fiction

Wedding Bells: Chop Wood, Carry Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

Van Morrison’s Enlightenment begins with a riff on the Buddha’s Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Didn’t I first stumble into that koan in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, that little white paperback my sister and I checked out of the public library and handed back and forth between us? Those were the adolescent years when I devoured literature — Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath — so hungry, those years of amazement, at how literature could sing. So hungry I was in those years that merged into that Vermont mountainside college where I often stayed up most of the night, talking, drinking, often sleeping under the dazzling constellations. In the mornings, we trekked to seminars in the former cow barn and debated Plato and Kant.

Those years, I believed I could wrap my mind around life, that understanding was possible in more than ragged snippets. All my adult life I’ve leaned into a daily version of chop wood, carry water, that three-legged stool of raising children, writing books, earning a livelihood to keep shelter and home whole for my tiny family. An insanely complex equation.

With great merriment, my oldest daughter marries, we host a party, folks arrive, cake is eaten. The night before, we stay up late, the girls decorating the cake, my brother on a kitchen stool, shaking out the stories of our memories together. Such happiness to have a full house of youth and laughter. Monday morning, awake long before dawn, I labor at my version of carrying wood, those Van Morrison lines humming through my mind. Illusion? Nonattachment? Perhaps all my life I’ve thought about this koan in the wrong Western way, an either/or. Cold dew washes my bare feet.

As for the cake…. I’m still handing around leftovers, sweet luck.

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
― Lucille Clifton

July, Sweet and Sour.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

I read in the New York Times that Catcher in the Rye turns 75, a novel my mother first shared with me. My parents owned little fiction; our house was mostly filled with philosophy books, David Hume (who I never read) and Plato and Aristotle. In those shelves was jammed a copy of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Ten Stories, drug-store paperbacks held together with rubber bands. Books I love — and maybe you do, too.

In this lushly lingering month of July — filled with sun and swimming, with work and chores — I’m lucky to have scheduled a dozen readings for Call It Madness, this novel about Vermont and family and how the sodden past shapes our lives. Of all the books that reflects my life, Long Day’s Journey into Night surely ranks at the top. A reader pointed out to me recently that Call It Madness moves forward linearly, but is packed with the past, events that happened decades ago that remain as vibrant as this morning’s news.

I write in the world of cause and effect — our actions always propel consequences — but the past with its radiant joy and unquenchable sadness propels us mightily. Nonetheless, the pear trees previous owners planted in my front yard bear reddening fruit. The bees suck globe thistle. Sunday evening, I walk far along the river, the running water sunk low among exposed rocks. The sunlight lingers — so much light in these days sugary with freshly-mown hay. I’d like to pocket a handful of July and return in January: humans, we can launch ourselves to the moon but July-in-January is impossible. Nothing to do but quaff the present while it exists.

hydrangeas
pale blue in the rain
blue in the moonlight

By Masaoka Shiki | Translation by Lucien Stryk

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Secret revealed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Freakishly, by chance, I discover my mother’s given first name is different from the name she used. I’d never heard a whisper of this secret. As a writer, the discovery is material manna. As a daughter… well, strange news, indeed.

In the inexplicable alignment of fate, I’m a month away from publication of my third book, Call It Madness, a novel about young woman Avah who unexpectedly realizes her mother lied two decades ago when she claimed Avah’s great-grandfather died, his beloved house sold. Now, I unearth this secret my mother kept so well. I carry my mother’s name that was at once her name and not her name.

Where is the dusky line between fiction and life? Impossible, this seems, impossible, that I’ve written about my life in reverse. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely…”

How meagerly we know this world, the littleness of the stuff that structures our own stories. Stacking firewood on Sunday afternoon, I listen to a NYT story written by a sighted man about traveling with the unsighted. The upshot? How we understand the world in pieces. The whole is an impossibility for any one of us.

And yet, fiction aims to manifest a perfect miniature world, a shimmering sphere, a handful of secrets and mysteries revealed one-by-one, like a matryoshka doll. At its center, is there a grain of rice or a chip of coal? A folded fortune like a slip of paper in a sweet cookie, a koan to clench in a fist and ponder. A way to reflect the whole of life, this impossible life.

Dividing line: rivers running north and south.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Lost, I spend a crazy amount of time on back roads, driving from here to there, searching for a house where I’ve never been. A porcupine ambles along a dirt road. I slow, the car windows rolled down, the sunroof open and dust drifting in. The quilled creature disappears into the roadside weeds. I follow the paved state highway north, a two-line twisting road that cuts through farm fields jeweled with blooming dandelions.

I find them, finally, this kind couple, and apologize for my lateness. Turns out, they’ve worried about me. We stand outside in the sunlight, with their little dog and their grown daughter who stops by, this witty and laughing family who has endured tragedy. We’re on a rise of land that overlooks a pond. We are at the dividing place, I learn, where water flows both south and north. As we talk on this old homestead, I sense the world’s expanse, how brooks and streams and thin rivers join immense lakes, powerful rivers, the mighty beast of the Atlantic Ocean. Around us rises the history of this homestead, how the house and family has grown and contracted and changed over the decades. Spread overhead, the gleaming night sky, the pinprick constellations.

Black flies chew my hairline. Post-chemo, my lost straight hair returned as ringlets. On my way again, I retrace my way through swamps dense with marsh marigold. On this sunny day, the trees push out new leaves, further, further, in these few hours. I return to a former school house, where the town is voting again that day on a failed school budget. People come and go, cheery with the spring weather. I stay late for a hearing and drive home under a blood-red sunset, the breeze through my car windows sweet with plowed earth and manure.

How furiously I labor to remain in this world. To savor the inevitability of lostness, the chance crossing of a porcupine on its solitary animal journey, the stunning May blossoms. Many months ago, I asked my brilliant oncologist what I did to invite lymphoma into my body. Vehemently, he replied that I’d done nothing, absolutely nothing, to cause this brutal disease.

This physician saved my ragged life, but do our philosophical planes align? Two years ago, as the cancer sunk its silent teeth into my flesh, those intertwined demons of fatigue and despair shook me, too. Always now, skimming beneath my days and nights, flickers that fear: relapse. I’d spent so much time, that winter of illness, in the Dartmouth ED that the nurses and MDs became familiar. They knew my daughters and I by name. The general surgery team appeared repeatedly in that huddle around my bed, and I began to understand the hues of that word restraint as they considered their surgeon thoughts. There was that dreadful evening when I informed the oncologist that I could endure no more, and he gently replied that I could. He would get me through. So I endured. Many years ago, when I was so young, 21 and naive and freshly falling in love, I whined to a professor that I could not finish my thesis; I’d done enough. He kindly informed me that someday I would write a book and I would fear I would never reach the end. All this, in fact, transpired.

Restraint and effusive joy. Sooty despair, the pleasure of a purring cat. As the night settled down through twilight, I drank tea on my back step, leaning against my house. A fox trotted across the violet-strewn grass, quickly, on its way. So much for monotone winter. Wild spring.

Dandelion 

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions 

is this single kernel of bright yellow 

dropped on our path by the sun, sensing 

that we might need some marker to help us 

find our way through life, to find a path 

over the snow-flattened grass that was 

blade by blade unbending into green, 

on a morning early in April, this happening 

just at the moment I thought we were lost 

and I’d stopped to look around, hoping 

to see something I recognized. And there 

it was, a commonplace dandelion, right 

at my feet, the first to bloom, especially 

yellow, as if pleased to have been the one, 

chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

~ Ted Kooser

Map Revision

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Fickle May, windy and wet, sweating and chilly, the green urgently shoving through last year’s dead brown. Every day, a different pleasure: marsh marigold blooming in bracken water, violets sprinkled under the apple trees with their tiny tufts of leaves.

Nights and early mornings, I lie on the couch and read Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, “The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.”

Oh, the imprint of life.

A year ago, in yet another Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room—fourth floor, the best of the ten rooms where I stayed that winter, with a sunset view of the mountains and such a kind nursing staff—the surgeons stopped in yet again, the pack of them, head surgeon to med students. Listening, I stared through the window at the walking path that wraps around the medical complex. I supposed I could keep arguing against surgery, get someone to push me in a wheelchair to the elevator, hobble outside, and then return via the Emergency Entry. My daughters and I were pretty darn familiar with that entry by then. There was no other option; I said, okay, signed the consent, phoned my siblings and pleaded for fresh horses to arrive, to get me through.

On this dawn-rosy May morning, no fresh horses needed today. A year ago, my daughters arrived for Mother’s Day, and walked me outside beneath the just-opening apple blossoms. We visited the courtyard gardens that we had stared at through the winter of chemotherapy, snow blowing. The cherry trees were profusions of pink. I salvaged books from free carts, novels and histories that I would stock up, like pain meds, to ferry me through the next round of recovery.

This morning, the daylight flooding in, a year later, a wall’s been removed in my kitchen. The dishes and baking pans are piled in cardboard boxes, a sole knife and cutting board in my sink. Will this chaos keep me in the world? Will messiness root me here? Or is this simply my lifelong patterns of creation-destruction-creation, life’s paddlewheel, that I lean on now? Er, maybe that I’ve always stood upon?

“Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” — Arthur Frank