Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 17

Sips of May.

As the spring dusk settles down, I’m wandering around the edges of my garden. The lilacs have just begun opening, a tiny four-petaled blossom here, another there, the remainder of that lavender flower still knotted, not yet relaxed into the wide open spring season.

I’m in my ragged jeans, dirt under my nails, when my neighbor pulls into her driveway and gets out of her Prius. She’s wearing what she calls her rag-bag dress, and the two of us make a kind of pair. I’ve known her since our oldest kids were babes in arms, not yet eating smashed carrots.

It’s been a year for each of us — and I mean that: a year. We both have college-aged kids in and out of our houses. Under the fragrance of pear blossoms, we immediately head into that long-running conversation we have about her work and my work, about writing and art, about aging parents. The half moon rises over my apple tree.

May, in all her radiant beauty. Here I am, with a hundred chores in one day — a hot water heater repair, more writing, plant arugula and Brussel sprouts, my constant fiddling with the wood pile, the daughter chat. How this Vermont world loves to green. Yes, and again, more, yes, yes.

Ruined!

In this sweet May rain, working on the covered porch of one of my favorite libraries, I remember a rainstorm about a year ago. My daughter and I were in Rome, eating dinner in an outdoor café. In the storm, the staff had pulled a plastic cover over the terrace. The effect was warm, cozy, intimate. Beside me, a group of young men were drinking wine. One man remarked that Italy had ruined him. There was no way he could return to his Chicago cubicle and drink lousy Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Hearing this, my daughter and I laughed aloud. Italy had ruined us, pleasurably, too.

Likewise, after a week of such largesse at the Vermont Studio Center — the gift of time and space, the pampering of meals, the kindness of the place — I wondered if I might be a little ruined, too.

Not so, perhaps. May in Vermont is one of my most favorite times. Here’s the gold of marsh marigolds behind an old grange. Gold.

Heart Runneth Over…

The Gihon River runs through the Vermont Studio Center campus, turning as a river does just out my studio window. All day long, the mallards do their duck thing, swimming up and downstream. In the wild honeysuckle’s tiny bits of green leaves, cardinals perch.

In this week I’ve spent at the Vermont Studio Center, I’ve leaned with a ferocity and joy into writing. A week to write, unfettered by the everydayness of commerce and cooking, of checking the car oil, adhering to those endless lists of can the house insurance get a lower premium, and am I ever going to paint the back side of my house? A thousand things comprise a life — some stupidly trivial like repairing a kitchen cabinet knob, some sacredly profound, like mourning a parent’s passing. 

Does writing, does sculpture, printmaking, poetry, make the world a finer place? The jury’s out perhaps, but art certainly unites the finer parts of who we are as humans, and makes this life more bearable.

Thank you again for reading.

Where I Am.

For a week, I’m lucky to be staying at the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, tucked in Johnson, Vermont, with writers and visual artists. A word, first: like anyone in this culture driven to create art, I’ve been swimming upstream (clumsily) for what seems like most of my life. But this magical place offers notsomuch an antidote but an alternative possibility.

In one way, I feel like I’m a college student at tiny rural Marlboro College again, eating communal meals with the same cohort, attending presentations, talking and so much talking. How’s your book going? What are you doing with copper? So many interesting people writing and sculpting and painting. But, like everyone else here, I’m far beyond college age, using my studio hours fiercely.

In my studio building, a former resident wrote in a communal notebook about arriving worn down from the grind of capitalism, and how rejuvenated she left after her stay here. I’ve long realized that our capitalist model often draws out the mean and petty strands of us, like a competitive gardening streak that weirdly surfaced in a long-ago baby group I attended. Which serves, of course, exactly no one at all. For this bit of time and space, I’m savoring this dear space, where my back is watched, and I can do my work.

… Last, thank you all for your notes and emails since my mother’s death. My father recently uploaded his memoir, 87 years of his indisputably distinct life.

Mending Myself.

Mid-morning, abruptly the weight of my mother’s recent death lies on me, a physical presence, as if she’s leaning on my shoulders. It’s 21 days since she passed, days and nights crammed full. Like most mother and daughters, my mother and I had a relationship filled with 10,000 things and more. Again, today, on the eve of a short journey, I pack my laptop and books. I vacuum and mop and talk and talk and talk with my daughter.

Rain falls all day, so chilly I light a fire to the intense pleasure of my two cats. A year ago, my youngest and I flew home from Europe, my heart filled with our trip’s happiness. So, too, again, my life unfurls forward with an offer of good writing news. Spring in all her exuberance sings — such sweet joy for us in a northern sphere.

I wander outside. My shoes fill with rain. I stop in at a friend’s house. In her well-lit living room, with her purring cats, we talk about travels and love. Later, as I leave, she leans out the door, and we keep talking about honeybees and blossoms. The rain falls steadily, streaming down the collar of my coat. I have that walk home and more work, but I linger in the billowing fog, the gleaming green, our conversation gently pulling me back into this world, stitching me.

The Rules.

Stopping beside me on a riverbank trail, a stranger grouses to me about the overcast weather hanging chilly and foggy. I share my month of May story: in my second pregnancy, rain fell every day in May. I’d heard on NPR that a rainy May predicted a sunny summer. That summer, with a new baby, I remember as one of the sunniest. Oh, but fickle memory…. perhaps rain fell all that summer.

The stranger answers, the rules don’t matter anymore, anyway, and loops away on his run.

Oh, the rules do matter. But which rules? My daughter, on a university campus, sends news of our Vermont world fracturing. Meanwhile, around the globe, misery. There’s that old nursery rhyme about for want of a nail the horse wasn’t shod and the battle was lost. The horseshoe nail matters.

Here’s a defining rule: mortality reigns. More: month of May, the tangled wild honeysuckle in the ravine behind my house sprouts leaves. The groundhogs fatten.

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage…

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

— Richard Wilbur, The Writer

The Bardo.

A few years ago, I bought a stick of a forsythia plant. The plant had withered in a nursery which hadn’t cared much for this plant, one of the three or four remaining perennials at the season’s end. For years, I had wanted to plant a forsythia with its cheery early-spring blooms, but I stood there and considered. The plant was about ten dollars. I eventually opened my wallet and took the admittedly meager risk.

The plant thrived. A few years later, I sold that house, dug up the forsythia, and carried the pot in the back of a friend’s pickup to my new house. The plant grew but never thrived, more stick and leaf than bloom.

This year, however, seven years into our life here, the blooms are abundant. I am not a Buddhist, not trained or schooled in any formal education at all, but here’s a thing. For a period of time after each of my daughters was born, I lived in a rarefied space, not of the common everyday world, but exposed and tender, as if the sky had opened up. I had labored to carry a six-pound baby into this mortal world. I had a foot in this world, and a foot still lingering in a gauzy undefined realm. But each day of nursing and crying, of meals of roast chicken and buttered toast, bricked up that entrance, planted me securely in this world again.

So, on the other end of mortality, I see my mother lingering yet with us, in profound and complicated manifestations, in the four of us — her husband and three children — and her four grandchildren as she drifts into her new realm.

In the house where I grew up, my mother and her neighbor bickered over ownership of an enormous forsythia that straddled their property line. As I walk around, planting and watering a lilac tree, stacking firewood, raking, I’m tugged to these delicate gold petals, so brief, such a long struggle, so miraculously splendid.

Darkness overtakes us on our way 

in my lodging the roof leaks 

weeping cherries in flower 

— Buson

The dark blossomings of chaos…

Again, this metaphor lens (how is it possible not to see the world in metaphors?) Paul and John’s Long and Winding Road, Dante’s gloomy forest, Sylvia Plath’s bees and beekeepers…

I lead a friend into a forest, a piece of Nature Conservancy land on a dirt road. We’re talking, talking, my eyes searching the forest floor for ephemerals (the trilliums folded shut, trout lilies still only leafy, no blossoms yet). I take one wrong turn, a second wrong turn. I backtrack, looking for the narrow stone steps. Our walking and talking — and my eventual smartening up to pay attention — takes us to Chickering Bog. In this pristine place, it’s just us and frog eggs, fat tadpoles, crimson pitcher plants — the confluence of ancient and freshly brand-new.

The strange thing is, I’ve walked to this bog half a dozen times, easily. Yet never in April when the sunlight drops down through the trees’ bare branches, when the winter-fall of broken branches strews over the paths. Or maybe I’ve never been here with this conversation about things tiny and great. The glassy water shimmers so clear the bog’s mucky bottom tantalizes, unreachable, so many centuries of so much life.

At the journey’s end, at the dirt road’s edge, the sprinkled gold coins of coltsfoot, a purple sprig of flowering Daphne.

On the reading front…..

“We must therefore be willing to get shaken up, to submit ourselves to the dark blossomings of chaos, in order to reap the blessings of growth.” — Gregg Levoy, Callings

A great fountain of white gossamer…

From New Mexico with its sheer light, I descend back to April Vermont, where miniature daffodils push their yellow faces through last year’s leaf mulch. How well I know Vermont spring — the sunny breezy days where the wind tosses the lake and the water is bluer than blue, the footpath sprinkled with the gold gems of coltsfoot.

After the desert’s sweeping beauty, Vermont is a mossy box, a jumble of the paint peeling from the back of my house, the bin of empty cat food cans in barn (quit kicking that dump run into the next week), the niggling college financial aid forms yet to be corrected, the working hours I string together, making some decent use of my time.

April is a month that goes on too long, lingers brown in northern Vermont, with its tease of green trout lily leaves, the flourish of wild ramps. Paradoxically, April has always seemed the most hopeful of seasons, too, the nesting songbirds sweeping out winter’s silence.

In the evening, my daughter and I walk her dogs across the cemetery to the ballfields. Off leash, the three of them run while I stand in the field’s center, listening to the robins’ chatter in the white pines. Back at my house, we stand by the woodpile, talking about little things — who will take the leftover garlic bread, did the butterfly bush survive the winter. The rising moon illuminates the clouding-up horizon with a glowing shaft. We linger, watching the full moon sail confidently, unstoppably, over the horizon. Later, I linger on the back porch, sipping tea. The moon has removed the lid of shoebox Vermont. The air’s sweet with wet soil.

Springtime, 1998

Our upstate April
        is cold and gray.
                 Nevertheless

yesterday I found
        up in our old
                 woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
        standing around
                 and blooming

wisely. And by the edge
        of the Bo’s road at the far
                 side of the meadow

where the limestone ledge
        crops out our wild
                 cherry trees

were making a great fountain
        of white gossamer.
                 Joe-Anne went

and snipped a few small boughs
        and made a beautiful
                 arrangement

in the kitchen window
        where I sit now
                 surrounded.

— Hayden Carruth

Strangers’ sweetness, flying United.

In a sleepwalking haze, I make my way from Albuquerque’s sunny airport to slushy gray Denver (winter, again?!) On the cross-country flight, I make friends with my seatmate, tossing away the nap option for our conversation about camping at Zion National Park. We part ways at Dulles. Walking through the airport’s chaos, I remember that Zion trip in our green Jeep when I was a girl. We tubed down the river all day. I smacked my hip on a rock. That evening, we devoured sausages roasted over a fire, admired the moonrise. Such happy hours.

Later, descending into Burlington, Vermont, the plane cuts down through the brilliant clouds, the underbelly smoky gray, furled with nascent rain or snow. A crimson blush scrims over the mountains, the merest beginnings of tree buds. Dusk hovers. I think of my daughter waiting for me in the nearly empty airport, all grown up now, car keys in her hand. I’m hungry for whatever food she’s brought and, mostly, for the conversation on our drive home.

As the plane brakes on the tarmac, the young couple with the baby beside me remarks that this was their baby’s first plane trip. Around me, the passengers cheer, “What a baby!” but quietly, so the little one isn’t frightened. The parents glow with happiness, the baby coos contentedly, the crowd keeps on, “Great baby! Great baby!” Such a long journey this has been and will be; so happy I am to hear this joyful mantra.

…. Last, a little about my mother.