writing

Mechanic talk….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

The garage I use wasn’t flooded this summer — the river simply swiped away the owner’s land in back, a great chunk, along with his plow truck and two customer cars. A few weeks later, I stood on a bridge, watching a towing company winch the truck free from the lowered river. For weeks, the two cars remained nearly submerged in a muddy wetland along the riverbank, badly beaten. Then one day, the cars had vanished, too.

Friday morning during what suffices as rush hour in Hardwick, Vermont, I park behind his garage. The three bay doors are open. We stand talking for a bit in the shadows of his garage, the autumn sunlight filtering through the great oak trees his great-grandfather had planted along the river, a few lifetimes ago.

I’ve been coming to the garage for years, from the crazed put-on-your-snow-tires season to this kind of September morning where we stand, in no rush, watching the parking lot dust drift in the honeyed sunlight. Curious, I ask about the town’s plans for the river tumbling so near to what remains of his back lot. In these dry autumn days, the river’s low, sunk among the rocks and boulders strewn by July’s flood.

He says simply, A lot of talking, many plans.

Last July, the bank where a motel was built was swept downstream, turned into silt, gone elsewhere. The town owns the property now. The mechanic tells me that people visit every day, fishing or wandering or simply enjoying the river sparkling in the sunlight. Weekends, families picnic.

Much later in the evening, as the moon hangs its three-quarters lamp in the clear sky, I wander there, too. The land slopes down gradually to the river. When the floods come again — and of course the floods will return — the water will rise here, stretching over Joe Pye weed and asters.

Along the river, the oaks and maple leaves splash gold and orange, early change. End of the summer, with its troubled river and kids on the banks, flying box kites.

Two autumns…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I leave the garden to do its final hallelujah of the season, the tithonia and sunflowers and cosmos fraying now, the basil still slipping into my cooking pot. September 11, the morning I stood in my sun-filled kitchen watching my toddler tricycle around the table, listening to public radio and wondering what was happening. My youngest was not yet born. Now, 23 years later, my daughters and I text during the debate. My cats are curled at my feet, in their usual, wise cat-disdain way, thinking their feline thoughts, savoring like any smart creature the warmth from the wood stove.

On my evening walk, I meandered the long way home. A half moon hung in the sky, sweet as maple pudding, so near I imagined I could reach out and lay my fingertips on its smooth sheen. Early autumn. So much more to come.

for me going

for you staying—

two autumns

– Buson

Imagining a fox, two strangers in a canoe…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A fox runs out in front of me as I leave the library, so quick the creature might have been my imaginings in the night. Upstairs, people are still talking and laughing, remnants from the Selectboard meeting. Behind me, the man who lives down the road, with neither water nor electricity and is often at the library at night, his phone plugged into an outlet in the foyer that’s left unlocked, perhaps for this reason, says, “Saw it, huh? Fox.”

The sunset has simmered down to a liquified gold spill in the darkness. I pull into the beach. I’m alone here, and I get out of my Subaru and lie down on the wet sand. I can feel the damp sand clump into my hair. The waves lap. The spill of light shrinks. The crickets are doing their sizzling thing, and goddamn, here it is again, end of August, a goodbye to the sunflowers not far in the offing.

I spent so many hours of my mothering life at this beach, and now this summer has slipped by without a single visit to this particular beach. The sun goes down. And here’s the weird thing: while I’m lying there, dampening, dampening, wondering what’s up with the universe anyway? Why does it always feel like loss, loss, loss, a canoe paddles by. In a funk, I don’t bother to sit up and chat with strangers, but the couple steers their craft right onto the shore and asks what’s up with me….

So, I sit up and talk.

Turns out, even strangers, we have strangely similar intersecting points. In the dark, the lake lapping at their canoe, we stand talking while the stars blink on, just a few, in the cloudy night. Then, instinctively, as if in some kind of pact, we reach out and shake hands. Then I’m off to my home and my hungry cats, and the couple paddles on…. maybe an imagining, maybe not….

Crash, smash, end of summer….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Sure, it’s hot again, but it’s a day without swimming. I’m in the nether in-between place where the youngest is headed back to college, and my life inevitably tips towards the not-so-fun adult things I’ve kicked down the proverbial road. Borrow a spark plug wrench and fix the lawn mower, walk down the hill and ask the young carpenter what to do about that stucco that crumbled from the house foundation, just behind the rose bushes that we sliced away last weekend, tearing away the moss to keep the moisture, moisture from my house.

We are inside and outside all day long, hanging up laundry and sweeping the porch, loading a car… The cats are confused. The kitchen floor is sandy. I think of this day and the next and the few following until I might meet my friend for dinner, exchange our mothering stories, ask what’s happening? what now? what next? This year, I have officially crossed over into the population of the dead mothers club. In a strange kind of way, I find this like membership in the new parents club: once you’re a parent, you’re in, a lifer, whichever way you’re going to take that ride. As for me — and maybe it’s really my suspicion I’ve been poisoned by mold at work — but I turned with an anathema against cattiness and pretense, as if my own death perches on my back just like my daughter now heading back to college classes who hung on my back not that many years ago, her miniature fingers curious against my ears, reaching for wild blackberries. Evenings, the August she was one, I walked her sleep every night as the twilight sank and then laid her, sodden with dreams, on our bed.

So it goes, this rich wild life.

On a whim, I buy a copy of Pearl by Siân Hughes in Montpelier. Oh, novel of my heart:

Had I stopped to think for a minute that the fracture in my family, the rift opened in my own heart, would be passed down to the next generation, through my own damage if nothing else? No, I hadn’t. It never crossed my mind….

The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In a gray drizzle/not quite drizzle, I stop outside the co-op to talk, my hands full with peaches, mozzarella, and Clif bars for my daughter’s hike the next day. The prediction is for temps at high elevation in the thirties.

My conversation companion is a woman I run into randomly, usually on the sidewalk, and inevitably we jump right into talking. It’s August and dreary with wildfire smoke and a sudden cold rain. My hands are full with those peaches and sweets, so I’m blinking in the misting rain. I’m laughing a little, because why not? but I sharpened up quickly as she’s not laughing at all. The strange thing is she’s listing some things that have been rattling around in my mind for months now – the collective frustration that bends dialogue to anger or sarcasm, the way the town’s Center Road is so unkempt grass grows through its middle, and the recent property tax bills that are are you kidding me?

And even though my daughter is at home waiting for the cheese for that pizza we’ll make from onions and basil and tomatoes I’ll snag from the garden, I leave my few groceries in my Subaru and follow my companion through the damp woody patch behind the co-op. We stand at the river’s edge. She leans far out over the water. Look, she says.

It’s drizzling, and even though I’d gone running just before stopping in for what I thought would be a few minutes’ worth of shopping I’m starting to shiver a little. But I have this sudden vision of what’s happening with this town where I live, how the river threatens to wash away this downtown of brick and granite and asphalt, trees and roses. Years ago I realized that brokenness is never one thing; all these unfixable things – climate swings and decades (centuries?) of ill-use and reliance on the Feds to fund these fixes, when that amorphous federal government… well, why say more there?

A few years back, I interviewed a well-known writer who advised me that a writer should always acknowledge her time and place. The rain’s fattening. The repair of the world might, indeed, be impossible. At home, our kitchen is warm and bright, and the cats are half-sleeping as cats do on the rug before the kitchen sink. I’ve always believed in domesticity as the antidote to the world’s inevitable callousness. Later, I wander over to the neighbor’s house and lean in her doorway for a bit. We talk randomly about nothing much at all, catbirds and rose thorns, no repair, but a strengthening of heart, surely.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it….

“Blackberry-Picking” by Seamus Heaney

Immensity taps at your life…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Nearing the end of August, the wild around our village house is mightily fortressing. The path behind our house has been given up this summer by friends; those who visit arrive via the street where the grass has broken the pavement, too, crisscrossed the gray with emerald. In the ravine behind our house, the foxes have kitted again this year. Randomly, the youngsters come out to chase each other. My daughter, who unexpectedly met the hissing mama fox, gave up that path a few years back. Only I now claw my way through the blackberry brambles, whistling, scraping my bare knees in some kind of penance for passing through their realm.

This year, while the human world on a great and local level has worked at its less admirable traits, the natural world has flourished. My daughters and I hold the apples and pears, gauging not yet, not yet. All around, a rioting of blossom and vine of what I’ve sown — sunflowers and morning glories, love lies bleeding — and the lushness of goldenrod, wild honeysuckle, creeping cucumber.

Oh, sweet illusion of Vermont’s August, as if stark November will skip her own visit this year….. On this dewy morning, smoke-drenched from wildfires so far distantly north, a favorite poem from Jane Hirshfield.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield