Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 166

In my weekly commute to Burlington, some mornings I hit t...

In my weekly commute to Burlington, some mornings I hit traffic, and some mornings I don’t. Today, waiting in a long line, I listened to Garrison Keillor read poetry.

“Despair” by Billy Collins

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—

flowers wilting on the table,

the self regarding itself in a watery mirror….

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,

my thoughts turn to the great

tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things

could hardly be restrained…..

Sitting alone in my little Toyota, I laughed out loud.

It’s the fragrant apple blossom season in Vermont. Dandelions are rampantly blooming. My teenager daughter texts me at work of her misery, the stark unfairness of the world. Of course, I text back, but go for a run. The ten-year-old skips on our evening walk. I’m just so happy, and I don’t know why.

How many decades has it taken me to relearn what I knew when I was ten? And to laugh about it? The black flies are out and biting fiercely, but the sparrows are singing mightily.

Unwinding the Rope of Writing

Not long ago, I was at the county courthouse in Barre, Vermont, waiting for the final hearing of my divorce. That courthouse contains the ebb of human life, chock-full of misery and grief, and every time I’ve entered that immense building I’ve witnessed adult women and men crying. I stood alone in a large room whose windows looked into a courtyard where trees were in bloom, and the sunlight shone bright and full of promise. What I was thinking about was a terrible illness in a family member, and how mortality’s knife lies in all of us. Dormant or not, at any moment that knife might turn and slash fatally.

Standing there, I vowed not to let my particular cup of sorrow raise so high that I couldn’t see beyond the vessel of my own brew. Lose a husband, a family life, an occupation, beloved friends: but lose my soul to bitterness, too?

Thoreau’s desire to live as fully as possible, to suck out life’s marrow, to know it as fully as possible is yet my own, despite the bile I naively never expected. Deep in the unlit realms of faith, I know writing is a rope out of that courthouse’s sludge, that art – and making art, like living a human life – holds the potential to burn our hearts in its kiln and emerge with deeper compassion. The sun rose and set on that day in my life, as it’s risen and set for centuries. Even when I was in the windowless courtroom, working through legal litany, I knew the sun would shine in the courtyard when I emerged.

If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

Crawford Notch, New Hampshire

The Earth Curves, of course

After a day of downtown Portland’s busy scene – art and wharf and walking, and my brother crashed a bachelorette party while my daughters ate gelato, and my older daughter bought the younger a miniature ship in a bottle – we drove over a drawbridge in search of the wide open ocean.

At the beach, we left our shoes by the car and spread out, one daughter gathering shells and sea glass, the other carrying her camera. Away from the city’s hurdy-gurdy, the ocean  – sky, sand, stone, gull, the steady and infinitely changing waves – churned, at once noisy and calming, a place we had never been and yet was familiar, expansively glorious.

We leapt over enormous chunks of pink granite to an old lighthouse while the sun tugged the daylight over the horizon. Afterwards, all of us laughing while I drove through the dark, I told the children we would stop in Pierre, South Dakota, for gas. With our three drivers, we’d switch off until we hit the north California coast. Even when we returned to my brother’s New Hampshire house, late, the little girl tired and nearly asleep, we were still laughing, the world wide-open and full of possibilities, as if my little car with its two bright headlights could trek all around the the globe and ferry us back to home.

…where we choose to be–we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer

Cape Elizabeth, Maine/Photo by Molly S.

 

 

 

Now, Stop & Admire the Scenery, for a Change

Yesterday, my daughters and I drove from Vermont and crossed over the White Mountains,  in a route I love and have travelled for years. This time, though, with a daughter’s friend, we stopped at a place in the mountains I’ve always rushed by, at fifty or sixty miles per hour. The point is near enough to the end (or, backtracking, to the beginning) of the trip that I’ve never wanted to pause.

In a meadow along the Sacco River, with enormous granite mountains steeply rising on either side, the area was exquisitely beautiful. The river flowed clear, clumps of bluets bloomed in the emerald grass, and the mountains held us like a pair of immense hands. In the bitter depths of winter, hail, snow, fiercely unrelenting winds pummel these slopes, but  this spring May afternoon, I remembered my childhood infatuation with Johanna Spyri’s little orphan Heidi.

As a mother, years later, when I read the book to my first daughter, I was appalled I had missed the heavy-handed Christian urging in this novel; this book was radically different from the book I had read over and over as a ten or eleven-year-old child. But was the book really different? What sang to me in the story was an orphaned child who loved her grandfather, a bed of fresh hay, the shimmering constellations, toasted cheese sandwiches and mountain meadows of wildflowers. Through her life’s circumstances, she experiences loneliness, cruelty, abject misery, and yet love of the mountains draws her beyond her own particular unhappiness: love of beauty and the inherent goodness in people is the staff of her strength.

Sanctimonious? Need not be.

 

But she had to go to bed first, and all night she slept soundly on her bed of hay, dreaming of nothing but of shining mountains with red roses all over them, among which happy little Snowflake went leaping in and out.

– Johanna Spyri, Heidi

 

White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire

Reading, Now and Then

Back when I was in high school, I copied Salinger’s Seymour Glass and wrote quotations on index cards and thumb-tacked the cards all around my desk. Some days, it feels like veritable centuries have passed since my high school days, and I’ve long since abandoned that practice. But every now and then, reading, I come across some of those lines I favored, and I’m often struck by how much I still admire whatever I was reading then.

What’s changed is me. What’s changed is that I no longer primarily understand with my head, but all the way down to the roots of my abscessed tooth, or twined around the scars of my caesarians, or in the pronounced veins on the backs of my hands.

Isn’t that one of the beauties of literature? Some places I’ve returned to from my childhood are far smaller and paler versions in my adult life than my memory held. But books? So many are infinitely better, this time around…..

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot

Lake Elmore, Vermont

 

Being a Child

Later in the summer, when the gardens are overrun with weeds, and cucumbers and string beans need to be picked from sagging vines, and the days are long with children swimming, and smoke hangs in the air from cooking outside, there’s often a point in the late afternoon when the world seems just a little much: that so-called witching hour mothers of babies know. We’ll move through that hour, through dinner and dishes, and washing up, and the cool leisure of evening comes in.

But now, in the spring, the world is yet at that new place. The weeds are nowhere near knee-high, and the warmth is as welcome as a novel in my hands I want to read.

I imagine this is how childhood should feel.

…And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and

cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams…

– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

Montpelier, Vermont

New Growth

The maple tree before my house was seeded in this ragged lawn before I lived here, and it has grown steadily over these years. This beauty is likely much older than I’ve ever given her credit for. And yet here again, this May, her gnarled, lichen-covered branches are sprouting green again, with the tenderest of leaves.

I love that mystery; I love that rebirth; I love that change. One of my most favorite endings in a novel is Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, at once simple and exquisite, while throwing the reader back into the depths of the novel, the infinitely deep, living sea.

That was when I knew I had a problem.

– Akhil Sharma

 

Reasons to Love Vermont

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave

you the vale of ten thousand trilliums

where we buried our good cat Pokey

across the lane to the quarry?

Maybe the tulips I planted under

the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied

woodpeckers who have given us so

much pleasure, and the rabbits

and the deer? And kisses? And

love-makings? All our embracings?

I know millions of these will be still

unspent when the last grain of sand

falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,

on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

 

The Little Hermit Thrush

Around my garden, hermit thrush are nesting for the season, singing their enchanting melodies, amazingly pure and piercing sounds from a bird so small it’s a handful of feathers and bone. The thrush is not a songbird from my childhood. As an adult, backpacking along the spine of the Vermont’s Green Mountains and sleeping outside, I first heard these unmistakable notes, and here, at this house on the edge of forest, these birds became my companions.

Now the thrush’s song has been a litany through my adult life, from before I become a mother to watching my children grow up. The birds lived here before I planted a garden, and no doubt will remain, long after my work with a hoe and spade have ceased.

Morbid? I don’t think so. There’s a real grace to be gathered here, listening to these symphonies of tiny songbirds – admission gratis. These mating calls are an audible tapestry that renders time not so sparse and dear but stretches it out into an immense arc of infinity. Sing on!

Nothing’s certain….

Watching, we drop to listen,

a hermit thrush distills it: fragmentary,

hesitant, in the end what source

links to wonder….

– Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”

Woodbury, Vermont, twilight

 

Break That Cliche: Writing Lesson from the Kids

My ten-year-old came downstairs the other morning dressed in shorts although it was only 39 degrees. No. I immediately said. But it might warm up, she insisted.

In this afternoon’s rain, the kids have headed down the road to the neighbors’ trampoline because it’s fun in the rain, apparently, even in a cold May rain.

These Vermont kids, like the unfurling leaves in my apple trees, are vigorously unstoppable with their own flowing sap. At ten and eleven, the world is as new to them as this magnificently unfolding spring. Lacking rigid expectations, why not leap in the rain? – Although I did notice the girls had the foresight to pull on extra pairs of socks.

 

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.

– Federico Garcia Lorca

Vermont dusk