family

Green Apples.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
I flee work early with my daughter and her dog, to watch my younger daughter play soccer. Mid-October, and in my world everyone clamors to be outside as much as possible.

In the parking lot, a rusty white Toyota pickup sports a peeling bumpersticker with Joseph Campbell’s advice: Follow your bliss.

In my young woman days, I wholeheartedly championed this, easy-peasy, of course, I thought. Then I entered what seemed like a labyrinthian period of my life where the notion of bliss seemed facile and sometimes outright stupid. On this sunny afternoon, I chat with parents and strangers on the grass about little things — who’s started their furnace already and the merits of sprinkling cinnamon on hot oatmeal and is that the new superintendent with the coach?

As the sun heads down, the spectators pull on jackets. The wiser among us brought blankets. I find my hat in my car and loan my daughter my jacket. My youngest is a senior. Next year I won’t be here, clustered among the parents and grandparents, and so each game seems a bead on a counting game. On the way home, we stop at the general store for curried dumplings.

All afternoon I kept thinking of Ruth Stone’s achingly lovely poem “Green Apples.”

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

October Afternoon.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On my way back to Hardwick, I’m stopped in road construction on the County Road. While I wait for the steamroller, I glance at the passenger seat and notice my knitting has slipped from my bag. The project is a simple hat, and the yarn slid from the needles. To save my work, I lift the unfinished hat and slide the stitches back on the needles.

Just before my car hood, the woman in bright yellow holding a STOP sign leans against the pole. I turn off my Subaru engine, thinking of where I’ve come from and the high school soccer game where I’m headed. How quickly cold shadows edge in when the sun slips behind the mountains at this time of year. The mountains around the road dazzle with crimson and gold, but gray is visible in patches, too. Stick season marches in inexorably.

I’m at the town line somewhere between Montpelier and Calais. A few years ago, I sold our arch — the long firebox and pans used for making syrup — to a man who said he’d pick it up in a few months. His address was in this area. I promptly cashed his sizable check. He didn’t return. More than a few months later, I had sold the house, too, and my daughters and I were moving. I wrote list after list with things like pack canning jars and Salvation Army drop-off and get rid of Toyota transmission in shed. On those endlessly reworked lists, I added arch must be moved. While tracking down the buyer, I discovered an unspeakably sad thing had happened to his family a number of years before he wrote me that check.

I found him. He arrived with a friend and loaded the arch on a trailer. He and his friend were older than me, in a different phase of their lives than I was. They spoke kindly to my daughters.

For just a fleeting moment, still waiting for that steamroller to move, I remember that arch precisely. Stainless steel, black metal, the scrape of a shovel on firebrick.

The woman with the STOP sign appears at my open window. I expect her to chide me for daydreaming. Instead, she points to a nearby pond where a flock of geese have landed. The sun hits the sugar maples around the water. There’s so much in that moment — the clamoring and splashing birds, the stunning leaves, that crystalline memory, the sunlight and green yarn in my lap. The woman tells me, “Head on when you’re ready.”

Autumn, Moon, Small Town.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

While my daughter washes the dinner dishes, I head out for coffee. That morning, I finished the last of the grounds. I pull on a sweater and cut through the back woods to the cemetery. A gibbous waxing moon hangs like a splash of cream over the cemetery and keeps me company as I cut through the elementary kids’ ballfield.

As I walk down a side street, I see the co-op below, lit in the falling twilight. Last year, the co-op moved from its tiny Main Street store — packed literally to the ceiling with stuff — to a much larger boxy grocery store around the corner. A number of years ago, the co-op quit selling bottled water after a staff member complied compelling reasons to quit. Instead, the co-op offered cups of free water. Now, the co-op sells local veggies and cheese and meat and wine and so on — and Cocoa Puffs.

As a long-term co-op shopper, I’ll simply note that people don’t know how to use this larger parking lot. For whatever reason, we keep tangling up ourselves, backing out into Route 15, nearly colliding.

In the parking lot, I stand for a moment, admiring the moon and the scent of autumn. All day, the sun has shone brilliantly, unseasonably hot, and rain will be pushing in Friday. The man who lives in the apartment across the street opens the co-op door and gestures for me to walk in ahead of him. We stand talking for a few moments about that drop-of-cream moon and how the scent of fallen leaves reminds us of childhood.

October 1.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I spend the better part of Saturday stacking wood, beginning bundled in a sweatshirt and hat, and quickly stripping to a tank top and shorts. A black cat wanders by and appraises my work which, admittedly, is uneven but certainly sufficient. I breathe in fresh sap, wet earth, dusty bark crumbles.

The month of September — all thirty days — disappeared in a few heartbeats. I’m still pulling in frost-choked parts of my garden, the dead lily stalks, putting away the clay fairy house in the rock garden my daughter made so many years ago.

Friday, I’m at a summit all day that brought together people, who, in one way or another, are enmeshed in healing from addiction. Here’s the thing: a few years ago, I never would have attended a summit like this, let alone speak to a large group. For years, I said nothing about my own struggles with addiction. But publishing Unstitched acknowledged in a very public way my own miserable struggles with drinking. Because I had written the book, I had to answer questions publicly about this, and I needed a surprising amount of time to acknowledge this, to really accept what this meant. But I heard — and I kept hearing — from people I both knew and complete strangers — about their struggles, or a friend or family member’s struggles.

The Rumi line I quote in Unstitched is “the wound is the place where light enters.” When I returned Friday evening, my daughter asked me why I go to these sad things. And it’s true; there’s such grief that’s shared. But now I understand that there’s my own grief — still much of it in a private place in my heart — but grief is our human commonality, too. The wound is what renders the light possible.

When I step out, three hot air balloons are rising.

Nearby the expo where the summit is held is a hair salon named The Rusty Clipper where I dropped off maple syrup wedding favors about twenty years ago. The father of the bride gave me a check. When the bride opened a box, she told me I had given her the wrong bottle — hearts instead of leaves, or leaves instead of hearts. I gave the check back to the father. I put the boxes back in my car. I buckled in my three-year-old and drove home. At home, I redid all the favors and drove back the next day. When I got the check again.

I stand there under the hot air balloons and wonder about that bride whose name I’ve long since forgotten. Then I follow the crescent moon home over the mountains as the light gives way to twilight.

Here we are…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Above pretty much sums up where we are now. 23 years into this parenting gig, it’s now me and the teen, and if a housecat has moved into a box on the kitchen table for the winter? Well, so be it. And the other cat refuses to drink water except on the kitchen sink? Well, so be that, too.

As a young mother, I read a literal library of parenting advice and made a trillion mistakes. I take my (diminished) reading time much more seriously these days. I continue to make mistakes. And I’ve decided the cats are fine companions, even on the table.

In so many versions of my previous life, this wouldn’t fly. Now, listening to Biden talk about his proclaimed End of the Pandemic, I wonder, What’s all that about? Who gets to decide what, anyway, and why believe anyone else when your experience doesn’t jive?

Rain comes down in buckets. A friend gives us a bucket of apple drops. I cook bacon in the oven and buy the best loaf of bread I can find for our dinner. Our tomato and basil plants are still churning out their delectables. Sure, winter is in the near offing. Much more than winter, too. Our cat is the happiest creature I’ve ever loved. We offer him drops of milk on our fingertips, licks of butter from a smooth silver knife, tender kisses on his head.

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

— William Carlos Williams

Found Sign: Enjoy this life.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Late on a Friday night, I’m reading on the couch when my oldest calls. There’s no heat, yet, in her apartment. The evening is tinged with near frostiness. I’ve returned home from an interstate drive in the darkness, thinking over the pieces of my manuscript. In my imagination, I see Lena, my main character, with her emerald green haircut.

A half-moon rises in the darkness as I drive along the Connecticut River. These days — long days — I’m grateful for these imposed breaks, for the opportunity to see the moon rise along an unfamiliar horizon, to stop before a church and read the congregation’s exhortation: Enjoy this life.

My dear cats are sprawled before our glowing wood stove. Listening to my daughter reminds me of my mother — our spunk and sassy irreverence and love of flowers — but my daughter is utterly herself. I close Beth Macy’s Raising Lazarus, and our conversation unfolds over the few miles between us. September, and the swimming season has passed. I hope for decades ahead to see what my daughter makes of her life. For now, this September evening.

... I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet...
— Hayden Carruth