers of bark on my stove’s embers and listen while my cat stares out the window at two cardinals in the twiggy mock orange. The birds are brilliant crimson in the merciless November gray.

I’ve just submitted a 100-word story of Thankfulness to the zillion and more that the New York Times will receive this week. Mine is precisely 100 words, drenched with gratitude and, honestly, rage. My little cat flicks his tail at me, as if asking if I, too, see that pretty bird my cat would like to hunt. Indeed, I do. The birds are wise enough to understand the merits of glass and peck away at the grass, unperturbed. Sunday morning, and my list lies on the table. A long week looms ahead. As I listen, however, a kind of peace settles around me, and not simply because of the warming fire. I’m reminded that I never sought a life of blandness.

My cat yawns and naps. The cardinals disappear. I brew another pot of espresso. My brother’s coming for Thanksgiving, bringing steak and endless conversations about the utterly mundane, like Wordle, the downright silly, and gritty existential pondering about the afterlife. November is looking up.

If the Buddhist’s job is to be detached, I think that the artist’s job is to be both detached and attached.

— Gerald Stern

Darkness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter comes in the house tonight and says, “The world smells of rain.”

I put the enchiladas in the oven and walk out in a warm drizzle. The darkness already lies impenetrably. By a scant light from the neighbors’ house, I head into the woods behind our house and then walk by feel and memory, knowing where the blackberry canes meet the white pines. There’s months ahead of the darkness to come; I need to step into it again, know it fully not as foe.

As I head through the back side streets into the village, I think of this deep darkness like drinking. How I feared for so long even the scent of liquor. Now, sober for so many years, I’ve been to countless bars with my brother the brewery owner, hung out with him in good times and terrible, and what’s in his glass or his hand seems nothing to me. Then, this: just recently, a horrific thing happened to someone I know slightly, an occurrence he did not cause and tried, in fact, very hard to prevent. When I learned of what happened, I sensed the tsunami of suffering that would wash through this man’s life. The utter enigma and apparent injustice of the world.

At home, that evening, I leaned against our house’s clapboards, let the cold breeze tug my hair into my eyelashes. I was alone that night, and I remembered, again, what I sought for so many years in the darkness of drinking, my own private little story in such a multifaceted universe. Crucible, I thought. I am a crucible.

Returning to our house tonight savory with dinner, bright with the little lights my daughter hung up in the kitchen, I flung open my bedroom window and let the warm rain blow in. The million mysteries and more of this world.

…. And last, I’ve been graciously invited to the Rockingham Free Public Library, Rockingham, Vermont, this Tuesday, November 15, 6 p.m. Come if you’re in town.

Time Out of Mind.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On the town forest trails, I spy two deer. Across the fallen leaves, now brown and dry, we eye each other. If I hadn’t seen a flicker of white tail, I would have kept running. But I have seen them, and so I determine to wait. I’m in shorts and a t-shirt; it’s so freakishly warm for November that people seem to be in a tizzy of utter delight tinged with dawning horror that this climate change thing, it’s really moving along. Nonetheless, these days are sweet.

The deer nearer me turns her? his? head just over one shoulder, checking in perhaps with the companion. Then they turn together and run. At the top of the hill, white tails bouncing, the creatures stop and look back at me, perhaps in nothing but curiosity. They vanish into the woods.

This is a November when I let the fire extinguish in the woodstove, hang the laundry outside, open the windows and make my cats happy. I chop apples into halves and quarters and eighths and throw the pieces into muffin batter, as if the world can measured and understood by rudimentary math, by counting two eggs and a quarter-cup of milk. In the afternoon, I abandon my thoughtful list of chores and lie in the weeds behind our house, reading Maggie O’Farrell, journeying imaginatively back in time to a Duchess’s life. It’s the same question that’s mesmerized me for years: how much of our lives do we determine and how much is dumb fate?

In the sunlight, I sleep and then wake breathing the complex scents of warm, humusy soil and spicy green leaves, and around all the dry crumbles of what this year’s frost has already bitten. In the cemetery behind my house, a man and a boy fly red kites, the long tails fluttering like ribbons.

Chasing Dreams.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

With our household size decreased, so is our garbage. On a sunny Friday afternoon, I swing by the transfer station with two bins of recycling and a bag of trash. The roving raccoon who appears regularly outside my kitchen door, pre-dawn, apparently found a way into my barn and enjoyed the trash far more than I did.

At the transfer station, I interrupt a woman who’s eating her lunch salad. I apologize, and then I stand at the open window as we kick around a weather conversation for bit — flowers blooming in my garden and all. She tells me she’s headed to Florida next week — not for the winter, but to drive down her convertible and store it at her father’s house. Where he lives, he’s eight hours from New Orleans, eight hours from Nashville, eight hours from just about anywhere worth going. The trash business slows in the winter (something I’d never considered), and she’s looking forward to doing some traveling this winter.

I’m no fan (who is?) of consumption and trash, but the transfer station has a particular allure to me: so many stories here. When I moved from our last house, I negotiated with the transfer station owner about swapping used tires for metal, and what could he offer for two old pickups in the woods? We each held up our end of the bargain we struck.

A flock of juncos settled around my house this afternoon. While I folded up the laundry I had hung on the back porch, I imagined my acquaintance driving south, roof cranked down and the breeze in her hair, speeding towards her dreams.

On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

— Hunter S. Thompson