swimming

A few known things: sand, evening…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

These August days are yet long, lingering exquisitely. Days of heat and sweat. Noon, we drag a picnic table beneath a maple tree, spread out our lunches, eat and talk with the sunlight dappling through the leaves, a small breeze kicking up. The nearby road is busy with pickups laden with ladders and mowers, suntanned arms crooked out unrolled windows, and the vacationers at their leisure. This August day hums magnificently, with that dappled sunlight and cicadas.

I receive an email about my novel Call It Madness from a woman in the middle of the country, not far from where my mother grew up, so many decades ago. We email back and forth a bit about class and working and how those two forces of writing and living can sharpen your eyes, if you lean into it.

Surviving cancer taught me countless things, too, made me both more tender and more ruthless, two things seemingly at odds but not. The world is a variated unfolding story of cause and effect. In my novel, a man mangles his hand in a sawmill accident. Decades later, his great-granddaughter struggles with the family fall-out of that accident: a farm lost, a penalty of impoverishment. I glean what I can of my own story — the murky details of my past (my mother’s changed name, a story my father shares of remembering his father burning his army uniform in a backyard fire) — and appraise how I fit into the terrain of the world around me. Swimming at twilight, the lake both golden and black, those elegant 1 Corinthians words return to me: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I’ve been swimming at this sandy stretch for nearly thirty years, once upon a time with children and sand buckets. The water is yet magnificent. Sand clings to my wet bare feet. The day has cooled, refreshing as quaffing water when you are thirsty. The sand scatters on my kitchen floor. Something, I think, I’ll need to sweep. This morning, the sand remains.

Singing a Love Song, Swimming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

It’s nearly 8 in the evening by the time I step into #10 Pond, the sun slipped down around this narrow pond surrounded by mountains, my only company two teenage girls who stand on the shore talking about a mother’s car—these girls and a loon calling.

I part the still waters and swim out. Despite raging heat elsewhere on the globe, Vermont’s summer holds a chill, and by the time I swim back, I’m cold. On the shore, the girls have disappeared, and under the twilight sky it’s just shivering me toweling off water, pulling on a sweatshirt. All afternoon, I’ve thought of this water, of the sky turning from blue to black, of the mud beneath my bare feet, the loon chorus. It’s been a day of work and laughter, nothing rotten that I’d like to leave at the bottom of the pond; nonetheless, July moves along, the relentlessness of time. I crave these moments of water and sky, of reading beneath the apple tree’s shade, dinner near the garden, as much sun and wind and, yes, cold water as I can bear. Sustenance.

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins

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

“Like a definition of love…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Eight summers ago when my daughters and I first moved into this house, we swam in a nearby pond, usually with friends who lived nearby. In those eight summers, the kids grew up and are now swimming in other lakes, other ponds. I kept on. The swimming and conversation was a peaceful way to end jammed and often chaotic working days.

Late last fall, as part of extensive testing after I was diagnosed with lymphoma, I realized I had Giardia, too, proverberial small potatoes compared to cancer and easily treated. This year, I never started swimming. In May, I’d endured a painful surgery with a lengthy incision that needed to heal. That nearby pond was the most likely source of the Giardia.

This August, a friend convinced me to swim at #10 Pond, familiar territory between our two houses, another place where my daughters and I swam and kayaked and picnicked. I arrived a few minutes early, opened my book, and the loons cued. This pond has always been one of my favorites: clear water, friendly fellow swimmers, scant motorized boats, little development. The water was cool. Kicking my legs, I felt my incision tug, but it was a sensation, nothing more. Afterwards, we lingered, drying and warming in the sun.

Yesterday, I was in sultry Barre and drove by the pharmacy where I had the go-around with the pharmacist and sharply insisted he fill my dilaudid prescription. I was on my way home from yet another lengthy stay at Dartmouth. We had to wait for the prescription, so my brother and I walked around Barre. It was early spring, hot, and the trees hadn’t yet leafed out. He’d parked on a hill and worried I couldn’t walk back up. I’d been on blood thinners, and the bandage around my IV site was soaked with blood. Don’t open it up! he warned me. It was so dusty and hot, and I was exuberant to be in the world where daffodils were blooming.

So yesterday, on my way home, I stopped at #10 Pond again, swam and read and listened to a nearby conversation between two men who were fishing — and the loons, of course, the loons.

We’ve now crested beyond the high summer. Each August day offers its own potential, for swimming or heartbreak or simply eating ripe peaches. Reader, wherever you are, love at least slices of your lives and places.

I’m about to send off a third novel manuscript to an interested party. In the dark this morning, I woke and began the book I’ll write about cancer and motherhood. Sure, cancer changed my life in small and great ways, but a year later it’s still the same me, rowing my life against the common current, compelled to write something that seems impossible.

And, for historical and record-keeping notes, I’ll add that the full moon, the Sturgeon Moon, rose smoky and red, ineffably beautiful over the cricket chorus.

“Green Apples” by Ruth Stone

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

A real clusterfuck of thinking…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Hurrying from one thing to another, I detour to my favorite swimming pond, under these overcast skies. A woman and a little girl are swimming. There’s no one else around, and the woman and I chat about the fish nibbling our toes. The girl sits on a floatie shaped like a chocolate ice cream cone and looks skeptically at us, as if her mother and I might be making up everything. Maybe, in truth, our toes are bleeding from fish fangs. The child is taking no chances. She leans back on the floatie and stares up at the sky. Her mother gently pushes her from shore.

I swim out.

My head is jammed with the conversation I just had over Pad Thai, three of us women, about writing and Vermont and friendships, about money, of course, always about money, how money winds into decisions we make. These are old conversations, worked out in new ways. As I drift out in the cold water, I keep thinking about all the material I’ve been reading about rivers and history, about farming and logging hands on the land, 100, 200 years ago, how what made sense then (sense? perhaps even seemed downright innovative, bordering darn smart) has piled up over these generations of rivers, now dredged too deep, the roads and the towns built far too near.

Because my mind works in metaphors, I keep thinking how years pile up mistakes, one after another, a real clusterfuck of thinking. There’s no one else around in the water save for me and the mother and girl. They’re both lying on their backs on the ice cream floatie now, circling around, the mother’s heels trailing in the water. All those summer days I spent at the beach with my daughters, with plastic shovels and buckets, with the sleeves of red cups that I used at the farmers’ market back in the days when I sold homemade root beer floats, $2.75 per cup…. The kids are now all (mostly) grownup, as happens. Maybe those years were nothing more than a light way to pass the days, insubstantial as dreams.

I swim out as far as I can bear in the cold water. When I return, the beach is empty. Clouds have pushed down low, and the sand is clammy. On my short walk back, two bikers ask me for directions. Go west, I advise. That’s the way out of here.

Finding a Thread.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

On my way home, I stop at Number Ten Pond. The water temperature is at that sweet spot, exactly perfect — and how often do you touch perfect? — and I wade right in. A woman stands in the pond, two children splashing around her. She laughs when the minnows bite her toes.

I swim far. In the pond’s center, I float on my back. With my eyes closed, my mind’s eye turns red, with blood or sunlight, who knows, and I’m no longer sure which way is up or down, water or sky. I’m distant enough from shore that only the loon call reaches me. By the summer’s end, these swims will add up to an invisible chain of experience: of water and weather, of whatever language drifts my way. July here, just a handful of fleeting days. 

"Everything Is Made Of Labor"
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.