writing

The natural course of things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Dawn, I’m barefoot in the dewy garden, gathering peas, the world ignited. By the time my daughter and I meet in the kitchen, a little after five as she drinks coffee and heads to work, gray has skimmed over the sky, rain rain rain pushing in. (Side note: Red Sky at Morning, Richard Bradford’s novel, is a terrific classic novel, the former husband of my very long ago nursery school teacher, somewhere in Santa Fe….)

A year ago, heavy rains flooded much of my state. As I left Greensboro yesterday afternoon, I passed a village resident digging a trench with a shovel, some preventative channeling. About this time last year, I realized I knew a number of people who were driving around with shovels in their cars or pickups.

We are now in midsummer. Around two sides of our house, my garden grows — cottage roses and cup plant and phlox — and the wild rallies on the other two sides — jewel weed and box elder and goldenrod twine around porch railings, brush against the clapboard. Snip snip must be done, and yet somehow hasn’t yet. The groundhogs multiply, run beneath our chairs on the deck. I wonder about those foxes, about the natural course of things, wonder again, Well, what do I know? What will happen will happen….

A stranger appears at our house…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

A stranger appears at our house while I’m watering one night, the little drink I offer my tomato plants on hot days. Her grandmother lived in this house, an old woman widowed now in another part of Vermont. I let the stranger in. She’s mystified that a tiny pantry in the kitchen was removed. I can answer some of her questions — that the four tiny bedrooms were changed to two tiny rooms and one larger one, that the downstairs walls were painted yellow by me.

Someday, I say, someone will knock down a wall and change this, too.

Outside, in the evening light that’s storybook shades of peach and lemon and lime, I tell her the soil is sand. She remembers the ants who bit her as a tiny child, and she remembers the lilacs. We stand talking a little about our lives — how I came to live here, where she’s now. I ask, Who planted the roses, but she doesn’t know.

Just before she leaves, she looks at the foot-wide strip of cement that surrounds the house. “My sister and I used to dress up in my mother’s old clothes and high heels. Everything was too big for us, so we scuffed the heels around the house.”

She gets back in that rusty mini-van, waves, and heads off. A few days later, she sends me photos, 1960s-style, of kids in what’s now my living room. And the wallpaper? She remembered it indelibly and wanted me to see it, based on some notion that pineapples and giant leaves were a fine addition to the walls of a small Vermont living room.

There’s one last thing, though. She even wanted to see the basement. As we stood looking at the stone walls and the rough-hewn floor joists, we wondered about the housewrights. How well-built this house is, tucked on a hillside in a place that seems both part of the village and not. My days, too, are numbered here. I’ll die here, or I’ll move elsewhere. All these stories are pieces of this house — these little girls, sixty years ago, in too-big shoes, hands pressed against this house for balance, giggling.

July, it’s worth noting again, July July July, month of growth, today own parents’ anniversary. Each of these July days…. Savor in some kind of way.

Finding a Thread.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

On my way home, I stop at Number Ten Pond. The water temperature is at that sweet spot, exactly perfect — and how often do you touch perfect? — and I wade right in. A woman stands in the pond, two children splashing around her. She laughs when the minnows bite her toes.

I swim far. In the pond’s center, I float on my back. With my eyes closed, my mind’s eye turns red, with blood or sunlight, who knows, and I’m no longer sure which way is up or down, water or sky. I’m distant enough from shore that only the loon call reaches me. By the summer’s end, these swims will add up to an invisible chain of experience: of water and weather, of whatever language drifts my way. July here, just a handful of fleeting days. 

"Everything Is Made Of Labor"
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.

Growth.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In these days of long light, my daughter and I are drinking tea and talking on our glassed-in porch when she spies a fox walking along the lilacs that fence us from the road. The red fox, a real beauty, turns and looks at us.

June has been a season of the wild pushing in — the prolific groundhogs (and my thoughts will come to naught about this, but I’m wishing for a more even ratio of groundhog to fox, for my garden’s sake), the multiplicity of birds, raccoon and possum, the circling turkey vultures. This year, too, my garden grows half-wild, the amaranth reseeding around the Brussels sprouts, coreopsis sailing over the fence. One morning, I straighten and pause, brushing dirt from my fingers, when I spy a fox staring at me through the layers of hydrangea and pin cherry trees. For a time without borders, we hold each other’s gaze. What passes between us is a wordless language, with no clear question or agreement. Maybe simply curiosity.

There’s plenty of the human chatter around me these days, much of it rippling up in chaotic waves. But then, this, too. Last night, poetry at a rural arts center, with all the best things of Vermont June: wildflowers and the pleasure of company, the beauty of words stitched finely together.

…. Last, never least, here’s some words about the unsurpassable Vermont novelist Jeffrey Lent, in need of a little lift…

Child

How you’ve grown, child

of mine—pearl from my oyster,

you sparkle like snow. 

— Mary Elder Jacobsen

The limits of what we do.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Friday night, driving home along a familiar road from visiting friends, I stop by the elementary school. Solstice, the Strawberry Moon, the daylight lingers, and the dusk is long, multiple hues of blue. No one’s there, of course. I follow the path along the wetlands. Shimmering with lilypads and twilight, the water chirrups, sings, buzzes. Fish leap and splash. I loiter, and the dusk closes in. Still, I keep walking, following the path through the brushy woods up a slight hill, so I can get to the other side.

In my twenties, I had a tendency to get lost in the night woods, stumbling off the path. Years before cell phones, we were always searching for flashlights with working batteries, to visit somebody in a remote cabin. But I’m in familiar territory, and I take my time, in this bowl of evening, letting the cacophony of the wild chorus diminish my stringy thoughts.

I haven’t been back here for a good long while, but this school and the town and the library where I worked was a warm place, with its own complicated stories, sure. Those were the years when my life fell apart. I pause, hoping to see the quicksilver flash of a fish. Across the wetlands, a single vehicle rolls along the road. Maybe it’s the passage of time, or the evening’s mellifuous beauty, but I see suddenly that I was following two strands of my story in those years. I was leaving my husband (and for months, I wasn’t at all certain how to do that), and I was also recreating my life (and how exhilarating and hard that was, too.) I’ve written about my struggle with addiction; when I began to lift that veil, my fierce hunger quickened for what I had wanted all along — to pursue my own creative and often dicey life. In this throbbing evening, I sense the limits of language, that words fail here, that to divide creation and destruction into two words, held in two hands, is illusory.

The fish I didn’t see smacked through the water. Fireflies winked around me as I threaded my way back to civilization in the dark.

“Train Ride”

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

— RUTH STONE

“Everything blooming bows down in the rain…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

In the sultry dawn, I’m wandering barefoot in the garden, snatching the lingering strawberries before birds have nabbed the remainder. By late afternoon, thunderstorms have settled in. I’ve left a wooden chair on the porch, a throw rug over the railings, both sodden now. Book in my hand, I lean against our house’s dusty and pollen-layer clapboards, reading in the coolness that’s washed in. Our porch looks out over a bed of bleeding hearts, false Solomon’s seal, hostas. Beyond that, the cemetery, the river valley below. Behind our house, the wild presses in. Ferns tall as my shoulders, goldenseal, the groundhogs, thrush, chittering sparrows, the cut of ravine and the great life there.

Equinox; the lushness burgeons. Bring it on. The rain blows through the bedroom screens whose windows we left open all day. The box elder shoves between the porch railings. The grapes rise hungrily against the barn. All night our rooms are filled with moonbeams, the blowing dew, the mixture of milk trucks rattling down the road and the calling frogs.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies

with their black and secret centers

lie shattered on the lawn.

~Jane Kenyon