memoir

Pre-election. Cows.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November 2, and chatter is all about midterms and the lingering balmy and dry weather. Variables.

For whatever mysterious reason, I keep thinking of Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” poem, which I’ve surely quoted here, perhaps numerous times over the years. This weekend, the moon waning, I drove home on a back road after dinner with friends. In the rural dark, I passed intermittent houses, windows glowing. Where I’d been was hot, so I drove with the sunroof open, in my thin sweater, the scent of woodsmoke drifting in with the breeze, my head filled with a killer live blues band. But where my road parts left, I kept driving, through the village mostly closed up, and to the town forest where I parked.

I’m mostly not afraid of the dark except when I’m terrified. I’ve lived a whole adult life to write this—mostly not afraid except when I tremble with fear—for the immeshed reasons of experience and will and desire that spiral into all our lives. In the thin starlight, I walked along the path, the woods redolent with fallen leaves. Where the path edged along a field, I paused and placed my hand against a white pine, listening, listening. Were the cows yet in the field? The night opened my eyes wide. Yes, indeed, the cows, shifting and chewing, steady.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

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

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

How the River is Cut.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I often write here about this season or that season—Siberian blue quill season or the beginning of the swimming season. It’s tamarack season now, great gold evergreen torches among bare branches. Yet, balmy, balmy. Busy, busy, at work, my desk between an open window and the door that leads into the hall where people come and go, all day long. Midday, I slip out wordlessly, walk to the lake where the quietness matches my mind. The summer people have all gone now.

In the evening, warm as spring with the darkening light true to November, a crazy mixed-upness, I restlessly walk around the village, my usual walking companions elsewhere, out of touch. The night falls quickly, and here’s another thing I’m grateful for: to generally not fear the dark. Lord knows, there’s plenty else we each fear.

On a bridge over the Lamoille River, I pause for the longest time, mesmerized by the gloaming light, the crickets still murmuring in a nearby field, by the swirl of people. For no particular reason at all but that low river flowing over stones, its hue shifting and flickering, I remember reading Norman Maclean so many years ago, as a young woman, the summer I lived in a tipi in a field of wild blueberries.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ― Norman Maclean

Night Wanders.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late autumn means shortening days which means a reacquaintance with darkness. In sooty twilight, I slip through the narrow path in the pines and into the cemetery, a letter in my hand. Quickly, night settles in.

At the bottom of the hill where this back street joins Main Street, an elderly man leans against the railings on a second-floor landing. The storefront has six apartments above it, and the tenants linger on the covered back stairs in all weather, all times of the year. I pause, and we talk about the balmy fall, the fattening half moon. Then I wish him a good evening and head along.

In the way of small towns, I know pieces of his story—he’s a veteran who served in a war that may seem forever ago, or perhaps just a few breathfuls of air in the past—and he may know snippets of my life, too. I drop my letter in the mailbox and circle through the village. Darkness settles in, and I follow the sidewalk home, not tromping through the woods and the cemetery. Save for passing cars, there’s no one out, house windows filled with people moving about their chores. Ordinary evening under the splendid night sky.

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
― Alan Watts

Ursa Major, companion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.

In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.

My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams

More things in heaven and earth…. Eve of Midterms.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Two years ago, the country churned towards an angry Presidential election. Now, mid-terms in a foliage season remarkable for vivid yellows, dazzling oranges, the natural world a common good exterior to government.

Two years ago, I (and, hence, my family) entered the medical system’s mighty beast of Ivy League Dartmouth Hitchcock. Just recently, I heard word of a long-ago friend and a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and reflexively I thought how awful, that’s likely the end. Yet I had stage 4, a rotten diagnosis. Two years ago, kind strangers rallied around me, advising me to tidy up, consider your affairs.

My affairs?? Had I become a character in a middling English novel? I had a closet shelf of my kids’ high school handwritten math notebooks, the back side of my house needed painting, no directives and certainly no exit plan, a novel under contract, another book about class in Vermont I hadn’t yet written. I’d left my shoes at work. I’d been going about my life — working and writing, my heart divided in throbbing currents of love and loyalty, of rage and hurt, fear and desire.

Entering this darkening season now, as the days shrink and the nights lengthen, the trees drop their leaves and stick season emerges—the metaphor of light reigns. In that winter of illness, daughters and I had so many speeding drives down the icy interstate, and, always, the glowing red of EMERGENCY was a welcoming beacon, the promise of succor. Bit by bit, we figured out how to navigate the system, how to enter and ask for help, parse the complex layers of staff hierarchy, to learn names and procedures, numbers, billing, to ask questions, to understand when answers were impossible. To gauge risk. To endure, and endure, and endure more.

In all this, to know awe for the skill and art of complex medicine, to be supremely grateful for this first world privilege, and to be awed for so much light that surrounded my tiny family — from friends and strangers, from so much that arrived to me through this writing space: cards and sweets, books, letters, messages, poems.

Two years later, heading into another election, yes, of course, absolutely, politics matter. People in powerful positions weld decisions that affect everyday lives. But there’s that Hamlet line: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy… In this quiet hour, the wind knocking an overgrown rose bush against my window, the woodstove crackling, profound satisfaction to be yet in the chaotic story of this world.

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers.”
― Suleika Jaouad

Scrap of a love story: “…the only things you know…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Asters I planted in my garden, withstanding first frosts.

More indicative, perhaps, would be this:

Darkness lies deeply on each end of the day, cats rising hours before dawn to eat, myself to weld that fork and open my laptop. Afternoons wind down into early darkness. A friend and I walk through spits of rain, wander along Main Street, jammed with locals and leaf peepers, negotiate the two empty stools at a long bar, where she drinks beer and I drink club soda, eating the pip of lemons.

What does time matter? It might be six or ten, maybe nearing midnight. Night presses against the wide windows, as if hungry.

Later, walking home, the air touches my face with its scents of diesel and rotting leaves, woodsmoke. Every year, this pause. The need to gather coats, who needs new boots? and where are the mittens?, the price of snow tires, the aligning of ash buckets, the necessity of socks. All that long winter I was sick, I couldn’t navigate the porch steps and the ice by myself, darkness relegated to my windows. Only in those rushing nighttime drives to Dartmouth Hitchcock did I know the constellations arced overhead, Ursa Major, the gleaming Pleiades, the scrap of cold on my lips. How I missed this.

And a favorite Maggie Smith poem:

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark

morning streets, I point and name.

Look, the sycamores, their mottled,

paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves

rusting at the edges.

I walk through Schiller Park with you

on my chest. Stars smolder well

into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks,

the dogs chasing prized sticks.

Fall is when the only things you know

because I’ve named them

begin to end. Soon I’ll have another

season to offer you: frost soft

on the window. The first time you see

something die, you won’t know it might

come back. I’m desperate for you

to love the world because I brought you here.