writing

Vectoring….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Autumn has stretched out in Vermont into days of balminess, the warm air shot-through with the gold that lingers on the trees. It’s so warm, I keep at my makeshift back porch deck, a table I moved out this summer that’s become a place of succor, resting my bare feet on a wooden crate of those onions I pulled from the garden.

I’m taking a class with the unmatchable Lauren Markham about structure in writing, one of the hardest challenges. Online, there’s attendees from California (what? you get sun and ocean?) and Phoenix and Boston. Signing in, I leave my laptop camera on. I throw a chunk of wood in my stove from sheer laziness so I won’t need to rekindle the fire as the colder night creeps in, but I open the back window so my cats can sit on the sill and enjoy this sweet October breeze. When I join, the group is admiring the view of my clapboard house and frost-killed morning glories vines. I tell them my chore which doubtlessly immediately marks me as…. quaint rural.

Late afternoon, I pull out the dead basil plants and then lie down under an apple tree. Her leaves, blacked with frost spots, spiral down, one by one, to the unmown grass. It wasn’t until I had babies and was forced to slow down (all those nursing hours beneath apple trees, milk-sweet baby in my arms) that I realized every leaf takes its own precise trajectory, from spring bud to the autumn dive earthward. Around me, rotting apples, persistent slow-flying wasps.

I might have slept; when I open my eyes, the sky is already draining of blue. Thinking of Markham’s words, I suddenly see the taunt arc of this fourth, yet unfinished book, the map that holds this story, the treasure at the reader’s end far from a Hallmark card. Vector is the word she used. Indeed, all story, all life, is motion. The chill rising up from the earth, I vector myself indoors….

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. 

— Thoreau

Rowing in autumn…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

In a cold rain, my friend and I set off walking. It’s a joke between us. When we were neighbors, I would call and ask her to meet me for a walk.

It’s sleeting, she’d say.

Only a little.

Invariably, she’d join me, gung-ho.

The rain lets up, though, as we walk up a muddy path, cross streams, pause to admire where a view might be through dense mist. The woods are gold and black, redolent with the humus-y scent of fallen leaves, this summer’s bounty already turning back into the damp soil. I remember her oldest son, now a teacher himself, standing on a chair in my kitchen, rolling out dough for sugar cookies, happy. Rain or snow probably fell then, too.

This is familiar forest to me, as I lived here for so many years. But I grew up surrounded by New Hampshire forest, and the exquisite beauty of New England fall, its sharp bite reminding us of winter, is as familiar to me as the backs of my hands. While the greater political world is utterly unfamiliar — which way will this go? — this path, our conversation, is balm for my soul. Both our lives have gone rocky ways, and yet here we are in rain, pressing on, pocketing especially pretty leaves.

On my way home from our soggy walk, I stop at the coffee shop and spread out my papers and laptop on a table. I’m standing there, thinking (or maybe dreaming), when a long-ago acquaintance appears. We sit and talk for a bit. There was a quarrel in the past between us. As she speaks, I feel the blood quickening in my rain-damp flesh, from my cheeks to my sodden toes. Here it is again, how experience shapes and changes us. Our culture pushes us, pushes us as women, to smooth the edges, say all’s well, be polite, diminish ourselves and pretend we’re still in the land of childhood, when the grownup woman world is a vast sea of star and moonlight, treacherous waves, radiant beauty, and the great unknown. At the end of our conversation, there’s no conclusion, no tidy wrap-up, just the two of us rowing together for a bit, handing the oar back and forth.

This precise moment… Now.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My daughter and I drink coffee at the kitchen table and talk about the election. Sun pours in through the glass doors. A cat lies on the table between us, purring, utterly blissful.

At 19, it’s her first presidential ballot. At 19, I was a different kind of young woman, holed up in a far-off-the-path cabin with a boyfriend, determined to forge my future in “the smithy of my soul….” My daughter’s generation was shaped in the smithy of the pandemic. Last week, I tore off the New Yorker cover and clipped the illustration of Harris to our kitchen calendar, a white star gleaming on her earlobe. My daughter and I wonder, if Harris, then what? If not, then what? There’s no answers, yet, to any of this, the future yet to be revealed. We fry eggs, butter toast, brew more coffee.

Later, in the night, I’m out in my fat wool sweater and Danskos, holding a cup of hot honey tea, looking for the northern lights. The stars are crystalline, swirled through with white. The wind soughs through the white pines in the ravine behind my house, and a creamy half-moon, like a luscious unworldly melon slice — so tantalizing I’d like to hold it with both hands — hangs over my house.

I’m at the edge of my garden, that familiar place where, if I smoked cigarettes or drank scotch, I’d linger, contemplating the sunflower stalks and the village lights below. The night pretties up the village, wraps it up, so I can see how small this place really is. In the night, my heart opens toward the village; in the daylight, not so much.

The light from my house illuminates stray leaves sailing through the darkness, the great shift of autumn. Like so many of my friends, I’m at that place in life, kids growing and grown, where creative possibilities unfurl. I’m doing the things I’ve done nearly all my life: drinking tea, staring up at the wonder of the night firmament, contemplating which way I’ll jump. In the meantime, I’ve been housekeeping: edge away from that negative snarl, lean into what and who I know is true, the wind and the stars, the moving moon, this swallow of tea, this precise moment. Now.

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

— Alan Watts

Oatmeal Chat, Vultures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Vermont sends its swiftwater team to North Carolina, repaying a favor when Vermont was in need. Word comes of similar terrain and climate causes, but far worse devastation. We send them our empathy, our skilled folks, certainly money, to their world broken apart….

In Vermont, these weeks have been tepid, the foliage gently rotating to gold, the sun warm in the afternoons. This year, the purple asters decorate the landscape everywhere, pallets of brushiness.

Thursday afternoon, I take my laptop to our picnic table, the bluejays creeping near, curious, my bent-over sunflowers in the garden shaking with feathered gleaners. I’m stuck on this notion of impermanence my father and sister and I have been kicking around, when we connect in our disparate parts of the country via our laptops. Autumn in Vermont personifies impermanence. Stepping out for firewood in the early morning, geese clack over my porch roof, getting their V formation together, out of here for warmer waters.

In the co-op, I round an aisle and meet an old friend filling a paper bag with oatmeal. You can imagine me, he tells me, standing at my back door, just staring at the mountainside. What perfection today. From there, our conversation quickly bends into small town democracy, how each of these three adjacent towns are different. We step to the aisle’s side and dig into the grittier details of a legal letter circulating on email. My friend, thinking like me, asks about motivation. Who’s desiring what? Why? What’s the intent, for what human footing?

Fascinating questions. Vermont Selectboard meetings are generally unfettered democracy. Anyone can show up and speak their piece, ask questions.

Later, I step outside with my pound of coffee and pound of butter. The turkey vultures are circling, swooping low over this section of highway and co-op and river. In my wool sweater, barefoot in Danskos, I stand watching for the longest time, the sun falling behind the hillside.

A passerby, walking in, glances up, too, and shudders. “Them. Those birds.”

I start up the hillside, under the gyrating vultures.

 Even  in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
 I long for Kyoto.

— Bashō

“The real, long history of this place…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Old West Church, Calais, Vermont, 1823…. The fieldstone foundation was laid 200 years ago. I’ve been tossed a lucky bone, and I’m reading here this afternoon. Recently, I swung by with a friend to check out the acoustics and ended up sitting and watching the sunlight shift through the space. The structure remains in the 19th century with no electricity.

In an interesting way, it seems fitting to do these things in the autumn when the light in our northern realm is shifting so rapidly. On each side, the days shorten. What began in April as a sprinkling on the forest floor of hepatica and trillium and spring beauties has flourished all summer in such a lush and lovely summer. Strangers remark, “What a summer of growth!” as if to make up for these past few years of soddenness, of rain and wildfire smoke from faraway (but apparently not that faraway) places.

At the transfer station, I pull up with my hatchback crammed with that metal lidded can of cat food cans, my bins of used paper and things I no longer want in my house. I’ve been coming here for decades now. On this peach of a September afternoon, the owner and I stand outside his office, our faces up to the sunlight and a circling hawk. I mention that I’d take a month more of these days, but I don’t want to be greedy. He looks at me and says, Let’s just be greedy and want that, anyway.

Autumn is the long weeks of the growing season’s finale, the landscape gold and crimson. But within the landscape are the tiny places where we walk and live: my garden’s pink glads, the neighbor’s blooming roses, the gold flush of the butternut tree I planted as a bare root stick, seven years ago, and the girls laughed at me. The tree stretches far above our heads now, and my girls marvel. Have faith, I remind them; beauty thrives from where we least expect it….

From Carolyn Kuebler’s gorgeous essay about Vermont:

The real, long history of this place goes even further
back, to the beginning of this landform as we know it, about twelve
thousand years ago when the glaciers drew back from the land and
various species, including humans, eventually moved in.

Evening gathering….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the spring, I moved my remaining hollyhocks into the fenced vegetable garden to save these flowers from feasting groundhogs. Spring, summer churned along. Now autumn, my garden still blooms its rainbow. Gathering tomatoes and basil for dinner, scraps of birch bark and kindling to start a fire, I pause for a moment in the drizzle, soaking in the delicate petals, the mist brushing in for the night, the trees already doing each their own foliage thing — some gold and orange, some already shaken down to bare twigs, others green, green, as if in defiance of winter.

Across the valley, the coyotes call, once, twice, as if testing their voices.

I snip bunchy orange marigolds for my table, their centers spicy. Overhead, the geese are always winging away these days, gathering their Vs, heading for their winter quarters, elsewhere. The clustered sunflowers, in their different heights and states of disarray from gold petal to curled brown leaf, rustle with the fat little chickadees dipping in and out, scavenging. Oh, sunflowers, so easily grown: scattered seeds, my palms pressing soil, water and sunlight. For me and the birds I imagine I sow these beauties, but of course that’s not true at all. The sunflowers are the waving prayer flags of my garden, this small territory.

The neighbor boys pile their sweatshirts and run in their t-shirts, the smallest hustling in and out of the lilac bushes, hide-and-seek. Rain pitters on leaves. A T.S. Eliot line runs through my memory, that graceful dismal poet, “…music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all…”

A few snippets of autumn.