nature

Wild Apples: Details of Living.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The red of my friend’s daughter’s hair matches this autumn—sunshot red—remarkable. Walking along a dirt road flanked by immense maples, abundant with purple asters, the child races forward, drags behind, curious as heck about the world as she gathers stones from the road and wonders if we might follow this inviting path in the woods. Where does it go?

She’s curious, too, about me and what I might say. My dog loves to bite. (The dog does not.) She holds out her hand to illustrate that it looks like mine. Walking, talking with my friend who’s doing her own fascinating unique adult things, a line from Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air returns to me. Holed up in my hand-me-down chair from another friend, nearly incoherent with fatigue by the working week’s end, I’ve just reread this little gem. “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

In ways, the book is a meditation on that Buddhist proverb, for advice post-enlightenment: “Chop wood, carry water.”

One result of what appears to be a permanent stamp of intermittent fatigue (not a sleepiness alleviated by a nap) is a double-edged parsimony and generosity. I’ve refining a few simple sentences in email and meetings—that’s all I have for this—but I also often ignore the hours; I lose track of time in ways I never allowed myself before.

My friend climbs an apple tree and shakes the fruit loose. Her daughter considers an apple seriously. The tree was planted years ago and has now gone wild, unpruned, its branches an immense tree bouquet. The apple’s skin is crimson, tart, the flesh sweet. The child rubs her thumb over a bump in the skin and then bites into the apple. She eats gleefully.

If I timestamped this, I’d note, somewhere in Vermont, late September, gnawed apple cores tossed back into the wild.

Little and Great Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

September 1, and the sudden gush of changing seasons, which is never simply a matter of weather and light, but habit and soul. After a summer of book tour and work, of road trips and hikes, swimming, of reconciliation and division, too, seed sowing and blackberry gathering, of the sweet satisfaction of a family marriage, now early autumn nibbles in these early mornings. All summer, I struggled writing, but the vision forward for this manuscript abruptly opens. I lean hungrily into the work.

On a recent evening, we visit an open studio evening, a dirt road site of a long-ago hill farm with a queenly view of the valley, a righteous post-and-beam structure with a stunningly opulent garden. The art ranges from sculpture to two charcoal drawings commissioned by Bob Dylan where I linger; the studio and gardens comprise a whole. Slowly, the rooms fill with people I’ve known for years and strangers, too, all curious. How much my mother, long passed from the earth, would have loved this evening. How implicitly she would have understood the present of art, its underpinning in the past. She would have noticed the old millstone now relegated beneath a young apple tree.

We drive home around the lake, then down the hills into Hardwick village, the sunset crimson and gold along the darkening horizon. Always, we’re plunging forward, into the night and sleep, into the morning. The next day’s noon, I walk with my daughter along a causeway far into Lake Champlain, balmy wind on our faces, small spits of rain in our hair. The good luck omen of white egrets.

All these are great and little things. The profound pleasure of pouring boiling water into a French press in my rosy dawn kitchen. Soon enough, the monotone of snow and ash and road sand, the immense might of winter, will settle here. For now, the bittersweet profusion of late summer—sunflowers and goldenrod, basil and tomatoes.

As it’s September 1, here’s W. H. Auden…

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Jam of August…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

My youngest and I hike in a nearby state park that, as a family, we’ve visited for years—Elmore Mountain. Mid-August, in frothy opulence, does not disappoint: rocky mountain path surrounded by leafy forest, summit view, lake, the nearby store where I once bought my daughters ice cream cones and we now eat sandwiches. The trueness of hunger, the satisfaction of satiation.

Fellow novelist Catherine Tudish and I make the long trek to Manchester, Vermont, to read at Northshire Bookstore. There and back, hours filled with writing talk, life stories, the fried dumplings we eat at a fancy bar, the lingering hours at the bookstore’s closing, me buying one and then two books, stashing these in my bag. We talk and talk as the twilight slides into darkness. I laugh and say two days from now maybe we’ll still be driving around Vermont, and Catherine gently prods me to turn left, go right…

Later, after I leave her at her farmhouse and the massive hydrangea — white shot through with pink — shimmering in my headlights, I listen to the Rolling Stones, and now I am keenly intent on the back road through the darkness, cell-free Vermont, navigating by the few road signs I pass. I’ve driven here, but never in the impenetrable darkness. The night is hourless, and I’m giddy, sunroof open, car heater on, giddy not with any kind of writerly fame but enmeshed in this road and this darkness that I know will of course inevitably end somewhere. Giddy with the joy of my third book that has now reached bookshelves, the story of my troublesome main character Avah Lavoie a rough-edged young woman in search of her own coarse salvation. The novel begins in a sour hangover and ends in hunger: appetite.

Home, gracious I’m tired, but I stand holding my books and wallet and looking up at the constellations in their complex gauze, the Milky Way’s arc, bridged over my house and garden, apple trees and that giant goatsbeard and compass flowers shadowy creatures. The thin thread of crickets. I’m furiously hungry.

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner

“… the now of us…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The incomparable Mary Elder Jacobsen reads her poetry at Elmore State Park. A sultry August morning, I come alone, friends off doing one summer thing or another. Mary reads in the beach house with the doors and windows open, a breeze carrying in the lake’s lapping and children’s laughter.

Afterwards, because I’m there, I hike the mountain. My family and I have hiked this mountain many times, but I haven’t been here in a few years. Last summer, I was walking—short stretches at first, then longer—gaining strength from the trifecta of cancer and chemo and surgery, gaining strength week by week. This summer, I’ve pulled out my hiking boots, pushing. How far will my strength return?

The rocky outcropping is familiar, a bit more brushy, but the cement footings of a vanished cabin are as I remember, with purple asters and wild roses. A sweltering, sweaty day that recalls my New Hampshire childhood, the countless hikes with my dad. A couple arrives, and we talk about the lake below, the view of the forest and hayfield landscape. We share apples, handfuls of crackers, stories.

The story I don’t share is the January evening I parked at the lake’s edge and walked out on the ice beneath the piercing stars. I was on my way from a late meeting to pick up my daughter at a friend’s house, and I’d allotted myself exactly ten minutes. The cold came at me like arrows. Across the lake, the ice cracked like a shot in the fierce temperature. And the constellations? Ancient and present and promising a future…. Now, years later, in moist August scented with those roses…. This day bears no thinking of time. August, in her tumbling abundance.

That January night, my daughter was waiting for me, wanting home. We’d been gone for hours and hours, since early morning, and the wood stove had gone cold, our house inhospitable. Rushing — I was always rushing in those days — I kindled the fire, boiled boxed macaroni and cheese, carried in more wood. We ate in front of the crackling wood stove, sharing our days. All the seasons of a life. Now, this August afternoon, damselflies flicker.

Hours later, I swim in my favorite pond. A friend and I swap stories and books, crackers, tomatoes, cheese. A stranger swims, too, and the stories widen. In a pouring rainstorm, I drive home, then stand under my covered porch and lean against my dear house, drenched from swimming and rain. The earth drinks deeply.

Because, whatever Science says about some equal future moon, 
I know the rare particulars of this vast and intimate brilliance— 
the now of us—won’t ever, in our lifetime, come my way again. ~ Mary Elder Jacobsen

July, in stillness and fury.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Restless, these July days long and, I kid you not, fragrant with fat pink roses in my yard, I’m at a nearby pond not long before twilight, craving company and coolness. I crouch along the shoreline. Save for one sole swimmer, the water lies flat. From the one house along this wooded stretch, laughter spills.

As a child, my sibs and I had a picture book by Leo Leonni about a mouse named Frederick, an artistic rodent soul who saved up the colors of the summer to share in storytelling, hunkered down in the mouse nest, to get his tribe through the dark winter. Likewise, July. In a patch of mucky reeds, forget-me-nots stretch up, teeny blue blossoms. Surely these flowers fit into the biological world for some specific and clever reason. This evening, they’re simply delightful.

Far down the pond, the loons call, exquisite tremolo. This evening, I’m yet humming from Ocean Vuong’s recent reading in Greensboro, how he did that rare thing: in a theater of hundreds of souls, he read simply to me, as I let my knitting fall into my lap and I leaned forward against the balcony’s railings, listening and marveling, his words a river of shoveling snow and absent fathers, of napalm in the jungle and American factories, and how history and bloodshed and the resilience of poetry bind us as a species—each of us a unique drop in that river of flowing time.

The pond’s chill gnaws my flesh. On the sandy mud, we eat cherries. Talking, we will solve exactly none of the world’s conundrums tonight. The loons appear, two parents, two fledglings, on an evening swim and fish hunt. I’ve been here before, stark winter, silent ice, the crunch of snow beneath my boots. Now, the biting insects cluster along my bare legs, claiming bite-sized sips of my blood.

Last, a few readings for Call It Madness coming up. Please come, if you’re around my edge of Vermont, in sweet July.

Meadow Meeting House, in Corinth, VT, Sunday, July 12, 3 pm, with the remarkable Sasha Hom.

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, Tuesday, July 14, 7 pm.

A novelist, however, sees the idea of ‘a leisurely life’ as practically synonymous with ‘the waning of one’s creativity.’ For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die. — Haruki Murakami

June’s Snow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

We eat on the back deck of a little restaurant in Plainfield, Vermont, home of the former Goddard College, its campus now morphing towards its next phase. In Plainfield, there’s hand-lettered LOVE signs everywhere, a sense that people are doing interesting things like writing novels in verse in treehouses, and folks say hi when we pass on the sidewalks, as if they know us. And maybe they do. Tiny Vermont.

Rain sprinkles around the table’s umbrella. Overhead, leaning back, I spy a puzzle piece of blue sky, a horn of the half moon.

Solstice, the longest day of the year, fragrant with roses, a serenade of toad songs. Afterwards, we walk along the river, then uphill, where the floods in the past few years cut the hillside, rammed silt and rock into houses that remain, people-less, doubtlessly waiting for FEMA money that may or may not arrive, an excavator, another breaking. We turn and wander through higher ground, where gardens flourish green and pink. Hammocks are strung for summer reading in porches.

June’s ineffable loveliness.

In the long twilight I drive home, my tires splashing through puddles where rain has fallen hard and missed us. Around Woodbury Lake, the mist layers among the emerald hills, the sky’s deepening blue, sunset gold. Beloved Vermont, relishing her own beauty. I don’t pause, the radio off, only me and my own stray thoughts. I drive north on this road where I’ve traveled for so many years, in so many kinds of weather, passing the place of the terrible recent accident, the unspeakable tragedy, and then I’m in little Woodbury village again. Wetlands and church and school and post office. Fog trails around me.

I’m not at all a churchgoing woman, but the phrase yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death clangs through me, resonates in my soul and body like a bell’s clapper. The dearness of this life, so easily torn.

At home, in the thin wisps of light, I wander through my garden, the campion white, the mock orange blossoms June’s snow. Through my neighbors’ windows, laughter spills.

“Peonies at Dusk,” Jane Kenyon

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.