friendship

Something Else.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

About a year ago, a friend and I hung out laughing in her car beside Lake Champlain. Early November, by 6 p.m. it was dark as a buttoned-up pocket. The lake lapped against the shore. We joked about the pan I held of the worst cornbread I’d ever baked and the potluck we skipped, the polite and surely erudite chat we’d missed. Ah, whatever…. Twenty plus years ago, we were young mothers, driving around in my old car or her old car, our toddlers in carseats. The kids sometimes bickered if nap time neared, sometimes spun tales about Mopsy bunny driving a dump trunk or wondered aloud if maybe the mothers would relent for creemees.

My friend’s kids and my kids — they’re all grownup now. Are their stories more fun now than the cups of sand and lake water they used to serve us on the beach? Those countless gritty root beer floats.

So a year ago… a kind of throwback, this time without the kids. She ran a stop sign. I insisted we walk out to the ferry launch, and the bitter wind was dreadful. We stopped and bought Thai noodles and kale, and my friend ate like a normal person, while I stared at her and wondered what on earth was wrong with me. I was convinced I had mold poisoning from a work exposure, and we kept laughing and laughing. Then she said, “What if it’s Lyme disease? What if it’s something else?”

It was something else, of course. A few days later, I was hospitalized, turning dreadfully towards septic. That winter, as I endured chemo, as things went from really bad to worse, I sometimes thought back to those hours of silliness, how rapidly my life altered. As a young mother in those years, I did not yet know this. I did not yet comprehend that the world does not go on and on and on.

Knowing this now, in my soul and body, does it make the laughter sweeter?

Yes, indeed.

But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, “Hi!”
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe. ~ William Stafford

Calendar (and actual) spring…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In my rinse-and-repeat pattern of this long winter, driving back from Dartmouth in the late morning, sunlight sprawling over the brown fields, the tree limbers along the interstate beginning the season’s cutting, I notice the Connecticut River has thawed. Unmutable sign the back of this mighty winter has cracked.

Home, my yard half-buried yet in twig-strewn snow, the ash buckets mark their winter resting place, a chaos of cinders that touch the edge of the quartz-pebbled rose garden my youngest and I made, years ago.

Later, a friend stops by with good cheer and belated and welcome Christmas presents. The sun is yet bright. We walk, slowly, slowly, on the short stretch of dead-end road before my house. I point to a robin perched in a pin cherry. She spies last summer’s hornet nest spun into the lilacs, a nest on the neighbor’s windowsill.

We were once neighbors ourselves. In mud season, we walked with our little kids up and down our back road, taking our time as the kids searched for frog eggs in the roadside ditches and tender green folds pushing up through matted brown leaves in the forest: the first spring beauties and trout lilies, bloodroot. Now, during my last hospitalization, her son repaired my daughter’s car, stayed for dinner and conversation.

Too snowy and wet to sit down, I lean against my car’s bumper. A robin chirps in the neighbors’ sugar maple, an expanse of curved trunk and branch and twig. Such a meager peep peep this rust-bellied hand-sized creature makes, prying winter away, thrusting our world towards nest building, egg laying, song.

“Against Panic” by Molly Fisk

You recall those times, I know you do, when the sun  

lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,   

when a parched day finally broke open, real rain   

sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples   

and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards   

tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished   

in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again —   

beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping. 

Rowing in autumn…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In a cold rain, my friend and I set off walking. It’s a joke between us. When we were neighbors, I would call and ask her to meet me for a walk.

It’s sleeting, she’d say.

Only a little.

Invariably, she’d join me, gung-ho.

The rain lets up, though, as we walk up a muddy path, cross streams, pause to admire where a view might be through dense mist. The woods are gold and black, redolent with the humus-y scent of fallen leaves, this summer’s bounty already turning back into the damp soil. I remember her oldest son, now a teacher himself, standing on a chair in my kitchen, rolling out dough for sugar cookies, happy. Rain or snow probably fell then, too.

This is familiar forest to me, as I lived here for so many years. But I grew up surrounded by New Hampshire forest, and the exquisite beauty of New England fall, its sharp bite reminding us of winter, is as familiar to me as the backs of my hands. While the greater political world is utterly unfamiliar — which way will this go? — this path, our conversation, is balm for my soul. Both our lives have gone rocky ways, and yet here we are in rain, pressing on, pocketing especially pretty leaves.

On my way home from our soggy walk, I stop at the coffee shop and spread out my papers and laptop on a table. I’m standing there, thinking (or maybe dreaming), when a long-ago acquaintance appears. We sit and talk for a bit. There was a quarrel in the past between us. As she speaks, I feel the blood quickening in my rain-damp flesh, from my cheeks to my sodden toes. Here it is again, how experience shapes and changes us. Our culture pushes us, pushes us as women, to smooth the edges, say all’s well, be polite, diminish ourselves and pretend we’re still in the land of childhood, when the grownup woman world is a vast sea of star and moonlight, treacherous waves, radiant beauty, and the great unknown. At the end of our conversation, there’s no conclusion, no tidy wrap-up, just the two of us rowing together for a bit, handing the oar back and forth.

The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In a gray drizzle/not quite drizzle, I stop outside the co-op to talk, my hands full with peaches, mozzarella, and Clif bars for my daughter’s hike the next day. The prediction is for temps at high elevation in the thirties.

My conversation companion is a woman I run into randomly, usually on the sidewalk, and inevitably we jump right into talking. It’s August and dreary with wildfire smoke and a sudden cold rain. My hands are full with those peaches and sweets, so I’m blinking in the misting rain. I’m laughing a little, because why not? but I sharpened up quickly as she’s not laughing at all. The strange thing is she’s listing some things that have been rattling around in my mind for months now – the collective frustration that bends dialogue to anger or sarcasm, the way the town’s Center Road is so unkempt grass grows through its middle, and the recent property tax bills that are are you kidding me?

And even though my daughter is at home waiting for the cheese for that pizza we’ll make from onions and basil and tomatoes I’ll snag from the garden, I leave my few groceries in my Subaru and follow my companion through the damp woody patch behind the co-op. We stand at the river’s edge. She leans far out over the water. Look, she says.

It’s drizzling, and even though I’d gone running just before stopping in for what I thought would be a few minutes’ worth of shopping I’m starting to shiver a little. But I have this sudden vision of what’s happening with this town where I live, how the river threatens to wash away this downtown of brick and granite and asphalt, trees and roses. Years ago I realized that brokenness is never one thing; all these unfixable things – climate swings and decades (centuries?) of ill-use and reliance on the Feds to fund these fixes, when that amorphous federal government… well, why say more there?

A few years back, I interviewed a well-known writer who advised me that a writer should always acknowledge her time and place. The rain’s fattening. The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible. At home, our kitchen is warm and bright, and the cats are half-sleeping as cats do on the rug before the kitchen sink. I’ve always believed in domesticity as the antidote to the world’s inevitable callousness. Later, I wander over to the neighbor’s house and lean in her doorway for a bit. We talk randomly about nothing much at all, catbirds and rose thorns, no repair, but a strengthening of heart, surely.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it….

“Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney

Immensity taps at your life…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Nearing the end of August, the wild around our village house is mightily fortressing. The path behind our house has been given up this summer by friends; those who visit arrive via the street where the grass has broken the pavement, too, crisscrossed the gray with emerald. In the ravine behind our house, the foxes have kitted again this year. Randomly, the youngsters come out to chase each other. My daughter, who unexpectedly met the hissing mama fox, gave up that path a few years back. Only I now claw my way through the blackberry brambles, whistling, scraping my bare knees in some kind of penance for passing through their realm.

This year, while the human world on a great and local level has worked at its less admirable traits, the natural world has flourished. My daughters and I hold the apples and pears, gauging not yet, not yet. All around, a rioting of blossom and vine of what I’ve sown — sunflowers and morning glories, love lies bleeding — and the lushness of goldenrod, wild honeysuckle, creeping cucumber.

Oh, sweet illusion of Vermont’s August, as if stark November will skip her own visit this year….. On this dewy morning, smoke-drenched from wildfires so far distantly north, a favorite poem from Jane Hirshfield.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield

The dark blossomings of chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Again, this metaphor lens (how is it possible not to see the world in metaphors?) Paul and John’s Long and Winding Road, Dante’s gloomy forest, Sylvia Plath’s bees and beekeepers…

I lead a friend into a forest, a piece of Nature Conservancy land on a dirt road. We’re talking, talking, my eyes searching the forest floor for ephemerals (the trilliums folded shut, trout lilies still only leafy, no blossoms yet). I take one wrong turn, a second wrong turn. I backtrack, looking for the narrow stone steps. Our walking and talking — and my eventual smartening up to pay attention — takes us to Chickering Bog. In this pristine place, it’s just us and frog eggs, fat tadpoles, crimson pitcher plants — the confluence of ancient and freshly brand-new.

The strange thing is, I’ve walked to this bog half a dozen times, easily. Yet never in April when the sunlight drops down through the trees’ bare branches, when the winter-fall of broken branches strews over the paths. Or maybe I’ve never been here with this conversation about things tiny and great. The glassy water shimmers so clear the bog’s mucky bottom tantalizes, unreachable, so many centuries of so much life.

At the journey’s end, at the dirt road’s edge, the sprinkled gold coins of coltsfoot, a purple sprig of flowering Daphne.

On the reading front…..

“We must therefore be willing to get shaken up, to submit ourselves to the dark blossomings of chaos, in order to reap the blessings of growth.” — Gregg Levoy, Callings