outdoors

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”

The Way Forward

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Skiing along the former railroad bed in the late afternoon, I meet a fellow skier — a man wearing a gray knit hat who’s retired now from the local high school. In one connection or another, I’ve known him since before I became a mother.

We pause and talk for bit. He asks about my daughters, and then he opens our conversation to what’s happening in the nation’s capital. Behind him, I see the Lamoille River winding towards Lake Champlain, flowing its slow way to cross the Canadian border and head to the Atlantic Ocean.

As a complete non-sequitur, I say, The sun actually came out today.

We look at the blue sky overhead between the trees. It’s January in Vermont, and the sun’s presence is never a given here.

We talk for a few more minutes, acknowledging chaos and the pandemic, these odd days and that sun overhead — light without warmth.

Then we part ways, he to his ski, and I towards home.

But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

— William Carlos Williams