nature

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.

Always, the question, which way?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

For readers who haven’t lived in northern Vermont, here’s a keyhole view of June: heat and humidity move in, and the earth thrusts out into leaf and bloom. Overnight, the loosestrife blooms yellow, the chard gains an inch in leaf. The lilacs fade. The Siberian irises spread purple.

In the heat, listening to terrible news of the American Empire’s spread, I finish stacking next winter’s firewood. Sweaty and dirty, the cats and I admire my work, contemplating the frosty fall evenings. The cats, perhaps, are merely curious about my labor, or the next meal’s arrival, or perhaps a cat calculus I don’t imagine.

June, the songbirds serenade exquisitely. I mow the grass around the woodpile, the pink roses beginning to bloom, the brushy compass flowers that are now knee-high. Will the ancient mock orange leaf and bloom? Will the woodchuck devour the sunflower seedlings? Will I unclench my knotted heart and let myself fall in love, tumble into the next phase of whatever I may have in this lifetime?

Rain falls and the heat breaks as I finish mowing. I wander around, drinking a glass of water, the rain running through salt and chaff on my cheeks and biceps. 21 years ago, a friend labored to bring her baby into the world. I sat in her kitchen while our six-year-olds played under her front yard maples. Her mother-in-law made chicken soup that I ate while I nursed my own wee infant.

The world isn’t filled with ten thousand things. In the June afternoon’s rain, a rainbow elusive, math welds no teeth. A hopping robin in search of sustenance, unfolding hydrangea leaves, the bounce of a child’s basketball, the scent of sap bleeding from winter’s firewood.

For local folks…. I’ll be reading at Still North Books in Hanover, NH, Wednesday, June 17, 7 p.m. Yes — a lovely bookstore — and yes, a non-cancer visit to this lovely village.

Is not all the summer akin to a paradise? — Henry David Thoreau

Harrowed Up Heart.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

As part of the 2050 project, I’m asked to read at Newbury’s Tenney Library, surely one of the prettiest Vermont libraries, and Vermont has plenty of these. The crowd is full and cheery, the snacks are sweet, the librarian gives me a tour of this enchanted place, built inside as a series of arches. The original gas lamps have been converted to electricity, and I ponder what it was like in 1910 or so, coming in from a slushy afternoon to a warm and glowing library.

Newbury is a town on the Connecticut River, the village high on a bluff. Before I head out, I walk across the street and behind a church. Through the trees and brambles that are just tufting with green, enormous fields stretch along the river, long rectangles of emerald, others black earth harrowed up for planting.

I linger, shivering a little in my wool sweater, hands jammed in my jeans pockets. Early May, spring season of promise. That plowed-up land, the blue swoop of the river, the invincible thrust of spring pushing mightily through the chill — such happiness here. I head not back to the interstate, but up a mountain’s dirt road, to a house surrounded by green and blooming daffodils and a tangle of apple trees. A lovely couple invited the readers to dinner. The couple is both humorous and gracious, the conversation full of the idiosyncrasies of local talk and global concerns. The pleasant evening drifts into night, from eggplant to lemon tart. Exhaustion, my now familiar, weighs my bones. After thankyous, I stand outstanding in the cold wet, breathing what might be the spicy scent of daffodils growing, threading through in my mind the unfamiliar roads I’ll follow home. Then I let that worry go and simply breathe, damp spring holding me, as if I’m a daffodil, too.


“Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire