Vermont

Autumn Mysteries.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Around a bend in the interstate, a rainbow leg glows. I’ve handed over the keys, and I’m in the passenger seat, knitting forgotten in my lap, as we hurtle along the pavement, rushing over bridges that rise over the Winooski River. Mid-October, dark is not far in the offing. I’m texting my daughter at home who’s feeding the cats and stirring the embers in the wood stove. It’s hopeless to tell my daughters that not so long ago whether someone was home or not was a mystery. Domestic life relied on a vein of faith.

Has the world less mystery now? Surely not. This autumn rainbow beckons us. Around us, an infinity of things we will never understand.

Between us, there’s a bit of discussion about which exit to take, but my driver humors me. There’s those maples before the gold-domed statehouse I want to see, the silver maple beside the library that holds its green longest. By then we’re laughing about a little joke between us — bulk foliage and bulk syrup — tossing those words back and forth for no clear reason at all except for a moment of pleasure.

Autumn: the swinging door between summer’s glory, the myriad folds of winter.

Above the fields,

above the roofs of the village houses,

the brilliance that made all life possible

becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:

they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s

bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:

she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

— the incomparable Louise Glück, “October”

Starlight Walking, a Pause, a Choice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Walking back from a library program after dark, I cut through the cemetery. The cemetery is unlit, and I’m walking slowly, staring at the Milky Way sprawled overhead, the enormous immensity of the cosmos. In the dark, I hear a cough. I haven’t been paying attention. At first, I think the cough has come from the person smoking on the balcony not far from me, in the house chopped into apartments at the dead-end road, or the people coughing might be around the gap in the fence surrounding the cemetery. I’m headed that way; the gap leads to the woodsy path that will lead me home. That particular place in the path often has trash – Little Debbie’s wrappers and empty Twisted Tea cans.

So here’s the thing: I’m not at all afraid. Despite the village around me, the night is deep. I’m well-hidden, so concealed I stand there thinking, staring up and seeing a shooting star.

I’ve written a fair amount about being a single mother, a broken half, the jilted family, the rage of abandonment. But it’s equally true that I’ve been single for so long now in a society that seems so devoted to coupleness, that I rarely speak of my solitary life. I know very few single parents, at all, for whatever reason. So this night, I do what I’ve taught myself all these years: I drink in my fill of starlight, that piercing Ursa Major hung over the black horizon of the mountains, let her drench me with her power. I make my choice and retrace a few steps, see my friend and her partner on the street below driving along in the dark, friends who would have happily given me a ride, had I asked. But these nights are still balmy and the bitter cold hasn’t set in yet.

The Pouring Glory of the World.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Saturday, I’m on the bridge in Winooski taking pictures of my daughters, in a strange, almost dreamy smoke-tinged sunset, the kind that’s become more par for the course than not these days. The river snakes through Winooski, a former mill town beside Burlington. Such effort has gone into this town, converting mills to upscale housing, the downtown bustling with restaurants that spread onto the sidewalks. My brother asks me if the town is on the rise. Wrong question, I think.

We’re at the end of a day of walking and sunlight. My brother owns a brewery, and so, while it’s been many years now since my drinking days ended, we’ve gone in and out of bars and breweries, and I’m reminded that the bars I once loved were such good places, full of the people and their stories, their weariness and joy, these things that have always tugged me.

Oh Vermont, my beloved state, in the gem of October. Walking through the woods with friends, golden light falls through the trees. Roads defined my twenties, mountains and rivers my decades after that. I’m well aware that living in Vermont, living in my hillside house with one foot in the village, the other hidden in a wild ravine, is a kind of undeserved luck. Yet the rivers, jammed with debris of broken buildings and busted vehicles, human junk, are a visible siren call of so much and so many things.

Sunday morning, we drink coffee and eat cornbread on my back porch, and solve, as my brother says, not one whit of the world’s problems. October: redolent of wet soil, broken leaf. Yellow and scarlet, a finale of gray. The month when the leaves will fall, the world open up.

From Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief:

Wonder is accepting what we cannot control, which is damn near everything. This, the pouring glory of the world. It goes in all directions.

The Swedish Word for Joy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The dental hygienist tells me about fishing trips to Lake Ontario, sailing far out into the lake where the land was no longer visible. Like the ocean she tells me. You can’t do that in Vermont.

With her gloved thumb, she presses on my lower jaw, my source of infection and misery and a veritable hemorrhage of money. The December before the pandemic, an oral surgeon took a scalpel to my gum and cut. A few days later, my brother and his girlfriend arrived for the holidays. He grilled on the back porch and drank beer while I leaned against the clapboards. In the kitchen, my daughters and his girlfriend cooked and baked.

On his phone, we studied footage of China, closed up and quarantined, back in the days when we couldn’t envision our own streets and highways closed up, the border closed between Vermont and my brother’s house in New Hampshire.

In a world of enormous possibilities, that bone infection is currently on the down low. The hygienist tells me I wouldn’t believe the things she’s seen — fishing, and in the dentist’s office. On my way out, she cheerily reminds me about floss.

Here’s a 100-story of mine published this morning about happiness.

“The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” 

— Rebecca Solnit

A Motorcycle is a Vehicle of Change…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On the cusp of the solstice, the evenings are chilly yet, mist pulling around our house.

I pull on a sweater — a wool sweater — as darkness falls and walk through the small stretch of woods into the cemetery. A stranger wearing a t-shirt and drinking a Fanta walks down. He looks at me as warily as I’m probably looking at him and then we exchange a mutual good evening and head each our own way, our mutual bit of our stories nothing but this.

Solstice — I’m hoping for sun and heat, for evening swims to stitch my summer together. I want to swim through pollen scattered on the still pond, glide through the ripples stirred by ducks, to have the mundane details of my life and my swimming companion’s life sewn together, swim by swim.

In the absence of swimming, I’ll sing the praises of those midday walks admiring the lupines and forget-me-nots, reading under the dwarf apple tree that’s long surpassed smallness, the fledgling robins clamoring for worms.

“A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn’t realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery’s favorite vehicle.” 

— Lily Brooks-Dalton, Motorcycles I’ve Loved

Worms for the Body, Philosophy for the Soul.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A little light rain falls as I pull a few weeds from the Sweet William in my garden. I planted these flowers when I moved here, putting my shovel into this terrain, vying for flowers and vegetables versus lawn. At the moment, the flowers flourish. I’m thinking a little about a writers roundtable I participated in the morning before, how I urged writers to remember that cause and effect drive the world we live in. All the pretty and noble thoughts we have about ourselves are only illusions. Character lies in our actions, for good or ill, whether we chose to see this or not.

On this Father’s Day, I remember those conversations my siblings and I had with my father at our kitchen table, so many decades ago. This sense of the world comes from the Aristotle he had us read. It’s a lesson that I’ve been hammering out, over and over and over in my life, through garden (what truer way to learn cause and effect), through writing and childrearing, through work, divorce, friendship.

On my deck, the robins’ nest has open-beaked fledglings, tufted and mewling. All day, the parents fly in and out, worms draping from their beaks, feeding their young, this great Herculean parenting endeavor. My cat Acer lies on a kitchen chair, staring through the glass door, mesmerized. The robins, in their robin way, have taken a chance nesting just above my door. Will this pan out? Will the young survive?

Wendell Berry wrote that “Parenthood is not exact science.” Nor, by any means, is bird or human life. My father gave his three children worms and philosophy. He taught us to love bread for the body, wine for the soul.