nature

Rowing in autumn…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In a cold rain, my friend and I set off walking. It’s a joke between us. When we were neighbors, I would call and ask her to meet me for a walk.

It’s sleeting, she’d say.

Only a little.

Invariably, she’d join me, gung-ho.

The rain lets up, though, as we walk up a muddy path, cross streams, pause to admire where a view might be through dense mist. The woods are gold and black, redolent with the humus-y scent of fallen leaves, this summer’s bounty already turning back into the damp soil. I remember her oldest son, now a teacher himself, standing on a chair in my kitchen, rolling out dough for sugar cookies, happy. Rain or snow probably fell then, too.

This is familiar forest to me, as I lived here for so many years. But I grew up surrounded by New Hampshire forest, and the exquisite beauty of New England fall, its sharp bite reminding us of winter, is as familiar to me as the backs of my hands. While the greater political world is utterly unfamiliar — which way will this go? — this path, our conversation, is balm for my soul. Both our lives have gone rocky ways, and yet here we are in rain, pressing on, pocketing especially pretty leaves.

On my way home from our soggy walk, I stop at the coffee shop and spread out my papers and laptop on a table. I’m standing there, thinking (or maybe dreaming), when a long-ago acquaintance appears. We sit and talk for a bit. There was a quarrel in the past between us. As she speaks, I feel the blood quickening in my rain-damp flesh, from my cheeks to my sodden toes. Here it is again, how experience shapes and changes us. Our culture pushes us, pushes us as women, to smooth the edges, say all’s well, be polite, diminish ourselves and pretend we’re still in the land of childhood, when the grownup woman world is a vast sea of star and moonlight, treacherous waves, radiant beauty, and the great unknown. At the end of our conversation, there’s no conclusion, no tidy wrap-up, just the two of us rowing together for a bit, handing the oar back and forth.

This precise moment… Now.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My daughter and I drink coffee at the kitchen table and talk about the election. Sun pours in through the glass doors. A cat lies on the table between us, purring, utterly blissful.

At 19, it’s her first presidential ballot. At 19, I was a different kind of young woman, holed up in a far-off-the-path cabin with a boyfriend, determined to forge my future in “the smithy of my soul….” My daughter’s generation was shaped in the smithy of the pandemic. Last week, I tore off the New Yorker cover and clipped the illustration of Harris to our kitchen calendar, a white star gleaming on her earlobe. My daughter and I wonder, if Harris, then what? If not, then what? There’s no answers, yet, to any of this, the future yet to be revealed. We fry eggs, butter toast, brew more coffee.

Later, in the night, I’m out in my fat wool sweater and Danskos, holding a cup of hot honey tea, looking for the northern lights. The stars are crystalline, swirled through with white. The wind soughs through the white pines in the ravine behind my house, and a creamy half-moon, like a luscious unworldly melon slice — so tantalizing I’d like to hold it with both hands — hangs over my house.

I’m at the edge of my garden, that familiar place where, if I smoked cigarettes or drank scotch, I’d linger, contemplating the sunflower stalks and the village lights below. The night pretties up the village, wraps it up, so I can see how small this place really is. In the night, my heart opens toward the village; in the daylight, not so much.

The light from my house illuminates stray leaves sailing through the darkness, the great shift of autumn. Like so many of my friends, I’m at that place in life, kids growing and grown, where creative possibilities unfurl. I’m doing the things I’ve done nearly all my life: drinking tea, staring up at the wonder of the night firmament, contemplating which way I’ll jump. In the meantime, I’ve been housekeeping: edge away from that negative snarl, lean into what and who I know is true, the wind and the stars, the moving moon, this swallow of tea, this precise moment. Now.

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

— Alan Watts

“The real, long history of this place…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Old West Church, Calais, Vermont, 1823…. The fieldstone foundation was laid 200 years ago. I’ve been tossed a lucky bone, and I’m reading here this afternoon. Recently, I swung by with a friend to check out the acoustics and ended up sitting and watching the sunlight shift through the space. The structure remains in the 19th century with no electricity.

In an interesting way, it seems fitting to do these things in the autumn when the light in our northern realm is shifting so rapidly. On each side, the days shorten. What began in April as a sprinkling on the forest floor of hepatica and trillium and spring beauties has flourished all summer in such a lush and lovely summer. Strangers remark, “What a summer of growth!” as if to make up for these past few years of soddenness, of rain and wildfire smoke from faraway (but apparently not that faraway) places.

At the transfer station, I pull up with my hatchback crammed with that metal lidded can of cat food cans, my bins of used paper and things I no longer want in my house. I’ve been coming here for decades now. On this peach of a September afternoon, the owner and I stand outside his office, our faces up to the sunlight and a circling hawk. I mention that I’d take a month more of these days, but I don’t want to be greedy. He looks at me and says, Let’s just be greedy and want that, anyway.

Autumn is the long weeks of the growing season’s finale, the landscape gold and crimson. But within the landscape are the tiny places where we walk and live: my garden’s pink glads, the neighbor’s blooming roses, the gold flush of the butternut tree I planted as a bare root stick, seven years ago, and the girls laughed at me. The tree stretches far above our heads now, and my girls marvel. Have faith, I remind them; beauty thrives from where we least expect it….

From Carolyn Kuebler’s gorgeous essay about Vermont:

The real, long history of this place goes even further
back, to the beginning of this landform as we know it, about twelve
thousand years ago when the glaciers drew back from the land and
various species, including humans, eventually moved in.

Evening gathering….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the spring, I moved my remaining hollyhocks into the fenced vegetable garden to save these flowers from feasting groundhogs. Spring, summer churned along. Now autumn, my garden still blooms its rainbow. Gathering tomatoes and basil for dinner, scraps of birch bark and kindling to start a fire, I pause for a moment in the drizzle, soaking in the delicate petals, the mist brushing in for the night, the trees already doing each their own foliage thing — some gold and orange, some already shaken down to bare twigs, others green, green, as if in defiance of winter.

Across the valley, the coyotes call, once, twice, as if testing their voices.

I snip bunchy orange marigolds for my table, their centers spicy. Overhead, the geese are always winging away these days, gathering their Vs, heading for their winter quarters, elsewhere. The clustered sunflowers, in their different heights and states of disarray from gold petal to curled brown leaf, rustle with the fat little chickadees dipping in and out, scavenging. Oh, sunflowers, so easily grown: scattered seeds, my palms pressing soil, water and sunlight. For me and the birds I imagine I sow these beauties, but of course that’s not true at all. The sunflowers are the waving prayer flags of my garden, this small territory.

The neighbor boys pile their sweatshirts and run in their t-shirts, the smallest hustling in and out of the lilac bushes, hide-and-seek. Rain pitters on leaves. A T.S. Eliot line runs through my memory, that graceful dismal poet, “…music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all…”

A few snippets of autumn.

Immensity taps at your life…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Nearing the end of August, the wild around our village house is mightily fortressing. The path behind our house has been given up this summer by friends; those who visit arrive via the street where the grass has broken the pavement, too, crisscrossed the gray with emerald. In the ravine behind our house, the foxes have kitted again this year. Randomly, the youngsters come out to chase each other. My daughter, who unexpectedly met the hissing mama fox, gave up that path a few years back. Only I now claw my way through the blackberry brambles, whistling, scraping my bare knees in some kind of penance for passing through their realm.

This year, while the human world on a great and local level has worked at its less admirable traits, the natural world has flourished. My daughters and I hold the apples and pears, gauging not yet, not yet. All around, a rioting of blossom and vine of what I’ve sown — sunflowers and morning glories, love lies bleeding — and the lushness of goldenrod, wild honeysuckle, creeping cucumber.

Oh, sweet illusion of Vermont’s August, as if stark November will skip her own visit this year….. On this dewy morning, smoke-drenched from wildfires so far distantly north, a favorite poem from Jane Hirshfield.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield

All kinds of summer rains…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Too stormy to swim on Sunday, I take up a new friend’s offer to walk the trails she’s cut on her property. Her property is off a back road, with a gorgeous view into the valley where the Lamoille River is barely beginning to fatten its strength.

The trails wind down through the woods, studded with white quartz on either side, so gleaming the rocks appear to have been freshly washed. On the verge of rain, the forest is still. In a kind of labyrinth, I walk over springy moss, beneath leaning cedars, around a former beaver pond now dense with green. At the far end, I lean against a great pine, bark rough through my t-shirt.

Rain begins, pattering through the canopy, then soaking me by the time I’ve returned to my Subaru parked at the edge of the road. I’m so soaked the windshield scrims over with fog. But the time the glass clears and I’m on my way, the rain has stopped, the sun burst through the pearly clouds. In no rush, I pull over and walk along the road, admiring the luminescent rainbow, one end in a leafy hedgerow of maples.

Sunday afternoon, rural Vermont, there’s no one around. I keep walking, thinking about a conversation I had recently with a geologist about what’s happening in Vermont. He’d stepped away from a conference to answer my questions for an essay I’m writing, and gently pointed out that the concatenation of flooding and heavy rainfalls and the great shifting around of debris has been human-caused, not by the folks who live on slopes or streams, but collectively.

His voice is persistent, filled with facts, but also not despair; we need to be cognizant, wide awake, look lively. His voice reminded me of what a good summer’s rainstorm used to be, not so long ago. You might sit on the covered steps of your back porch, listening to the rain gather strength to satisfy your kale and broccoli, the thirsty hydrangeas.

The rainbow winks out, and I head home, carrying with me the memory of those silvery cedars, a few chips of pine bark nestled in my hair.