memoir

The natural course of things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Dawn, I’m barefoot in the dewy garden, gathering peas, the world ignited. By the time my daughter and I meet in the kitchen, a little after five as she drinks coffee and heads to work, gray has skimmed over the sky, rain rain rain pushing in. (Side note: Red Sky at Morning, Richard Bradford’s novel, is a terrific classic novel, the former husband of my very long ago nursery school teacher, somewhere in Santa Fe….)

A year ago, heavy rains flooded much of my state. As I left Greensboro yesterday afternoon, I passed a village resident digging a trench with a shovel, some preventative channeling. About this time last year, I realized I knew a number of people who were driving around with shovels in their cars or pickups.

We are now in midsummer. Around two sides of our house, my garden grows — cottage roses and cup plant and phlox — and the wild rallies on the other two sides — jewel weed and box elder and goldenrod twine around porch railings, brush against the clapboard. Snip snip must be done, and yet somehow hasn’t yet. The groundhogs multiply, run beneath our chairs on the deck. I wonder about those foxes, about the natural course of things, wonder again, Well, what do I know? What will happen will happen….

A stranger appears at our house…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

A stranger appears at our house while I’m watering one night, the little drink I offer my tomato plants on hot days. Her grandmother lived in this house, an old woman widowed now in another part of Vermont. I let the stranger in. She’s mystified that a tiny pantry in the kitchen was removed. I can answer some of her questions — that the four tiny bedrooms were changed to two tiny rooms and one larger one, that the downstairs walls were painted yellow by me.

Someday, I say, someone will knock down a wall and change this, too.

Outside, in the evening light that’s storybook shades of peach and lemon and lime, I tell her the soil is sand. She remembers the ants who bit her as a tiny child, and she remembers the lilacs. We stand talking a little about our lives — how I came to live here, where she’s now. I ask, Who planted the roses, but she doesn’t know.

Just before she leaves, she looks at the foot-wide strip of cement that surrounds the house. “My sister and I used to dress up in my mother’s old clothes and high heels. Everything was too big for us, so we scuffed the heels around the house.”

She gets back in that rusty mini-van, waves, and heads off. A few days later, she sends me photos, 1960s-style, of kids in what’s now my living room. And the wallpaper? She remembered it indelibly and wanted me to see it, based on some notion that pineapples and giant leaves were a fine addition to the walls of a small Vermont living room.

There’s one last thing, though. She even wanted to see the basement. As we stood looking at the stone walls and the rough-hewn floor joists, we wondered about the housewrights. How well-built this house is, tucked on a hillside in a place that seems both part of the village and not. My days, too, are numbered here. I’ll die here, or I’ll move elsewhere. All these stories are pieces of this house — these little girls, sixty years ago, in too-big shoes, hands pressed against this house for balance, giggling.

July, it’s worth noting again, July July July, month of growth, today own parents’ anniversary. Each of these July days…. Savor in some kind of way.

Old cheese, new peonies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The girls come find me where I’m swimming, the water brackish, strewn with pollen. A blackbird keeps me company. The girls have snagged out-of-date cheese that’s perfectly fine and a tomato that’s sweetly ripe. At home, I dice last year’s garlic. I insist the girls admire the Bartzilla peony that’s blooming now, two blossoms and more fat buds of blossoms. The Bartzilla was a gift a number of autumns ago. My youngest planted the hairy root with me, skeptical. Now, for these few days, this peony’s a marvel.

All day, I’ve been thinking of this Mary Oliver poem. Well worth a share.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace, 
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again — 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

Playing cards, considering remains.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the darkness, I slide the barn door shut. The world is redolent with cut grass, the wet earth where I watered grape vines. Embers flicker in the fire pit; low laughter moves through the night. June, oh loveliest June, endless varieties of leaf and blossom.

On a hike, we meet a stranger from Maine, and we swap stories about climate change and marriage. He sees my brother’s dog has no water, and shares what he’s carried for his dog. The afternoon gleams with storybook colors of emerald, cobalt, gold. We drive to the lake, to the general store, to a brewery where we sit outside. My brother drinks beer. My daughter and I sip lemon sodas from stemmed glasses, so sweetly yellow I imagine my hand cups sunlight.

I have my mother’s ashes in my possession. Our conversation bends back again and again to her ashes and her life, and the very different relationship that each of us had with her. Lacking a religious framework, I’m treading in open water. My mother, in fact, might have been fiercely opposed to the chain of circumstances that landed me keeper of her remains, or not. I am her second daughter, her match in stubbornness.

All day long, this tender beginning to June, we do the things we love to do. We drink coffee and eat buttered toast, play cards. The sunlight crosses over my house. The day is both chilly and hot. The days spin on, rich with the illusion that there is no finality. Mercy, I think, shutting the barn door to keep the raccoons from the recycling. Another day, the nightsongs of frogs serenading.

In the edge…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Midafternoon as a storm threatens in, I’m at a stretch of lakeshore where I’ve never swum, and I push in. I’m on the prowl for an eagle, which I never find, and the day has grown muggier than I imagined.

What a month of May this has been. My mother’s death ripples through the amazing forsythia and lilac season, through writing and the steady complexity of work I do for the local Selectboard. At a nearby farm, I buy hothouse basil and tomato starts. A woman I know slightly strikes up a conversation. In the past, our lives ran on weirdly similar tracks, involving divorce, sudden visits from the FBI, the miasma of disorientation. Now, we swap mother stories beneath an enormous lilac. I breathe in the blossoms’ scent.

A few years back, I volunteered in my youngest’s elementary school classroom to assist with a nature program that the kids loved. Naturalist and artist, the teacher kept using the phrase “in the edge.” She pointed out that life thrives at the crossing borders of field and forest, of riverbank, the edges of a homogenous world.

I’m in the edge these days. May’s heat notwithstanding, the water is bitterly cold. I swim out with my lousy swimming skills, my garden’s dirt washing away, the storm clouds hammering together over the glassine water, some of the day yet to come. On the shoreline again, sharp stones gouge my soles.

Stop all the clocks.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments
Santa Fe, many years ago

In this space, I’ve stepped between the mossy threads of my own life. For many years, my mother who lived far from me kept up with my life through my blog. I’d started writing stonysoilvermont the summer my then-husband and I split up. I was about to publish my first book. Although I’ve considered quitting, I’ve kept on, the disciplined scraps of this writing feeding into my creative life.

So it seems right to acknowledge my mother’s passing over into the next realm. A woman of nearly indomitable strength, she was ill for many years and surmounted multiple surgeries and illnesses. But none of us are mortal. My mother, who was a nurse for decades, knew this more keenly than most people. When I was a girl, she returned every morning at breakfast with stories from the hospital, some funny and some heart-wrenching — a child with leukemia, a cab driver shot point-blank in his head. One July morning, she carried home an orange kitten. We named him Oliver, and he lived a long full cat life.

Same, too, with my mother, a woman whose strength and passion shaped my own. In her later years, disease made her wander back and forth in time, into places where none of us could follow. My mother would have wanted us to grieve the end of her life, but not to fall dramatically on our knees. Raised a Lutheran, she was imminently practical. Nonetheless, I remember when I was 21, and my mother grieved her own mother. She stopped all the clocks.