Vermont

A great fountain of white gossamer…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

From New Mexico with its sheer light, I descend back to April Vermont, where miniature daffodils push their yellow faces through last year’s leaf mulch. How well I know Vermont spring — the sunny breezy days where the wind tosses the lake and the water is bluer than blue, the footpath sprinkled with the gold gems of coltsfoot.

After the desert’s sweeping beauty, Vermont is a mossy box, a jumble of the paint peeling from the back of my house, the bin of empty cat food cans in barn (quit kicking that dump run into the next week), the niggling college financial aid forms yet to be corrected, the working hours I string together, making some decent use of my time.

April is a month that goes on too long, lingers brown in northern Vermont, with its tease of green trout lily leaves, the flourish of wild ramps. Paradoxically, April has always seemed the most hopeful of seasons, too, the nesting songbirds sweeping out winter’s silence.

In the evening, my daughter and I walk her dogs across the cemetery to the ballfields. Off leash, the three of them run while I stand in the field’s center, listening to the robins’ chatter in the white pines. Back at my house, we stand by the woodpile, talking about little things — who will take the leftover garlic bread, did the butterfly bush survive the winter. The rising moon illuminates the clouding-up horizon with a glowing shaft. We linger, watching the full moon sail confidently, unstoppably, over the horizon. Later, I linger on the back porch, sipping tea. The moon has removed the lid of shoebox Vermont. The air’s sweet with wet soil.

Springtime, 1998

Our upstate April
        is cold and gray.
                 Nevertheless

yesterday I found
        up in our old
                 woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
        standing around
                 and blooming

wisely. And by the edge
        of the Bo’s road at the far
                 side of the meadow

where the limestone ledge
        crops out our wild
                 cherry trees

were making a great fountain
        of white gossamer.
                 Joe-Anne went

and snipped a few small boughs
        and made a beautiful
                 arrangement

in the kitchen window
        where I sit now
                 surrounded.

— Hayden Carruth

Sweeping Out Inner Clutter.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments
Spring window, upstairs study.

Early evening on Friday, after a long workday, I’m in a nearby town’s general store, talking to an old acquaintance on the porch. The store’s door is propped open. A warm breeze swirls. Rain isn’t far in the offering.

A few years ago, a stranger stopped on the porch steps where I was eating ice cream with my daughters and said my name. She’d read my first book, she said, and loved it. That conversation: a shift for me.

On my way home, I stop at the town beach and lean against the tall cedars, whitecaps chopping on the lake. The breeze is no longer so warm here, and I have the beach to myself. Last fall, weekend afternoons and stuffy evenings, I swam here, when everyone else was too busy or too disinterested to swim at my usual places. With my youngest at college, I lived alone again, and I determined not to drench my empty nest with tears. For those hours, I brought pages of my manuscript. Dusty sand drifted into my printed words and into my bag that held my ever-present things: library books and knitting. I’d swam here before with my daughters, but I began to know this lake in a new way: how the bottom drops quickly and few boats venture to this far end. I kicked far out, leaving the weeds and the strangers on the beach behind. Curious or not, the loons joined me.

And a line from the mesmerizing Annabel Abbs’ Windswept about women, walking, solitude, and creativity: “She purged her inner clutter with outdoor space.”

‘Eat all the plums from all the iceboxes. Apologize to no one.’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Not a spoiler alert — an eclipse is headed our planet’s way — and we live in the path of totality. Over the past few years, it feels like the state has prepared for so many things: snowstorms and windstorms, floods. Now, a river of people streaming in for The Awesome.

Meanwhile, lives churn on. I spend a pleasant and snowy afternoon writing a spreadsheet, followed by a ranting email which I (wisely) delete before I send. I write and write. A short excerpt of my novel is picked up for publication in May. I’m given a green folder and a white folder of old letters and documents and site map for an article I’m writing. The housecats twitch at the juncos in the feeder.

Ryan Champan’s advice on writing a novel:

56. If you’re struggling with revision, print out the draft. Cut each sentence into individual strips and papier mâché them into a sculpture of your head, scaled 2x. Once it’s dried, place the sculpture over your head—create eye holes at your discretion—and just sit like that.

And another:

15. Llosa again, on writing one’s first novel: “Those writers who shun their own demons and set themselves themes because they believe their own aren’t original or appealing enough are making an enormous mistake. In and of itself, no literary theme is good or bad. Any themes can be either, and the verdict depends not on the theme itself but rather on what it becomes when the application of form—narrative style and structure—makes it a novel.”

Read the whole 1oo here. Surely a few gems for anyone…

Dazzling light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Here’s the weird thing about this March: cabin fever is not a thing. March has always marked the time of year when snow and cold has piled unrelentingly on us for veritable months. Not so, this warm year. But climate change does squat for the dearth of light, and certainly nothing for the dissatisfaction that’s creeping into our social consciousness. I am a woman who craves the planetary might of blooming crocuses, the radiant headiness of a forest strewn with spring beauties, the serene hover of a bee tucked into a downy apple blossom. Patience, patience.

Walking home from the library, a sudden snowfall drenches my eyelashes.

On this early morning, poetry:

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end

of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now

I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives

two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck,

out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.

Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running

for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water,

but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.

The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,

strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls

of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,

fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything

broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse

of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way

or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

— Barbara Crocker

Song against Reductionism.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 20 Comments

A pretty wet snow covers our muddy world — temporarily, for sure, a grace of sugar snow in a long mud season. Early March, and I’m already hanging the laundry out to dry, the pale green nubs of perennial bulbs pushing up through matted debris of last year’s leaves, broken twigs.

On a warm afternoon, I put the snow shovel away — my usual blind enthusiasm about spring! I’m the woman who rails against reduction, that the world can be defined as this or that. This world is nothing but gray, an unending smear of thaw and freeze. And yet, I’m wrong about that, too. Daily, the bird chorus gains, the winged creatures flocking in the box elders in the ravine behind my house, feasting at the feeder in the mock orange.

A poem from the late David Budbill:

“What Issa Heard”

Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds

singing sutras to this suffering world.

I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,

since we will always have a suffering world,

we must also always have a song.

Birthday Cake.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

March 7 is my father’s 87th birthday. My daughter, the oldest grandchild, visited my parents a few days ago and asked what to do for my parents’ birthdays. Cake and flowers. And be sure to eat the whole cake.

At town meeting, on the fly, I had to add a few numbers, tally a total. Writing with my pencil, the 100 or so audience members looking at me, I thought of those childhood evenings when I handed my dad an algebra or calculus problem and asked for help. He always made me sharpen my pencil, align the numbers so the problem made sense, and exhibit some respect for mathematics, please. These three things have stuck with me my entire life.

Every year on my father’s birthday, I think of this Hayden Carruth poem. My father — a man who taught his kids about Arkhipov Day and Ancient Greek philosophy, and spent so many nights in the desert, playing cards with his kids at a picnic table lit by a battery lamp….

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.