small town

Hunger.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments
Curious cat named Acer

A few years back when my youngest was doing odd jobs, she came home with four strawberry plants someone had given her from a garden she weeded. Naturally, I planted these in our garden. The plants spread and have produced beautifully this year. I crouch beside these weedy plants and devour red berries. The crop is so small no berries ever make it into the house. Since it’s usually just me here these days, I eat in the garden. I’m famished for this sweet food. I devour the strawberries, juice dripping down my chin.

I’m ravenous for the sharp June sun, for this morning’s cold dumping rain, for my daily midday reading break, for the purring cats who clamor across my keyboard. Healing from cancer, I’m supposed to sleep (get seven to nine hours!) but, come that glimmer of gold at the horizon, I’m finished with bed, hungry for coffee, oatmeal, maple syrup. Eager to finish my novel revisions.

In those months of chemo, I’d worried my mind and imagination might dull, my fierceness lessen. Six weeks out from surgery, I’m diminished in body but a peculiar power blooms in me. A determination to do what I want. An impatience with artifice. Don’t waste my time.

And yet, the old haste that plagued my days and nights has quelled. Stopping by my neighbor’s, I sink into her armchair, set my feet on her footstool, listen, let the day’s exhaustion drape around me. That fatigue is now familiar to me as the blanket a stranger gifted me at the beginning of this cancer journey. We talk and talk, then wander outside and keep on with these conversational matters, the color of paint she’s considering for her house’s clapboards, how to encourage Columbine to grow among the phlox.

This time, I really want to listen…. I’ve spent my life mistaking instinct for fact, subjective experience for reality. What a waste of time here on earth to spend it as a slave to one story, how boring and repetitive, how many of our days are spent in chains.

From Sarah Gilmartin’s Service.

“…the strange idea of continuous living…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

A knock at my kitchen door wakes me. Midafternoon, home from a long morning at Dartmouth for routine things, nothing major, but a day that began in the dark after scant sleep. The week before, I’d left a message for a man who painted three sides of my house a few years ago to ask about an estimate for my barn and that fourth side that somehow I’d never painted. Last fall, sick and not knowing the (cancer) reason why, I’d managed to get out my sander, but that was about as far as that plan went.

The painter is a person my daughter and I know in our overlapping circles, so I’m not surprised when he says he’d heard of my illness. We talk for a bit in my kitchen. Then I grab my sweater, and we walk around the barn. A stunning sunlight makes me blink. Our conversation winds around primer and caulking and ladders. In the back, where the woodchucks claim domain, the painter turns the conversation towards politics and the word that’s so commonly used now — cutting. We talk about cancer research (which saved my life) and the bitch of enduring chemotherapy. A house finch perches in the honeysuckle in the wild tangles below my house. The honeysuckle’s bent branches are dotted with tiny fans of new leaves.

It’s been a day for me. I once had unbounded energy that I spent so easily with my garden shovel, my paintbrush, laptop, trowel, my two hands. I lean back against the barn’s peeling clapboards, beside last summer’s clematis vine that appears shriveled, used-up, no good. I have complete faith this beauty will bloom again this year. Listening to the painter, I wonder, why make any guesses about anyone or anything, really? What will happen will happen. Yet, I can’t help myself. I’m betting on the clematis and its purple flowers. The painter offers me his good will, and I take that, too.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~ Ada Limón

Pre-Election, Pause.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the late afternoon, I walk down to the post office and empty my box of election flyers, adding to the recycling boxes in the lobby. The lobby’s a shabby space, with a metal Christmas tree strung with pink lights for Breast Cancer Awareness month and a box on a counter for respectful flag disposal. A few summers ago, the postmaster planted a garden in the strip of soil outside the squat brick building. In a weird kind of way, this seems like a micro collage of this country. That midmorning, when I arrived at the town clerk’s office, she’d received FBI warnings about election security, so many concerns about the grid going down.

The season’s first snow layers in among the remains of frost-killed summer. The light now is late fall — unfiltered by leaves, without the warmth of summer, but clear, penetrating. One of the autumn’s beauties are lingering twilights, the slow unfolding of the day into night.

Recovering, bit by bit, from a summer mold toxicity, I walk home the longer way, through the neighborhoods where kids have decorated houses with orange lights and ghosts on broomsticks. I pass the Legion and the gun store, and then walk along the river for a bit. I stop to talk with a dog walker about the declination of light. Do people do this in other parts of the world? Surely they must. We muse about the summer and fall — like a rare gift this season has been, suffused with growth and sunlight, as if in defiance of the human world.

And a relevant line from Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound: “History is personal, even when it isn’t.”

Mechanic talk….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

The garage I use wasn’t flooded this summer — the river simply swiped away the owner’s land in back, a great chunk, along with his plow truck and two customer cars. A few weeks later, I stood on a bridge, watching a towing company winch the truck free from the lowered river. For weeks, the two cars remained nearly submerged in a muddy wetland along the riverbank, badly beaten. Then one day, the cars had vanished, too.

Friday morning during what suffices as rush hour in Hardwick, Vermont, I park behind his garage. The three bay doors are open. We stand talking for a bit in the shadows of his garage, the autumn sunlight filtering through the great oak trees his great-grandfather had planted along the river, a few lifetimes ago.

I’ve been coming to the garage for years, from the crazed put-on-your-snow-tires season to this kind of September morning where we stand, in no rush, watching the parking lot dust drift in the honeyed sunlight. Curious, I ask about the town’s plans for the river tumbling so near to what remains of his back lot. In these dry autumn days, the river’s low, sunk among the rocks and boulders strewn by July’s flood.

He says simply, A lot of talking, many plans.

Last July, the bank where a motel was built was swept downstream, turned into silt, gone elsewhere. The town owns the property now. The mechanic tells me that people visit every day, fishing or wandering or simply enjoying the river sparkling in the sunlight. Weekends, families picnic.

Much later in the evening, as the moon hangs its three-quarters lamp in the clear sky, I wander there, too. The land slopes down gradually to the river. When the floods come again — and of course the floods will return — the water will rise here, stretching over Joe Pye weed and asters.

Along the river, the oaks and maple leaves splash gold and orange, early change. End of the summer, with its troubled river and kids on the banks, flying box kites.

Two autumns…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I leave the garden to do its final hallelujah of the season, the tithonia and sunflowers and cosmos fraying now, the basil still slipping into my cooking pot. September 11, the morning I stood in my sun-filled kitchen watching my toddler tricycle around the table, listening to public radio and wondering what was happening. My youngest was not yet born. Now, 23 years later, my daughters and I text during the debate. My cats are curled at my feet, in their usual, wise cat-disdain way, thinking their feline thoughts, savoring like any smart creature the warmth from the wood stove.

On my evening walk, I meandered the long way home. A half moon hung in the sky, sweet as maple pudding, so near I imagined I could reach out and lay my fingertips on its smooth sheen. Early autumn. So much more to come.

for me going

for you staying—

two autumns

– Buson

Saving…. Who?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One recent morning, on the lawn of the former schoolhouse where I work, signs appeared on the triangle green: Save Town Hall. Shortly afterward, with black spray paint, someone altered the signs to: Save Town.

This building has been around since before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. The entire top floor is a gymnasium, the middle floor four classrooms, the basement originally must have housed a coal furnace. After a $14k heading bill one winter for a building largely empty, I urged the Selectboard to consider other options. Oh, the furor that suggestion has now caused.

All summer, walking into the basement, I kept saying, I smell mold, I can’t work in a basement, I can’t think straight, can’t breathe, in a repetition that was doubtlessly whiny and certainly dull. But like the people arguing around this building, the building isn’t stagnant, either. I take my laptop upstairs to the empty rooms, where it’s me and the dusty windows, the paint shedding from the pressed tin walls and ceilings, the beadboard molding higher than my head.

In this wet, wet summer, mold blooms, and I rally the tiny office staff. Let’s move! I grab my jade plant. In a few hours, we’ve moved upstairs into the empty rooms, opening the windows and letting in the sunlight and breeze. I prop open the doors and sweep up cobwebs. Behind us, we leave so much. In our rouge occupation, we women set up housekeeping. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot over the maple floors .

We hire a crew to move the heavy things, and the men walk around remembering when they went to school in these rooms. Art classroom here, lunch there. All day long, with the doors open, the public wanders in and offers suggestions and stories.

A woman asks what we need. I’d like a pair of kittens here, frankly, or maybe a small old dog who wouldn’t mind sleeping on the rug in the sunlight.

Save Town? A question that opens up into a Jacob’s Ladder of questions….. in the meantime, we’re at least moving up into the light….