writing

Talking Past Dark.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

A friend comes to visits, heads to my picnic table, and we commence talking. Hours later, a dewy dusk has descended. I’m shivering, my sweater cuffs pulled all the way over my hands. Inside, my cats are grousing for a fire in the wood stove.

I remember my friend’s oldest son sitting on my couch, about an eon ago. The boy was so small his legs didn’t reach the end of the couch. Now, he’s thinking of heading into a PhD program.

I haven’t seen this friend in months, since before I traveled to Europe and decided I was born on a continent that mismatches me. Yet, we start talking as though I was a young mother again, walking along the dirt road with a toddler, my hair unbrushed for days.

It’s a cliche of course, how the world changes and how it remains the same, that one long Heraclitus river — always the stream, never the same.

The foxes didn’t return to den behind my house this year. A few stray lilacs bloomed in late September. The harvest moon sails up in the sky. All our hours of talking and we solve absolutely nothing, not a single problem, except this, perhaps: a fattening of our friendship, this woman who assured me I would survive my divorce, that my life would continue. The sun heads down, and we keep on talking.

A Story in Here…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I visit a woman whose family bought a house on a peninsula in a glacial lake. She invites me in — a stunning place of wood and glass and French doors — nothing polished, all preserved as if it’s still World War I. There’s an enormous stone fireplace. She tells me that, after a hurricane in the 1930s, the original owner (who lived elsewhere, New York or Pennsylvania) never returned after he heard that all the trees on the peninsula were destroyed, save for eight. He sold the house to this woman’s family. Great pine trees tower over the lawn and hydrangeas.

She says to me, Imagine the view of the lake in the thirties, when the trees were all gone? That must have been stunning, too.

I drive home in a sudden windstorm. I’m passing a stand of poplars, their leaves crinkled and finished with summer. The wind blows leaves through my open car windows, over a bucket of apples, on my library books, into the lap of my skirt. Ahead of me, two cars are pulled over, blinkers flashing. A branch smashed the windshield of one car. Two young woman stand in the road, the wind circling, twigs snapping, rain beginning in earnest. One woman raises her arms in a giant Y.

There’s a story (or two) in here for sure….

Here: Where I/We Are.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Post leaving my daughter in her college dorm, the cats and I hole up and read Here by Richard McGuire. A sample of this amazing book is:

Here: the cats and I wake, in the morning that’s yet dark, to the rain pattering through the open windows on the stones and leaves around our house. One more week of August remains, and the swimming prognosis is lousy.

Around me: backroads in places still barely passable, bridges out, the riverbanks strewn with human junk — pieces of the ripped-apart motel, wires wound around wood and twisted clothing and two cars and so much plastic. I started this summer, July 1, driving to an Independence Day celebration, cloudy with smoke from the Canadian wildfires, noting that day as my own marker: the smoke has become part of our life. We accepted it, kept on with our lives, as we had — and have — to do.

A summer of the strangest things. The world’s great problems, my own petty woes. In all this, we filled our days with working and drinking coffee, hiking and playing cards and eating tacos and talking, so much talking. Gravy.

On this rainy Friday morning, a Raymond Carver poem:

“Gravy”

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

The 10,000 Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

The last night I am in New Mexico, I can’t sleep, so I slip on my sandals and walk. The moon hangs over my parents’ house, luminescent as a giant drop from a sun-shot waterfall. It’s dark yet, a cool-nearly-cold breeze stirring the desert. No human wanders at this early hour. It’s just me and the singing crickets and birds, the sun pushing a golden curve over the black mountains, the desert stirring in a language I have no words for: the rush of lizards and hustle of rabbits, the sharp-eyed coyote and fox, the wild sunflowers silently bending towards the rising light.

So many pieces to this journey — from the shuttle driver who happily counsels a passenger not to rush as “we’re in the Land of Mañana,” to the flight to Chicago where the Brandeis student beside me whispers about her fear of flying, to the stunningly beautiful flight over the Great Lakes through voluminous white clouds. I keep thinking how unworldly, but that word is ill-chosen. Better said would be of this world. Then the brilliance ends as we fly into the soot of the Canadian wildfires. All through this day, I read Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate (the novel Ben Hewitt told me read), this novel about a family and the collapse of our world, and the brutal irony doesn’t escape me for one moment that as I’m mourning and fearing those sooty clouds I’m entirely part of this 21st century….

In Vermont, my daughters greet me with their 10,000 stories and cheerfully announce I’ve missed the two good kayak days through the lily pads. The humid night air stinks of diesel exhaust. In the parking garage, I strip off my leggings. My youngest drives out of Burlington, along the river through the Winooski Valley, and through the state capital. The girls tell me sunflowers are blooming around the statehouse, and my daughter’s dog fell off a dock into a lake (what clumsy dog does that?) and the swimming has been stunning in Caspian, the water perfectly clear.

My youngest tells me about exploring Burlington with her sister. She says she can’t believe how lucky she is to move there this fall.

In this dew-soaked morning, I realize I haven’t missed the hollyhocks’ bloom. Lucky.

…. Seriously, can’t recommend The Light Pirate enough.

Because everything is changing…. We should all be curious about it, because the way we live has to change, too.

— Lily Brooks-Dalton

Lonesome Trails, Amazing Views.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

New Mexico is scorching hot. I’m visiting my parents for a few days, and even at nine, ten o’clock, the desert day hasn’t shifted to cool evening. The heat lies thickly. In Vermont, my daughter and a friend head to swim, as heat has moved into Vermont, too, bringing humidity and hail. In the hot desert, I think of the pond where they’ll swim, the cool clean water, the blooming lily pads like buttery jewels on emerald saucers. By dawn, though, a cool breeze rushes over the desert, under the moon.

I’ve spent nearly my whole adult life in Vermont, learning the names of wildflowers and trees, the rhythms of the seasons, how loons dive and surface, the brilliance of the Milky Way in January. In New Mexico, I know far fewer of the plants’ names, but the scent of the desert — the unmistakable piñon — is intimately familiar to me. My youngest years were in this country, so many hours spent in the red sand, collecting pebbles, white quartz. The scent — always near mystical with so much life in this vast space, from lizards to jackrabbits. Add to this, the sweep of the wind in the piñons and sage, that ancient breath.

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” 

— Edward Abbey

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.