wildfires

Wildfire Smoke.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Are these days hot or chilly? All afternoon, working on my back porch, I put on and take off my sweatshirt, step into the sun to make phone calls, lean against the cool clapboards with my laptop. For days now, the air has been smoky with wildfires far away in the north. In the mornings, I wake coughing, wondering how people are breathing, so much nearer these fires.

August, and the raucous summer abruptly quiets. Walking in the woods with a friend, she notes a bird singing — wood or hermit thrush? — but all else is quiet save for our conversation. I’ve been here before, the pause between high summer and early autumn, when the swimming’s still good and the sunset lingers long after supper, but the mornings are filled with cool mist, and the shadows are not warm.

In past years, the faintest shadow of Long Winter has filled me with dread. Again, I will lose my tan, carry my laptop to the kitchen table, maybe go mad talking to my cats. Or not. Twice a day, I water the nasturtiums hanging in baskets on my back porch, listen to the neighbor boys biking. These days are yet long.

From Sunday poetry readings at the local arts center…

Wavering

What makes you think you’re so different? 
That was my weaker self hanging around outside the door. 
The voices over the telephone were accusing, too. 
“Must you always be you?” (They had the advantage, 
More bold without faces. They swirled a few ice cubes 
With a suggestive pause.) For a moment 
I took my heart out and held it in my hands. 
Then I put it back. This is how it is in a competitive world. 
But, I will not eat my own heart. I will not.

~ Ruth Stone

No Going Back.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

July 1: I’m driving on a back road to a nearby town where there’ll be the traditional New England small town Independence Day festivities, when I suddenly realize I can no longer see the road before me. The road dips down and then rises up. I know this, because I’ve driven this road so many times. I know precisely where to swerve around the persistent pothole where the stream runs under the lowest point of the road. But the rise is hidden in smoke.

The day marks a line for me, a place I won’t forget. I’ve been here before; this is familiar territory. I remember the precise afternoon I knew I would severe my marriage. Likewise, today, it’s clear to me that this smoke, in what will likely be one unimaginable variation after another, will remain.

Nonetheless, I go on into the day, watch the parade with an old acquaintance and we catch up about kids, ruminate about our old college days. I talk to a woman who’s built a house of cans and bottles and tires. She asks me to stop by sometime. Heck, who could pass that up? Of course I will.

Then I’m back home again, working, working, on this third book, taking it apart, sewing it back together, phrase by phrase. I wind in how it feels to walk along the edge of a lake that may not be frozen and thread through the Himalayan blue poppy, a child’s nightgown, pebbles under a clear running stream. I’m after those same old things: how to salvage order and beauty from chaos and destruction and despair. A river of sadness is not the torrents of despair.

Swim. Bartzella peonies. My neighbor leaning out her door, green curlers in her hair, saying hello.

Wildfire Smoke, Vermont.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Smoke from Canadian wildfires suffuses our world, the briefest intimation of so much happening so far away. Sunday afternoon, I crouch in my garden, weeding, while talking on the phone to my brother. When I stand, the sun is a pool, the hue of fresh blood.

Later, before twilight, we swim with a friend, the smoke like a mist. On our way home, my daughter and I drive up the hill across our town, to the hillside where we often walk and look for the sunset. It’s after eight, but these are the longest days of our Vermont year. The sun is utterly absent, swallowed up in smoke and humidity, the light meager as November.

This, she says, is not good.

The following morning, our air clears. At dinner on our porch, a light rain patters. We keep eating, talking a bit here and there, lacing together our days. As for the humidity, I keep thinking…. bring it on. The myriad leaves and blossoms reach out, sucking it up, summer in all its messy intensity.