writer

Messy democracy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

So this whole democracy thing? Since we’re in an election year and all?

I work in a small town for a Selectboard. Monday morning, I pull into work (late, again), and a Selectboard member is eating a blueberry muffin as fast as he can in the parking lot, a muffin I’m certain the town clerk made. I get out and make some comment roughly along the lines of it’s a good thing I don’t do drugs anymore because Your Town….

He counters with, Let’s get serious. What’s your cucumber and zucchini situation? I’m coming back at noon with four full boxes.

Monday morning, it’s revealed that people have stolen signs. People have written letters to the Selectboard and newspapers and the Sheriff about the theft. People arrive in the office with dogs and laptops and questions, eat muffins and disappear. I walk outside with the phone. It’s possible that the thief arrives. It’s also possible there’s some laughter. Or maybe I’m making all this up.

Democracy is messy, chaotic, often brutal. People arrive who look as though they’ve slept in ditches for their entire adult lives and complain about the flood. People complain about their neighbors. People run for election. In all of this, I take off my shoes and walk around barefoot. I do all the things I’m supposed to do and I keep wondering if I’m doing any of these right. I give an old woman a bottle of water. I am always trying to leave, disappearing into the asters around the lake, into the rooms upstairs where it’s just me and the wasps and the open windows. I am always trying to sew the pieces of my life together. Sometimes I crumple paper and throw it at my coworkers, which is not really at all charming or funny.

As a writer, I learned from reading. I learned so much from sugaring — the majesty of the world, the inarguableness of cause and consequence. I learned joy and love as a parent. I learned grief as a broken wife. Working for a small town, I’ve learned the peculiar American craziness of little towns and politics, of gossip. How to spy cowardice and when to lean against the courageous.

There’s not one damn thing perfect about any of this. Here I am as usual, half in, my head and heart filled with my garden gone rampart with rudbeckia and coneflowers. But we’re all that way…. July is the season of joy, January the season of despondence and loneliness. In the heart of midwinter, I leap from the snowy shore to the frozen lake. Far out, I sometimes lie down in the middle of the day, the ice a bed between my bones and the sludgy lightless waters. Overhead, the infinity of the heavens.

But today it’s Good Old July. In the afternoon, I walk with a woman along the forest trails she’s cut. She’s eased white quartz from the soil. The rocks gleam, as if freshly scrubbed with rain.

Human chaos, the desert.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Galisteo, New Mexico

My daughter sends word of rain and more rain in our Vermont world. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, visiting my father in New Mexico, we’re amazed by the hues of green. The desert’s rainy this year, too. In the afternoon, I work outside while a storm blows in. In New Mexico’s wide skies, sooty clouds may lower and threaten and yield not a drop of water, blowing elsewhere, breaking or not.

In this quiet, edge-of-the-greenbelt place, news comes to us, the President now ill, an election teetering any which way. We do the everyday familiar things — drink coffee and eat dinner, play cards, talk about my mother’s recent death, about each one of us. After dark, the two girls and I stand outside in the dark in the cool rain, breathing in that ineffably sweet fragrance of the rain-damp desert. Wind shakes the junipers. Here, at fifty, I seem to be carrying a goblet of my life, the wind in the junipers one of the very first sounds I remember as a little girl, so many trips crisscross between Vermont and the desert, the enthusiasm of these young women with me who have seen so much of this world already, so eager they are for more, more of life. Later, when the girls are whispering and laughing in bed, the rain falling, the breeze blowing through the window, I feel that endless ancient desert around me, the calling coyotes, dwarfing for this moment even our human chaos.

Complex People.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I was on a Claire Dederer reading jag, stepping into her island home, soaking up her kids and her questions and her fierce writing. Witty, smart, edgy. Which led to me to the father of those children and his books. 

Bruce Barcott writes in The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw:

 “… a good portion of my life I believed that a law of benevolent action held sway in the world. This law maintained that if you did the right thing and worked hard, eventually things would work out; that the world generally tended towards fairness, decency, and wisdom. But of course the world doesn’t work that way. The people who learn that lesson through crushing experience and still refuse to bow to it astound me. They go on fighting, again and again and again. These people aren’t perfect. They aren’t simple heroes. They are complex human beings. And we need them. Because without them the world would be lost.”