travel

Playing cards, considering remains.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the darkness, I slide the barn door shut. The world is redolent with cut grass, the wet earth where I watered grape vines. Embers flicker in the fire pit; low laughter moves through the night. June, oh loveliest June, endless varieties of leaf and blossom.

On a hike, we meet a stranger from Maine, and we swap stories about climate change and marriage. He sees my brother’s dog has no water, and shares what he’s carried for his dog. The afternoon gleams with storybook colors of emerald, cobalt, gold. We drive to the lake, to the general store, to a brewery where we sit outside. My brother drinks beer. My daughter and I sip lemon sodas from stemmed glasses, so sweetly yellow I imagine my hand cups sunlight.

I have my mother’s ashes in my possession. Our conversation bends back again and again to her ashes and her life, and the very different relationship that each of us had with her. Lacking a religious framework, I’m treading in open water. My mother, in fact, might have been fiercely opposed to the chain of circumstances that landed me keeper of her remains, or not. I am her second daughter, her match in stubbornness.

All day long, this tender beginning to June, we do the things we love to do. We drink coffee and eat buttered toast, play cards. The sunlight crosses over my house. The day is both chilly and hot. The days spin on, rich with the illusion that there is no finality. Mercy, I think, shutting the barn door to keep the raccoons from the recycling. Another day, the nightsongs of frogs serenading.

In the edge…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Midafternoon as a storm threatens in, I’m at a stretch of lakeshore where I’ve never swum, and I push in. I’m on the prowl for an eagle, which I never find, and the day has grown muggier than I imagined.

What a month of May this has been. My mother’s death ripples through the amazing forsythia and lilac season, through writing and the steady complexity of work I do for the local Selectboard. At a nearby farm, I buy hothouse basil and tomato starts. A woman I know slightly strikes up a conversation. In the past, our lives ran on weirdly similar tracks, involving divorce, sudden visits from the FBI, the miasma of disorientation. Now, we swap mother stories beneath an enormous lilac. I breathe in the blossoms’ scent.

A few years back, I volunteered in my youngest’s elementary school classroom to assist with a nature program that the kids loved. Naturalist and artist, the teacher kept using the phrase “in the edge.” She pointed out that life thrives at the crossing borders of field and forest, of riverbank, the edges of a homogenous world.

I’m in the edge these days. May’s heat notwithstanding, the water is bitterly cold. I swim out with my lousy swimming skills, my garden’s dirt washing away, the storm clouds hammering together over the glassine water, some of the day yet to come. On the shoreline again, sharp stones gouge my soles.

Sips of May.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

As the spring dusk settles down, I’m wandering around the edges of my garden. The lilacs have just begun opening, a tiny four-petaled blossom here, another there, the remainder of that lavender flower still knotted, not yet relaxed into the wide open spring season.

I’m in my ragged jeans, dirt under my nails, when my neighbor pulls into her driveway and gets out of her Prius. She’s wearing what she calls her rag-bag dress, and the two of us make a kind of pair. I’ve known her since our oldest kids were babes in arms, not yet eating smashed carrots.

It’s been a year for each of us — and I mean that: a year. We both have college-aged kids in and out of our houses. Under the fragrance of pear blossoms, we immediately head into that long-running conversation we have about her work and my work, about writing and art, about aging parents. The half moon rises over my apple tree.

May, in all her radiant beauty. Here I am, with a hundred chores in one day — a hot water heater repair, more writing, plant arugula and Brussel sprouts, my constant fiddling with the wood pile, the daughter chat. How this Vermont world loves to green. Yes, and again, more, yes, yes.

Ruined!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In this sweet May rain, working on the covered porch of one of my favorite libraries, I remember a rainstorm about a year ago. My daughter and I were in Rome, eating dinner in an outdoor café. In the storm, the staff had pulled a plastic cover over the terrace. The effect was warm, cozy, intimate. Beside me, a group of young men were drinking wine. One man remarked that Italy had ruined him. There was no way he could return to his Chicago cubicle and drink lousy Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Hearing this, my daughter and I laughed aloud. Italy had ruined us, pleasurably, too.

Likewise, after a week of such largesse at the Vermont Studio Center — the gift of time and space, the pampering of meals, the kindness of the place — I wondered if I might be a little ruined, too.

Not so, perhaps. May in Vermont is one of my most favorite times. Here’s the gold of marsh marigolds behind an old grange. Gold.

Mending Myself.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Mid-morning, abruptly the weight of my mother’s recent death lies on me, a physical presence, as if she’s leaning on my shoulders. It’s 21 days since she passed, days and nights crammed full. Like most mother and daughters, my mother and I had a relationship filled with 10,000 things and more. Again, today, on the eve of a short journey, I pack my laptop and books. I vacuum and mop and talk and talk and talk with my daughter.

Rain falls all day, so chilly I light a fire to the intense pleasure of my two cats. A year ago, my youngest and I flew home from Europe, my heart filled with our trip’s happiness. So, too, again, my life unfurls forward with an offer of good writing news. Spring in all her exuberance sings — such sweet joy for us in a northern sphere.

I wander outside. My shoes fill with rain. I stop in at a friend’s house. In her well-lit living room, with her purring cats, we talk about travels and love. Later, as I leave, she leans out the door, and we keep talking about honeybees and blossoms. The rain falls steadily, streaming down the collar of my coat. I have that walk home and more work, but I linger in the billowing fog, the gleaming green, our conversation gently pulling me back into this world, stitching me.

The dark blossomings of chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Again, this metaphor lens (how is it possible not to see the world in metaphors?) Paul and John’s Long and Winding Road, Dante’s gloomy forest, Sylvia Plath’s bees and beekeepers…

I lead a friend into a forest, a piece of Nature Conservancy land on a dirt road. We’re talking, talking, my eyes searching the forest floor for ephemerals (the trilliums folded shut, trout lilies still only leafy, no blossoms yet). I take one wrong turn, a second wrong turn. I backtrack, looking for the narrow stone steps. Our walking and talking — and my eventual smartening up to pay attention — takes us to Chickering Bog. In this pristine place, it’s just us and frog eggs, fat tadpoles, crimson pitcher plants — the confluence of ancient and freshly brand-new.

The strange thing is, I’ve walked to this bog half a dozen times, easily. Yet never in April when the sunlight drops down through the trees’ bare branches, when the winter-fall of broken branches strews over the paths. Or maybe I’ve never been here with this conversation about things tiny and great. The glassy water shimmers so clear the bog’s mucky bottom tantalizes, unreachable, so many centuries of so much life.

At the journey’s end, at the dirt road’s edge, the sprinkled gold coins of coltsfoot, a purple sprig of flowering Daphne.

On the reading front…..

“We must therefore be willing to get shaken up, to submit ourselves to the dark blossomings of chaos, in order to reap the blessings of growth.” — Gregg Levoy, Callings