recovery

Talking Past Dark.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

A friend comes to visits, heads to my picnic table, and we commence talking. Hours later, a dewy dusk has descended. I’m shivering, my sweater cuffs pulled all the way over my hands. Inside, my cats are grousing for a fire in the wood stove.

I remember my friend’s oldest son sitting on my couch, about an eon ago. The boy was so small his legs didn’t reach the end of the couch. Now, he’s thinking of heading into a PhD program.

I haven’t seen this friend in months, since before I traveled to Europe and decided I was born on a continent that mismatches me. Yet, we start talking as though I was a young mother again, walking along the dirt road with a toddler, my hair unbrushed for days.

It’s a cliche of course, how the world changes and how it remains the same, that one long Heraclitus river — always the stream, never the same.

The foxes didn’t return to den behind my house this year. A few stray lilacs bloomed in late September. The harvest moon sails up in the sky. All our hours of talking and we solve absolutely nothing, not a single problem, except this, perhaps: a fattening of our friendship, this woman who assured me I would survive my divorce, that my life would continue. The sun heads down, and we keep on talking.

Facts Yet Matter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As one of the things I do to keep my household of daughter and me and two cats churning along, I spend an inordinate amount of time on minutes for a complicated development review board hearing. The writing poses the interesting questions of what to include, what to delete, clarity of the whole, simplicity of sentence. Beneath this, the minutes are a miniature of a town and the push-pull around building and change, of past and present and future, of how multiple stories of people intersect.

A deep appeal for me, writing these minutes, is that the facts matter. I arrange numbers and percentages, how these describe boards and a proposed building beneath a stand of cedars.

What I don’t include is that beyond the cedars the bank drops steeply into the water. The water is particularly clean. I’ve been swimming at the public beach for years, and I know how you can swim far out and look down at the sandy bottom. Flecks of mica glitter in the sunlight. The facts of my own story include an especially warm October day many years ago when a friend and I ventured far out into the lake. We swam among the first of the fallen red leaves. The day was so warm and the water so still.

And a line from Nikita Gill that sums up my tenor of thinking these days….

“We have all taken turns being Red Riding Hood and we have all been the wolf.” 

— Nikita Gill

In Very Vermont Fashion….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

… I stopped by an art opening in a former brick stagecoach inn. In the Vermont way, the art was eclectic and superlative, the cheese local, the diminutive cupcakes homebaked, and the company excellent. My friend is the easy kind of person who doesn’t mind stepping forward with a plate of olives in her hand and introducing herself to a former library volunteer of mine whose name I can’t quite place….

Across the dirt road is an old barn where a stone labyrinth was placed a few years back. While my friend and I were talking, we watched two strangers do an excuse me, no, excuse me, sorting out who was going to enter the labyrinth first.

Small pleasures, friends, against the inevitable chaos of life.

A Story in Here…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I visit a woman whose family bought a house on a peninsula in a glacial lake. She invites me in — a stunning place of wood and glass and French doors — nothing polished, all preserved as if it’s still World War I. There’s an enormous stone fireplace. She tells me that, after a hurricane in the 1930s, the original owner (who lived elsewhere, New York or Pennsylvania) never returned after he heard that all the trees on the peninsula were destroyed, save for eight. He sold the house to this woman’s family. Great pine trees tower over the lawn and hydrangeas.

She says to me, Imagine the view of the lake in the thirties, when the trees were all gone? That must have been stunning, too.

I drive home in a sudden windstorm. I’m passing a stand of poplars, their leaves crinkled and finished with summer. The wind blows leaves through my open car windows, over a bucket of apples, on my library books, into the lap of my skirt. Ahead of me, two cars are pulled over, blinkers flashing. A branch smashed the windshield of one car. Two young woman stand in the road, the wind circling, twigs snapping, rain beginning in earnest. One woman raises her arms in a giant Y.

There’s a story (or two) in here for sure….

The Putting Back Together.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A coffee drinking companion, winding around at the end of our conversation, posits that our world appears to be unraveling. He notes that grass and dandelions break sidewalks: an act of defiance.

While I’m meticulous about certain things (keep mice out of the house, learn to use a comma), my garden this year obeys no orderly rules. Cosmos and calendula mingle with tomatoes. Amaranth reseeded among the dill and parsley. Forget-me-nots, to my great joy, blossom in random patches. I plant giant coneflower — Rudbeckia maxima — around my house. Have at it. Rage on. Rage.

End of August, the frogs and crickets keep singing. Overhead, a gibbous moon in the night, creamy light through roving clouds. Here’s a thousand action and more…. all alive, multi-faceted, full-throatedly in defiance….

Here: Where I/We Are.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Post leaving my daughter in her college dorm, the cats and I hole up and read Here by Richard McGuire. A sample of this amazing book is:

Here: the cats and I wake, in the morning that’s yet dark, to the rain pattering through the open windows on the stones and leaves around our house. One more week of August remains, and the swimming prognosis is lousy.

Around me: backroads in places still barely passable, bridges out, the riverbanks strewn with human junk — pieces of the ripped-apart motel, wires wound around wood and twisted clothing and two cars and so much plastic. I started this summer, July 1, driving to an Independence Day celebration, cloudy with smoke from the Canadian wildfires, noting that day as my own marker: the smoke has become part of our life. We accepted it, kept on with our lives, as we had — and have — to do.

A summer of the strangest things. The world’s great problems, my own petty woes. In all this, we filled our days with working and drinking coffee, hiking and playing cards and eating tacos and talking, so much talking. Gravy.

On this rainy Friday morning, a Raymond Carver poem:

“Gravy”

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”