Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 146

A Handful of Words

Recently, on a freezing afternoon, I was late to a workshop for writing a grant, in an attempt to keep funding my second novel endeavor. Either because I live where parking is usually not a problem, or because I don’t think ahead, I arrived with about a heartbeat to spare, but then couldn’t find parking, and ended up running in my clunky boots and parka a few blocks.

The workshop was held in a dance studio that was hardly heated, and all of crowded around tables in our sweaters and coats and hand-knitted hats. Mainly painters, the other attendees ranged from a young man who seemed to have just rolled out of the sack to elderly folks who asked a lot of good questions. Although I didn’t linger, I knew these were my tenor of people – not all that well-coiffed, intense enough about their passion to seek out sitting for a few cold hours in a shabby end of Burlington.

To get through the first cut, I’ll need to write four paragraphs. I sat there, in my sweater with the unraveling cuffs, and thought, That’s it? Four paragraphs? While the painters asked questions about matting, I started scribbling my answer. Be specific. Be profound. Articulate why literature matters. And, for God’s sake, don’t be afraid of four paragraphs.

Check back in May and see if I’m weeping….

Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place.

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

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Hazen Union, Hardwick, Vermont

Radius of This Afternoon

The cold hammers down around us again, returning with March’s powerful jaws, reminding me of all those years when my daughters were little, and we were housebound around the wood stove. Always, I bundled up the baby and walked out into the cold, even in the rawest of days, and the house’s warmth welcomed us on our return.

My friends would bring stacks of Sunday New York Times, and I would read months-old news before the wood stove, children playing with dolls or wooden frying pans, devouring the news aptly while eating popcorn. Such was the world of living with little children…. Today is merely a dip back in my mothering days, a memory when the girls couldn’t zip their coats or read a book.

I’m glad to welcome this reprise from the world-out-there of news I’d rather not hear but will make its way to our door, one way or another, eventually. For now, I’ll shake down the coals, lay on more wood, and brew tea.

March is the in-between season, of library books, knitting, board games. End-of-winter pause.

The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,

it brings no relief from winter.

My neighbor stares out the window,

talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,

trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.

It’s a little early for all this.

Everything’s still very bare—

nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.

We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light…..

From Louise Gluck’s “March”

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Melody

Remember Robert J. Lurtsema and Morning Pro Musica’s sweetly singing birds?

My family had an orange cat named Oliver who would swipe at the window when he heard this opening, searching for birds. We believed that cat brilliant, God rest his feline soul.

Mozart’s music has been gracing our early mornings, these first few days in March. I’ve been skimming through a biography of Wolfgang – until I stopped suddenly at this excerpt from a letter from Mozart himself.

I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! And I thank God for graciously granting me the opportunity (you know what I mean) of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that – young as I am – I may not live to see another day. Yet no one of all my acquaintances could say that in company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my Creator.

Enough said.

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West Woodbury, Vermont

Gift-Bearing Guest

Many months ago, I wrote in this blog about visiting a friend who was gravely ill. I’d known this friend for years, and, driving him home from a doctor’s appointment, he imagined raising chickens and pigs and lambs. I believed he was not long from death; I could see the nearness of his demise in his ochre skin. Today, he stopped by with pork, from three pigs he slaughtered on Monday. We exchanged stories about our kids, standing in my kitchen he helped build.

Those pigs represent a dream come true for my friend: more of this life.

He has the money problems he’s always had, but he copes with those challenges as he always has, making do, one way or another. The little bit of help I offered him I gave as freely as I’ve given anything in this life, with no thought of repayment. After he left, I opened up the cardboard box and found ham steaks, painstakingly packed, for the short distance from his house to mine.

Here’s a typewritten piece of Woodbury’s history I found in our little library’s stacks.

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Flipping the Lesson Inside Out

As part of my on-going museum fascination, my daughters and I stopped by the Burlington library today to check out a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about human evolution. Pointing to one panel, I (no doubt, tediously) explained to my 11-year-old about the progression of homo sapiens’ brain development depicted by a series of illustrations.

My girl pointed to a nearby rack of magazines with a crazy-haired illustration of our nation’s current commander-in-chief and laughed. We’ve progressed?

Which pretty much ended my history lesson.

We walked down the street for coffee and little cupcakes.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

– Charles Darwin

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Photo by Molly S./Burlington, Vermont

Out!

These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.

Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.

That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.

From time to time

The clouds give rest

To the moon-beholders.

– Matsuo Bashō

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Hardwick, Vermont

Largesse

A full-throated sunny thaw yesterday. With laundry hung on the line, the younger daughter and I dropped off outgrown clothes at the Salvation Army where two volunteers pointed out blackbirds in maple branches spread over the back lot.

Wearing shorts and a white t-shirt, my daughter and I ate lunch outside on a bench, watching folks walk by in everything from summer skirts to zipped-up parkas. It’s that kind of season.

Later, my friend and I walked a dirt road into Hardwick, while the girls clambered over the chicken coop and threw snowballs at each other. The dirt roads ran with trickling channels of melting snow and thawing frost, catching glittering gold coins of sunlight.

There’s that old adage about traveling the world over to discover what you were looking for all those miles was in your own backyard. I’m grit-minded enough to acknowledge that yesterday an antique claw foot bathtub emerged upside down in our yard from melted snow. A ripped pair of outgrown jeans that fell from the clothesline last fall and froze beneath a snowbank bled bluely up through ice. The messiness of compost spreads near my garden. But our treasure is infinite, too.

I’m reading Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition now, a fascinating tale written by a Spanish conquistador. Again, the same story of desire and seeking, of gold and suffering. I can speculate how this short narrative will end…..

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.

– Christopher Columbus

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In the Back of the Closet

All day long, streams have been running down our mountain; the road muddies and ruts, the crack in the cellar drips water, the doves coo. The urgency of thaw. Our world will freeze hard again, assuage, then clench with cold, pulling and loosening its long unhurried way into spring.

Patches of rain-sodden earth emit the hopeful scent of life releasing and breathing again. Surely, we’ll find coltsfoot in March this year.

Inside, boxing up ripped and myriad-stained coats, I find a leather jacket at the closet’s far back, stiff with disuse. No one lives in this house anymore who would fit into this jacket.

My sister and I, as teenagers, had a favorite phrase from TC Boyle’s The End of the World: “hard, soulless, and free.” A mother of a teenager myself now, I see how that line fits an adolescent, an emerging self needing a slick, fashionable shell to shield a tender heart.

All around us is the hardness of winter’s ice, and now simultaneously suffused with the streams running rapidly towards Lake Champlain, to where the rivers run north, to the distant sea.

I can’t help myself. I lift the cuffs of that jacket as though clenching the hands of the person who once wore that jacket, but that’s all; that’s it. I let the sleeves fall, and I step back out of the closet and shut the door. I’ll pass the jacket to someone else. Not today, but possibly tomorrow. If not tomorrow, surely before the thaw has bled itself out.

All night long, I sleep above the dripping in the cellar, from the cracks in the foundation poorly laid.

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

– TC Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

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Last Week of February

Our days reflect this mixed-up weather: a jumble of crystalline perfect snow, excessive heat for February, and an unraveling disorientation. Where’s everyone going? Who’s coming and when?

Maybe it’s simply the place I am in my life, solidly in my forties, when long-term marriages of so many friends are cracking – some to fail, some certainly to mend and reknit, even more tightly – and that beastly presence of cancer rears in overlapping ripples of my intimate and not-so-near circles. The upshot, perhaps, is that we’re all in the same literal journey, living our lives in an infinitude of variations, all of us making some wise and some foolish decisions, chancing into ill-fortune or light-hearted luck.

This is midwinter, season of no greenery, no blossoms, no barefoot running over lake-dampened sand. No garden to gather a basket of greens for dinner. No sun-sweet Brandywines in my hand. No stash of cucumbers the kids have quartered and sprinkled with snipped dill and coarsely ground salt.

Midwinter is the season of the moon on the snow-buried garden, the stars icy against the night sky. Midwinter is the pondering season.

A reader essentially my whole life, I return to talismans of poetry, repeatedly. I read James Joyce first as a teenager, his Dubliners filled with rooms conversely both shadowy and light-filled. Over and over, I think of the ending of “The Dead,” with steadily falling snow, that image suffused with sadness and grief, yet also with an odd acceptance – even more, perhaps, a genuine comfort in the “generalness” of snow, the transience of all our lives, how each of us will rub up against hardship. A piece of this luck, certainly, and some of the outcome simple grace in how we navigate our lives.

He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce, “The Dead”

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Secret Chute

House hunting with my enthusiastic contingent, us adults stood in a dim basement yesterday, so cold we kept swaying from one foot to the other, trying to stay warm. Outside, the children tromped in the snowy yard, warmer in the sunlight than we were in the house.

In the basement, someone discovered a wooden chute, carefully nailed shut from the cement floor to the under boards of the dining room above. Intently curious, my friend pried off a board, and I peered up through the darkness where I saw a gleam of daylight through an ornate floor grate.

What the heck?

It made no sense to any of us, running through our logical possibilities.

In the end, blowing on my hands, I said, But it must have made sense to whoever built it. Look at the labor.

Upstairs, the children were laughing and throwing snowballs at each other, busy in their own meaningful kids’ work.

Whether I buy the house or not, we’ve spent serious time already, running palms over pipes, fingering up loose linoleum, rapping on old plaster, getting to know just a few mysteries of this old house.

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context.

Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic – and How to Get It Back

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West Woodbury, Vermont