travel

June Love.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

First copies of Call It Madness in the Galaxy Bookshop.

After my long trip to northern New Mexico — sand and yucca, family in all its myriadness, green chili, and the sweet juniper breath of the desert night — I lean into Vermont’s lush early summer. Mostly, I keep to myself, planting my garden before this morning’s warm rain, stacking wood piece by piece, savoring the forget-me-nots that have appeared this year beneath the dwarf apple tree that is no longer any small thing. These days are a living Impressionist painting, lilac-scented pastels. In the night, my bones worn satisfyingly with hours of labor in the sun, I lie on my weather-splintered picnic table, the frogs singing, the Milky Way a celestial arc. I am not a piece in this puzzle, but a strand in the tapestry.

“Go down through the garden, dig up the radishes! Root up everything! Eat grass! Look for corn! Look for oats! Run all over! Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place.” E. B. White

Secret revealed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Freakishly, by chance, I discover my mother’s given first name is different from the name she used. I’d never heard a whisper of this secret. As a writer, the discovery is material manna. As a daughter… well, strange news, indeed.

In the inexplicable alignment of fate, I’m a month away from publication of my third book, Call It Madness, a novel about young woman Avah who unexpectedly realizes her mother lied two decades ago when she claimed Avah’s great-grandfather died, his beloved house sold. Now, I unearth this secret my mother kept so well. I carry my mother’s name that was at once her name and not her name.

Where is the dusky line between fiction and life? Impossible, this seems, impossible, that I’ve written about my life in reverse. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely…”

How meagerly we know this world, the littleness of the stuff that structures our own stories. Stacking firewood on Sunday afternoon, I listen to a NYT story written by a sighted man about traveling with the unsighted. The upshot? How we understand the world in pieces. The whole is an impossibility for any one of us.

And yet, fiction aims to manifest a perfect miniature world, a shimmering sphere, a handful of secrets and mysteries revealed one-by-one, like a matryoshka doll. At its center, is there a grain of rice or a chip of coal? A folded fortune like a slip of paper in a sweet cookie, a koan to clench in a fist and ponder. A way to reflect the whole of life, this impossible life.

Bear, darker than midnight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

I’m walking up a fourth-class road when I spy a black shape moving along the upper end of the nearby hayfield. Vermont divides its roads into categories, from the interstates to dirt roads to the little-used former farm or forest roads that are snowed-cover in winter, mud-rutted in spring. I stand beside a wild apple tree, the blue view of the Worcester Mountains over my shoulder, and admire this bear, darker than midnight against the field’s glossy emerald. When green kindles in Vermont spring, it flourishes.

This place I’ve never walked, although I’ve seen maps and heard stories. The road treks uphill through the forest and dips down where Caspian Lake gleams, realm of summer visitors, but for the time, still the territory of the locals.

I find what I’m seeking and also what I’m not: the labor-dense stone walls whose once-upon-a-time fields are gone to forest, moss-covered cellar holes, twisted rusty remains of farm equipment. Peepers chorus. An old farmhouse with an enormous veranda on a hill must have once had a royal view of the lake, and endured bitter winter winds. Someone has tried to cut the wild reclamation from the house and mostly failed.

In the sunlight, I linger, wondering who lived here, their stories silent. The two-story house has large dormers and many windows; it’s not a fly-by-night, tossed-up structure. On my way home, I pause where I saw the bear, searching, but of course the bear has moved on. Three ducks fly low over my head. The earth exhales its sweetness of thawing mud, the turning-over of last autumn’s leaves, this summer’s great promise.

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” — Jack London

Journey of many layers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

One of the best journeys of my life was when I was 19 and had long hair I rarely brushed. My then-boyfriend and I were hitchhiking (don’t hitchhike any more, folks) at the Greenfield, MA, I-91 exit, heading north, home to Brattleboro. A man driving an old convertible Cadillac, a great white Moby Dick beast, picked us up. In my memory, he’s smoking a cigar and grinning. While he and the BF sat in the front, shooting the shit, I sprawled in a backseat so enormous it could host a family. I surely wore no seatbelt. My god, on that July evening, I felt like I was flying.

This week, a grad school friend of mine invited me to spend a morning as a visiting writer with his students. All the layers of this trip—the journey south, the first solo I’ve taken since the cancer (my girls urging me to drive carefully, have fun), the stop in Brattleboro where I’d lived in my twenties and was happy, the visit with my dear friend and his wife who I immediately feel is a kindred soul, in their inviting house with a backyard vernal pool and singing peepers, a night of rainstorms, the morning’s magnolia blossoms gleaming pearly—all these layers folded into these writing students who arrived with questions and notebooks, hungry. In this breaking world, what a joy to swim for a bit with others in the passionate stream of loving literature, in all its myriad forms.

On my way home, I stop at a café near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. By then, early afternoon, I’m worn down. The café was a favorite of my daughters, in all those months I was treated. Last June, when I was finally well enough to join them, no longer sequestered in a hospital room, they bought me a plain croissant, and I ate a few bites of its inner softness. This afternoon, on the sunny patio, I devour pickled vegetables, soaked in vinegar—something I could not eat last year. Delicious.

April, mud season, it’s just me and a young woman with an infant cradled on her chest. I read for a bit, and then as I’m gathering my things, a car pulls up with two young women. They run to the woman and the baby, laughing and shouting, gleeful.

Midafternoon, I have a ways to drive yet, along the wide river and over the mountains. I take a small walk first through the pine forest behind the café. Warm sunlight filters through the canopy. No ephemerals emerge yet, but soon, soon, as the trout lily leaves spread over the earth. My mother would have noticed the young mother, her sleeping babe, the joyous friends meeting this new life. Such satisfaction she would have taken. One more element folded into this journey. Then I head north.

…. And for folks around me, Helen Whybrow will read from her fantastic The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding from her translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars at Greensboro’s Highland Center for the Arts, Saturday, followed an artists’ reception for a stunning group exhibition celebrating Vermont’s pastoral life. I was lucky to write about this for Seven Days.

I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. ~ Helen Whybrow

Natural resurrection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I am reminded of spring by the quality of the air . . . It is a natural resurrection, an experience of immortality. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Friday begins raw and shivery. I’ve shed my long underwear and regret it. By mid-afternoon, the sun’s emerged. I park along a muddy road and hike up through a soggy pasture to the stone cellar holes. A hundred years ago, a farm must have been rooted on this hillside, bracing against winter’s snowy wind, full of summer sun. A view of mountains and the Lamoille River Valley. Sugar maples dominate what remains.

As I approach, robins flutter, fly, resettle, their singing unbroken. I tie my coat around my waist, cram my hat in my pocket. At home, green nubs of lilies and crocuses emerge, just beginning their greening. Among the lilacs, I look for those daffodils.

Mighty spring, season of healing. The winter’s debris of compost and spent woodpile and last fall’s unclipped perennials emerge. Every year, spring rushes in with a surprise. A certain reminder of mortality, but so lovely, so marvelously endearing…

Mired in fog.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I hole up for the weekend reading Wallace Stegner, a pastoral novel about friendship and mortality, about the pre-internet world when complicated events unraveled perhaps not more kindly but more slowly. Vermont March is the season of live-or-die, the fits and starts of spring, jagged with driving ice, whirling snow, delirious sun.

I drive home from a dinner out in a fog so thick that the car before me pulls off, turns on flashers, and maybe simply intends to wait it out. It’s not late, but there’s no one else out, the wind throwing twigs at my windshield, the radio jingling Lou Reed. I’ve not driven in a fog so profound since I was in my twenties, living in the wooded spine of the Green Mountains, in the years when I was brash with youth and amor. The edges of the road vanish. I pull over at the spring with its pipe where people gather water, and I stand just outside the beam of my headlights, the nearby stream gushing against what remains of its winter ice. I surely can’t stay here for the night, shivering, on the edge of my own mad solitude. The way back, the way forward, all around: pathless, and surely a metaphor for this time.

I’m still shaken to the core by lymphoma, by chemo, by the surgeons who sliced me open and removed those physical scars so I might live. I’m here for this moment, flesh over my slender shoulders, my now bony hips that once carried two babies, and flesh—well, so easily ruined. I spent most of last March in one ED or hospital room or another. While the world spun on, I leaned into treatment, propped up by dear ones, who ferried me to remission.

Now, shivering, nearly blind with fog, I turn off my car and the headlights. The fog wraps around me. I drink it in.

“In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” — Andrew Solomon