mortality

In Between: Adolescence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Raw. Mothering an adolescent daughter is like ripping a scab off your soul. My daughter’s agonized questions are existential: why do people suffer? What could possibly be the answer to this? A question I have asked since my own adolescence, more and more intently with each passing decade of my life, with each new encounter I have with the multiple varieties of human suffering.

Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood chronicles his young and pregnant wife’s death in an automobile accident. Luzzi, a Dante scholar, writes: My reading of Dante had always been deep and personal, but when I found myself in a dark wood, his words became a matter of life and death.

During both my children’s births, I felt myself poised between life and death, the scrim of our everyday world pushed aside in this small, sacred space. Surely, part of the keenness of adolescence is its odd pivotal place. Half in the clouds of childhood, not yet in the forest of adulthood, adolescence, for this brief (and yet simultaneously very long) moment, spins between these two realms.

 

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November Blooms

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I drove along the road to East Hardwick today, a narrow road I’ve driven countless times. I’ve transported numerous kids in many vehicles, often to the lake’s beach, wearing our swimsuits, the trunk filled with floaties, our bags packed with sunscreen and snacks and knitting. This road means to me little children in diapers, stacks of library books, and the long winter the crew worked on an old farmhouse along this road. The snow blows mercilessly across this road. This road means the public library at the end, and the general store where I buy groceries, mud boots, sugaring supplies and lemonade.

Today, driving a companion to a doctor’s appointment, we talked about his dream to get piglets and sheep. You have to think about something, he said.

There’s a line from a TC Boyle novel, World’s End, where a character defines himself as hard, soulless and free. How I aspired to that in my brash youth. But now, fully immersed in Dante’s woods, I see hardness crazes and breaks, whereas a malleable heart, smeared across the terrain of a road and intersecting journeys and lives, offers a tensile strength, the possibility for growth, the chance to bloom in this brief, dear life.

… The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

–– Hayden Carruth

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Molly S. Photography

Freckled Jack O’Lantern

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

November is the season of mortality. Driving along the southern side of Morristown this late afternoon, the silage fields were harrowed up, dark earth and stone and pieces of corn stalk laid open and fallow for the winter.

Tonight, while the girls carved pumpkins and listened to music, I sat at my desk in the corner upstairs and called one of my oldest friends. We talked about frozen chickens in my freezer, pork, beets, carrots, cabbage. What do you need? I asked. I offered to make soup from beef bones and marrow. He hasn’t long to live, his life caught up quicker to him than he might have imagined. So many years ago, I met his pregnant wife for the first time. She wore a new dress the color of buttercups. That was in the house of many windows and myriad rooms, surrounded by fields of wildflowers. At a wedding one summer, I climbed rickety ladders in my bare feet to the hay barn’s cupola. That marriage ended. My friends’ marriage ended. Strangers to me now live in that house.

Downstairs, my children hunted for stubs of candles. My older daughter had carved flowers and vines and an earthworm on her jack o’lantern. The younger girl’s pumpkin had ears and eyelashes, smiling lips, hearts for hair, and freckles – freckles! – over bumpy orange cheeks. I struck a match and carefully put my hand in the pumpkins. We turned out the lights. The girls’ jack 0’lanterns glowed.

Abandoned house on a
mountainside.

Garden gone to
weeds.

No one home
anymore.

– David Budbill

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Morristown, Vermont, November

My House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While the girls and I were taking down screens and putting up storms today, I noticed a pane of glass had fallen from one of the windows. I was alone on the that side of the house and the window is slightly above my head, in an odd place above a bed of chives. This old window had fallen into such disrepair, its glazing entirely decrepit, that the pane had merely slipped down the house. I lifted the glass, about sixteen square inches, between my hands. That window with its peeling teal paint I had intended to scrape and paint this fall, but I had found neither time nor inclination for any of the windows. I held the pane up to the sunlight as if it were a smudged tear from the house, then set it carefully behind the chives where it wouldn’t be broken. I imagined the house shedding that tear of glass in the night.

My house seems more alive to me than it ever has before, with its rooms of children’s artwork, yarn, books, cobwebs and mud crumbles and the crates of garden onions I’ve yet to carry to the basement. Our house sings with light and joy and color in places; other corners need care and paint and trim. Like everything else in our lives, this house has a story, too, one that began before we arrived with the sprawling clutter of our lives, and one that will continue when we are gone, too.

This afternoon, we attended a memorial service for a neighbor, this woman who had helped build so many houses for family and friends. What a good thing, I thought. What a gift that will last.

Storm Windows

People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain
Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass
I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream
Away in lines like seaweed on the tide
Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind.
The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass
Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by,
Something that I should have liked to say to you,
Something . . .the dry grass bent under the pane
Brimful of bouncing water . . . something of
A swaying clarity which blindly echoes
This lonely afternoon of memories
And missed desires, while the wintry rain
Unspeakable the distance in the mind!)
Runs on the standing windows and away.

Howard Nemerov

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Bridge Over the Abyss, With Baby

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Today, in a grassy field, with sunlight everywhere and school children running around, another parent told me about a long bridge he had frequently crossed as a young man, and how at times he had been afraid of that bridge. Today was so quintessentially Vermont, with a hike through the woods behind the school, little kids and big kids, just fifty in all. The grass was warm, and my daughter and I ate wild apples we had picked the evening before.

The parent’s description was entirely metaphorical – he had now progressed far enough into his life, over that halfway point, that he felt darn certain if the Subaru went over the bridge, he and the kids would pull through.

Listening, I remembered when my older daughter was one, a baby chewing on a stuffed rabbit, and I was driving down the Vermont interstate to visit my parents in New Hampshire. I was driving a beat-up red Toyota pickup too big for me, and I wasn’t able to fasten the safety belt as I sat so far forward to reach the clutch. At highway speed, I approached a long bridge spanning the White River. By chance, I happened to see the bridge in just a certain way, at great speed, and I saw how enormously high was the bridge over the river far down below in the valley.

I had a sudden fear that I absolutely could not traverse such the narrow path over that abyss. I slowed and saw a highway worker along the shoulder, and I had an abrupt impulse to stop and beg this man – a complete stranger – to drive myself and my baby across that bridge.

I didn’t, of course. Somehow I knew I would have to get myself and my baby from here to there, in whatever rattletrap I was driving. Since then, I’ve driven both daughters over many bridges, through all kinds of snowstorms, and once through a terrible ice storm, and I’ve always ferried them safely home.

But like my parent companion today, I often see that abyss beneath us, an intimation of our own morality, and yet I press on. As I drove over that bridge on my fearful day, however, I slowed more than perhaps was prudent on an interstate, and I steeled myself to peer over the guard rails. Far down, in the same tenor of autumn sunlight I sat in today, the bend of river glowed like gems.

Albert Camus wrote a novel, The Stranger, in which his character, Meursault, is condemned to death. Three days before his execution, he is able for the first time in his life to touch the blue sky. He is in his cell. He is looking at the ceiling. He discovers a square of blue sky appearing through the skylight. Strangely enough, a man forty years of age is able to see the blue sky for the first time. Of course, he had looked at the stars and the blue sky more than once before, but this time it was for real. We might not know how to touch the blue sky in such a profound way. The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life.

–– Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love

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Tomatoes on the Way Out/Photo by Molly S.