Vermont

Always, the question, which way?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

For readers who haven’t lived in northern Vermont, here’s a keyhole view of June: heat and humidity move in, and the earth thrusts out into leaf and bloom. Overnight, the loosestrife blooms yellow, the chard gains an inch in leaf. The lilacs fade. The Siberian irises spread purple.

In the heat, listening to terrible news of the American Empire’s spread, I finish stacking next winter’s firewood. Sweaty and dirty, the cats and I admire my work, contemplating the frosty fall evenings. The cats, perhaps, are merely curious about my labor, or the next meal’s arrival, or perhaps a cat calculus I don’t imagine.

June, the songbirds serenade exquisitely. I mow the grass around the woodpile, the pink roses beginning to bloom, the brushy compass flowers that are now knee-high. Will the ancient mock orange leaf and bloom? Will the woodchuck devour the sunflower seedlings? Will I unclench my knotted heart and let myself fall in love, tumble into the next phase of whatever I may have in this lifetime?

Rain falls and the heat breaks as I finish mowing. I wander around, drinking a glass of water, the rain running through salt and chaff on my cheeks and biceps. 21 years ago, a friend labored to bring her baby into the world. I sat in her kitchen while our six-year-olds played under her front yard maples. Her mother-in-law made chicken soup that I ate while I nursed my own wee infant.

The world isn’t filled with ten thousand things. In the June afternoon’s rain, a rainbow elusive, math welds no teeth. A hopping robin in search of sustenance, unfolding hydrangea leaves, the bounce of a child’s basketball, the scent of sap bleeding from winter’s firewood.

For local folks…. I’ll be reading at Still North Books in Hanover, NH, Wednesday, June 17, 7 p.m. Yes — a lovely bookstore — and yes, a non-cancer visit to this lovely village.

Is not all the summer akin to a paradise? — Henry David Thoreau

On not splitting.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A number of years ago, I was eating lunch in a friend’s kitchen while the kids played in the yard or barn or spread out on the living room floor with some game involving shards of bark from firewood. Whatever the kids were doing.

A man I had just met was eating lunch, too. His wife was expecting her first baby, and he was eating his quesadilla nervously. My friend’s husband counseled him: You’re going to feel like splitting at some point during the labor, but whatever you do, don’t do that. Stick around.

My god, the work that goes into parenting. My oldest married her beloved last weekend. Life is so many things: long as an hourless day, short as an inhale. Changeable. I had expected joy. What I had not expected was profound contentment, like an afternoon of sunlight. There’s all those platitudes — of watching this daughter learn to run and walk, the years of mothering through all weather — but for this afternoon, our world paused. For a moment, just two families at a round table, raising drinking glasses, cheering life.

Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness

Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired

Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow…

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly

Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears

Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes

Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you

Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days — Jane Hirshfield

Visitors from the Animal Realm.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A yearling bear, black as country midnight, appears through the hostas and checks out my back porch. The bear and I appraise each other through the glass door. Then the bear slips over the porch into the raspberry canes and heads off. My little street, with not even a handful of houses, quickens in the texting world. I am not the only one awake this early.

Later, midday, on the Dartmouth College campus for a lit mag launch, I’m standing on a street corner, talking with a woman I’ve just met, and a deer walks by. It’s Hanover, a New Hampshire town, and students raise their phones to record. The deer runs across the road, its heels click-clicking on the pavement.

Early June, a heady time in northern New England, the lilacs as dense and profuse as I’ve ever seen these beauties. My neighbor and I walk along these fragrant blossoms, then head into town for the community meal where, in the noisy space, the group of old and new friends that I join put our heads near, the conversation rising and twirling with that spring ebullience.

As the evening cools but doesn’t cloud, my neighbor and I walk home and linger on her veranda. Hummingbirds sip at her feeders. I’ve been moving the remainder of this year’s firewood, readying to stack next year’s wood, and the weight of this work lies in my shoulders, exhausting and yet welcome. This moving of firewood may take me weeks. We talk about phlox and columbine, about sex and money and house painting. These days are long. I slip off my sandals and wander home in my bare feet.

Re-teaching loveliness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Photo above is evidence of my loose approach to living with cats, an approach my visitors either embrace or wonder, what’s up with the cats on the counters? Brush stroke by rag wipe, I proceed with my kitchen project. I am a woman who craves order. Keeping my kitchen in cardboard boxes is not my SPARK JOY go-to; nonetheless, I persevere.

With added windows, I am relearning the light in my kitchen. Sure as anything, the metaphor of this project does not elude me. A year ago, a friend visited me in my Dartmouth room, bringing knitting and butterscotch pudding. Before she left, she walked me around the hall, 150′. We walked that loop twice? Through the window, the green and rain filled the day.

A year later, novel writing and paintbrush washing, property taxes and weeding, the Monday morning plan for a week’s work. The metaphor of this has not escaped me. In the co-op, reaching for broccoli, a long-ago acquaintance startles when he sees me.

I’d heard you were dead, he says.

Not yet, I laugh. Squeaked through, for now.

A year ago, I’d envisioned a kind of ease for myself; surviving lymphoma had made me invincible to misery in certain ways—a disinterest in petty bullshit, a newfound ability to let the little bickering struggles that seem to plague our time, or maybe simply our human nature, fall with the dust and debris on the kitchen floor. But what rose, instead, with sharpened teeth, were those existential questions: how does meaning structure my life? Who’s with me? Where to tap happiness, that old true word?

Walking home, I cough and touch the lymph nodes in my neck. Has that mighty disease returned? I’m at the kids’ ballfield, where the turkey vulture roost in the surrounding woods. Evening, the thrush sing. Holding these two things — the thrush’s melody, the circling vultures — I head home. Where the cats wait for me on the kitchen counter.

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness… ~ Galway Kinnell

“… spring’s thousand tender greens…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Two sleek loons swim and dive in the lake while I stand on the shore, listening the conversation about mean water level and stones and a grandfather who bought this property, back in the years when no phones reached here, and travel to the lakeshore was by foot or by hoof or a wooden-spoked wheel.

Chilly, I pull my sweatshirt hood over my head. A story about this summer cottage is that it was a farmhouse. Not so long ago, the landscape was cleared around this lake, and farms stretched down to the water. In the winter, ice was sawed into great chunks and shipped via train, cushioned in sawdust, to faraway homes.

In my own home, the carpenter has finished. I keep on with my paintbrush, call a daughter for reinforcements. A year ago, just out of surgery, I could stand only as a wilting flower stem, crooked over in pain. Sequestered in a hospital, I longed for cold rain on my face. Now, on this breezy afternoon, the wet wind burrows behind my neck. Later, at home, I feed my woodstove. There’s nothing permanent, but for now, this.

… I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,

and the white-throated sparrow’s call

that borders on rudeness….

— Jane Kenyon

Hell-bent robins.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I arrive home from the local arts center, get out of my car, and a robin nearly flies into my head. Winged creatures are swooping from the apple trees to the hedge of lilacs that is just beginning to bud. My god, what a lovely day.

In my bag, I have an empty pint jar of water I’ve been drinking, and a ball of purple linen I’m knitting into a summer shift, and the books of the two authors whose reading I just attended — Helen Whybrow of The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding’s translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. I have a new book, too, a collection of stories by a Turkish author I’ve never read. Sitting with my book world friend, her publisher friend hands me a book, too. The afternoon and evening has gone this joyous way, like that hell-bent robin — strangers and friends and people I haven’t seen in ages — exuberant about literature and art and the unstoppable profusion of spring.

I like this art center so much I imagine curling up on a cushiony bench and sleeping beside the wide windows, the starlight on my face. An acquaintance I met at a Vermont Studio Center residency works here, too, and we plot some amusing possibilities. We’re beside the table heaped in lush mounds of delicacies, and I graze on stuffed mushrooms and empanadas and fresh tomatoes. I wrap lemon squares in napkins and hold these in my hands away from my books and knitting.

Outside on the stone patio, the wind is lifting over the meadow, the sun sinking and the cold creeping in. All around me looms that chilly darkness, the nearness of sunset, the hole in the night where dawn seems impossible. So much of my life I’ve teased and poked at this, and, conversely, pushed the vast cold away — through distraction and once-upon-a-time through drinking and work. Now, as the twilight drains away and night stakes in for its duration, I wander among the yet leafless apple trees, the garden with its green garlic nubs, drinking tea and listening to the birds settle down to sleep. My god, the myriad lessons of cancer. Note this, too: clench joy and fear in the same fist. See what happens.

Kitchen renovation paint considerations….