travel

Hay strands for sheep, purring cat, Harry Potter chocolates for neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Now in my fifties, I’d lulled myself into believing my risk-taking days were sewed up: those early 20s of getting in the old Volkswagen for journeys of thousands of miles, buy a decrepit hunting shack and convert it into a home, severe a marriage soured terribly and fear he might take your life in retribution — all that time of selling the maple sugaring equipment (who to trust, how to cut a hard deal?). So jaywalking suited me just fine. Waking long before dawn to feed the cats and drink milky coffee, write and watch the sun rise, that streaming beet juice.

As if I held all the cards in the risk-taking plans, anyway. Now that thread of riskiness has spread to those beloved around me, too. More and more, I understand my learning to craft a honed a sentence or the deep pleasure of watching a cardinal pause on a branch, are my steadying rituals of rooting me meaningfully in this world. I have friends whose lives center around sheep and chores and woolly affection, in ways that transformed their lives. Chicken and horse lovers. My sister-in-law with her two goats.

As I write from Room 101, I haven’t forgotten that the world spins on. Last night, I listened to VTDigger’s Dave Goodman’s follow-up conversation with Elizabeth Price, mother of Hisahm Awartani, one of the three young Palestinian men who was shot in Burlington, Vermont, a year ago. The Gaza war reigns. The American presidency shifts.

In Room 101, so many stories of people come my way — the night nurse who studied for two years in England, near the beach, transcontinental; how transport folks and nurses made their to live in New Hamsphire and Vermont, often from places around the country. What do you like here? What have you found? I keep asking, curious to know what roots people in their lives.

The smaller world spins on, too, with its things both miserable, joyous, and pleasurably mundane. Your own rituals of offering hay to sheep, fingertips to a cat’s purring head.

Last day of November, the month of cancer in my world. A year ago I bought Harry Potter chocolates for the neighbors’ boys and waited in the dusk for the three laughing boys to appear around my woodpile. The Good Doctor tells me I will go down, down, soon, and then rise to where I once felt well. What would that mean? I’m hanging on to this unrealized promise.

I repeat. When I go down, I will re-emerge.

The Moon is Cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments
Photo by Molly S.

My novel Call It Madness, slated for publication in a year and half (a small eternity away?), is arranged by places — or vessels in my mind. An apartment, an unheated farmhouse, the center of a frozen lake. To my way of thinking, places shape who we are.

Friday, wheeled on my back into a procedure room at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, I answered the usual name and date of birth and then a third question: why are you here today? A moment, a pause, and then I answered I was there for a specific biopsy.

Words are magical things, and magic is powerful. In the Dartmouth waiting room, laughing with my brother about memories from our childhood (he cheated at Monopoly, yes, I hit him over the head with a metal rod), the thought kept pulsing through my mind how much I didn’t want to be there (get out! walk out!), for this appointment I had worked so hard to finagle. But saying those words aloud sealed this very first step.

On the long drive home, the full Beaver Moon rose, lit the river and interstate, the ubiquitous Vermont hayfields still green in this lingering late autumn, the sky a blush of pink , reminding us, again, of the sheer luck of millennia of sunsets and the sailing moon, each dearly unique.

Later, later, lying on the couch, my brother and youngest sit opposite me, drinking beer and talking, eating the prized Club crackers that I never buy and a kind neighbor left. My brother disappears into the kitchen and returns.

“Cheese!” my daughter says, sparkling with happiness.

The world, keep on keeping on….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The young barista in my coffee shop muses with me about the small pleasures of November: the summer slam of tourists quieted, the sudden simplicity of stillness. On a balmy afternoon, I head out in search of places where I’ve loved and been loved, the sunny afternoon so warm the crickets have struck up their chorus again.

A few days later, I’m in the diner, eating breakfast with a friend whose mind works along my hard-bitten lines. Our booth’s window looks down into the river where the patched-up cement walls have fallen flat. We are in absolute agreement that this shifting world of thoughts and opinions, all the junk fed by media and social media, come to naught. It’s action that shifts the world. And the world, despite our fears, will keep on keeping on.

I put poetry as action, too. Here’s a few lines from the incomparable Mary Ruefle’s “Glory.”

... I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one’s mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That’s when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw...

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.”

A Handshake and a Promise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I leave dinner with neighbors and friends and walk home, down through the village. It’s late enough that the few restaurants in town are closing down, a few lingerers at the bars while the waitstaff wipes down the tables, doubtlessly thinking of their own homes and nights ahead.

Knowing I would savor this walk, I brought my hat and a coat, and the night is warm enough. I’d been offered a ride — “it’s dark!” — but me who is afraid of so many things (rushing semis, rats) has no fear of this autumn dark, this small town. I pass no one, not even a dog walker.

End of October, and I labor through the daily chores, now shoveling ashes from the wood stove, putting away the summer’s chairs and garden tools. My daughter phones with a homework question. Over us, the ineffable holiness of the passing of both of my daughters’ grandmothers this year, the old women who had distanced themselves from their granddaughters. What will this mean for my young women? At dinner, whisperings about the election. Which way will this split?

Just beyond the village, a U-Haul idles, lights on. As I walk nearer, I squint in the brightness. U-Haul, those rental trucks that have appeared intermittently in my life. The last time was that sleety winter day when a couple loaded up barrels of syrup from our sugarhouse driveway. I was in a desperate time in my life then, selling what I could to pull up stakes with my daughters and light out for new territory. I took a chance on this couple, watching them head down the slushy road with our liquid gold with nothing more than a handshake and a promise between us.

As I walk by, the U-Haul driver doesn’t look up, reading his phone, maybe a map, maybe a love note. I keep walking. As for that couple, the handshake and promise were gold. A week later, the check arrived in the mail.

Rowing in autumn…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In a cold rain, my friend and I set off walking. It’s a joke between us. When we were neighbors, I would call and ask her to meet me for a walk.

It’s sleeting, she’d say.

Only a little.

Invariably, she’d join me, gung-ho.

The rain lets up, though, as we walk up a muddy path, cross streams, pause to admire where a view might be through dense mist. The woods are gold and black, redolent with the humus-y scent of fallen leaves, this summer’s bounty already turning back into the damp soil. I remember her oldest son, now a teacher himself, standing on a chair in my kitchen, rolling out dough for sugar cookies, happy. Rain or snow probably fell then, too.

This is familiar forest to me, as I lived here for so many years. But I grew up surrounded by New Hampshire forest, and the exquisite beauty of New England fall, its sharp bite reminding us of winter, is as familiar to me as the backs of my hands. While the greater political world is utterly unfamiliar — which way will this go? — this path, our conversation, is balm for my soul. Both our lives have gone rocky ways, and yet here we are in rain, pressing on, pocketing especially pretty leaves.

On my way home from our soggy walk, I stop at the coffee shop and spread out my papers and laptop on a table. I’m standing there, thinking (or maybe dreaming), when a long-ago acquaintance appears. We sit and talk for a bit. There was a quarrel in the past between us. As she speaks, I feel the blood quickening in my rain-damp flesh, from my cheeks to my sodden toes. Here it is again, how experience shapes and changes us. Our culture pushes us, pushes us as women, to smooth the edges, say all’s well, be polite, diminish ourselves and pretend we’re still in the land of childhood, when the grownup woman world is a vast sea of star and moonlight, treacherous waves, radiant beauty, and the great unknown. At the end of our conversation, there’s no conclusion, no tidy wrap-up, just the two of us rowing together for a bit, handing the oar back and forth.