Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 20

Don’t let your cow get the upper hand, er, hoof…?

Ah, February, the month with the strange “U” that children stumble to spell. Two inches of a sugar snow this morning when I carried out the stove’s ashes, the cardinals whistling the day alive, a buttery full moon charming the evening sky. For the past few weeks, my life has overflowed with the challenges of faraway aging parents, with details mundane and immense, and all very very real. There’s that Tolstoy saying about families unhappy in their own way. Carrying in firewood, I remind myself: families endure the unspeakable in their own particular vernacular, swaddled in the way of all human life.

Sugaring season is hustling into Vermont now. The years I spent sugaring with a husband and two young daughters taught me to strip away the unnecessary, to bend into work when bending is required. It’s a habit I’ve carried to writing, and I’ve managed now to write three books against odds that even now seem not in my favor. But it was single parenting that honed my skills to grasp the nourishing in times of hardness, suck hard the marrow of the real. In a conversation with a young homesteader and poet today, she offers me a line of wisdom so pithy and wise I laugh out loud: Don’t let your milk cow get the upper hand on you. Yeah, think that one over.

Here’s a David Goodman interview with Elizabeth Price, mother of the young Palestinian man Hisham Awartani who was shot with two friends in Burlington, Vermont, last November. The family epitomizes courage, knowledge, and depth of heart — highly recommended.

Cats, Coyotes.

The return trip from my parents’ house in New Mexico to my own Hardwick, Vermont, house was 20 hours. When I stepped off the plane, I was effusively grateful to see my daughters waiting to drive me home, to wrap me again in our own particular kind of family — loving and funny, with the fierce rivers of stories that run between us.

A friend texts me and sweetly offers to make me a meal; these days, about all I’ve done is trudge into work, then lie on couch with my cats, reading Michael Crummy and soaking in Jon Stewart’s election update. When my daughters were babies, I lived in a rarefied kind of atmosphere, of warm milk and scant sleep and intense curiosity: what now? what next? As if bookended, my parents in very old age live in a unique world, too, suffused with New Mexican sunlight, and with a similar uncertainty: what next?

In that middle-of-the-night drive to Albuquerque, circling through the airport parking lot, I spied a coyote. I pulled over, opened the car door, and looked back. Under the amber streetlights, the coyote hurried along, brushy tail bouncing, not so much as glancing over its shoulder at me. Around us, so much cement, then the desert, undulating, spreading up into the hills, disappearing from sight.

The wild creature vanished into the dark.

“A body must bear what can’t be helped.”

— Michael Crummy

Travel in Out-of-Everyday Places.

In the quietest hours of the night, driving by the twinkling line of Santa Fe’s lights in the immense desert, a crimson half moon cupped in the firmament like a bowl full of mystery, I have the strange sense of transmogrifying into a Russian novel. Maybe in part because of the Bulgakov novel from my sister crammed in my backpack with my laptop and half-written notebook, or maybe it’s my family story unfurling simultaneously at lightspeed and also breath by labored breath.

At the Albuquerque airport, the shuttle bus holds just me and the driver who says he’s from the Chicago suburbs. He remarks that I’m shivering and wonders how that can be, as I’ve told him I’m flying back to Vermont. I’m tell him I’m just tired. Perhaps. But the illuminated city and the airport floodlights and mundane directional signs for United and Alaska Air bedazzle my 3 a.m. eyes: there’s so much of the world, so many people and stories braiding and twisting, from the sweet simplicity of a child cradling a beloved doll to an old woman gasping her way to the end of her life.

The driver asks me about the church scene in Vermont. I rattle off about white steeples in every town. Driving incredibly slowly, he launches into his story of knowing that he wanted to be a better man but kept falling into sin, and then a page in the book of his life turned. I can see this is doubtlessly headed to a pamphlet he wants to hand me. Yet, as he speaks, I wonder what that really means: Knock, and Jesus will open the door.

Later, in the terminal, drinking coffee, I sit in a space crowded with strangers, all on their meaningful journeys. My heart swells full with so many things: the robins singing in my parents’ aspen, last night’s dream of wandering through a sugarbush, forest floor sprinkled with spring beauties, the luminous crimson bowl of the moon in the infinite darkness. Nature never builds a door. Maybe those doors and windows we’re forever using as metaphors are illusions.

The driver had forgotten his bag, so the pamphlet was a no go. I take his words and tuck the sliver of his story into my writer’s mind with the hard-boiled egg I’d split down the middle and shared with a young woman yesterday morning. While we ate, she told me about her son’s heart surgery, and the surgeons who saved the boy’s life. With my fingers, I sweep the eggshells into a pile on the plate we’ve shared.

Complex People.

I was on a Claire Dederer reading jag, stepping into her island home, soaking up her kids and her questions and her fierce writing. Witty, smart, edgy. Which led to me to the father of those children and his books. 

Bruce Barcott writes in The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw:

 “… a good portion of my life I believed that a law of benevolent action held sway in the world. This law maintained that if you did the right thing and worked hard, eventually things would work out; that the world generally tended towards fairness, decency, and wisdom. But of course the world doesn’t work that way. The people who learn that lesson through crushing experience and still refuse to bow to it astound me. They go on fighting, again and again and again. These people aren’t perfect. They aren’t simple heroes. They are complex human beings. And we need them. Because without them the world would be lost.”

The Revenge Business.

Washing dishes this morning, I catch a little of NPR’s Morning Edition. Mandy Patinkin who starred in The Princess Bride says his famous line about avenging his father’s death. As I’m scrubbing out the coffee pot, Patinkin says the more important line is about how revenge never got anyone what they wanted. Ever.

For February, this Saturday is crazy warm. I hang the laundry outside to dry and open the windows. I finish up some work at the coffee shop and talk with a school board member from the board I quit, abruptly, last spring. A few raindrops are falling as we step outside on the sidewalk.

In the little rain, I walk home, thinking about that revenge line. Families, nations, epochs, have run on revenge. And the math always works out in its own calculation. Check out the NPR segment.

Boots on the Land, the Ice.

I’m meeting someone, late afternoon, who’s late, so I wait. The February sun has dropped into the horizon and clouds, and the day’s softening snow is tightening up, freezing again. I’m along one of the glacial lakes, a deep cut in the earth created by the planet’s unstoppable movements. It’s an old, old lake, not a newer pond formed by a human dam construction. Across from where I stand is the beach where I swam last fall, evenings and weekends. The water is shallow for a short stretch and then deepens quickly. My youngest had just gone to college. I would swim out as far as I could, then lie on the shore beneath the shaggy cedars, reading and watching the loons dive and reappear.

February exposes the bones of Vermont, the land’s steepness, the flatness of ice, the pale grace of a white birch in a hemlock forest. That afternoon, the stranger tells me a story of how the land was divided in families, re-divided and swapped, sold. Around this side of the lake, the state highway was built nearly on the water, and from here it’s easy to see the challenges of traffic and how the road hampers runoff from the mountains. It’s a familiar story that plays out in particulars in all but the wildest places.

On my way home, I stop at the town reservoir and walk a short distance over its ice. Walking on ice is always a kind of magic, a temporary thing. I don’t see the two bald eagles who live here: another day, perhaps.

‘I can feel my life start up again…’

We’ve crossed the halfway point of winter and can, again, believe in the possibility of crocuses, the promise of pearly-and-pale-pink apple blossoms. Monday morning, my friend Brad Ferland invites me onto his WDEV radio program Vermont Viewpoint again. I’m lucky enough to ramble on for a bit about writing, and I spoke a little about this blog. For those of you who are new here, I often write about what the seasons in Vermont mean to me. July is the Swimming Season. September the Season of Fat Sunflowers. February, in my mind at least, is the Season of Hope.

The days suddenly widen and grow. A sunshiny stretch like this, and my state’s collective spirit rises. February is still deep in the Woodstove Season, however, which means, as a writer, no need to worry about missing a few fine gardening hours. The clouds will descend again, and surely I’ll complain (again), but for now, with two days of radiance, savor. Savor.

I feel my life start up again, 
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

— Jane Kenyon

Thin Ice.

On my way home, I walk down to the lake and stand at its edge. Such a warm winter this has been. There’s not a single ice fishing hut on the lake. Across the middle, two people walk, talking intently, their hands gesturing. As they stroll south, I head towards the center of the lake.

At the beginning of any year I’ve walked or skated on lakes, there’s an always initial angst, a discombobulation about the deep water beneath, the zone where I’ve kayaked or swam. Midwinter, the summer folks are faraway on beaches or cities. The walking pair disappears, and then it’s just me and a lone crow making its steady way across the sky. This winter has clouds and clouds and clouds. Out on the ice, however, the sky spreads wide, its permutations of blue dazzling.

Twenty-five years ago, I was descending into labor with my first daughter, a period when dawn and twilight intermingled, a space where time had no meaning for me. Near the labor’s end (and she came into this world courtesy of a surgeon’s scalpel), all light had vanished from my world save for a distant circle, like a full moon gleaming on still water at the bottom of a well. I saw my right hand reaching down, fingers outstretched, seeking that gleam.

In each of my daughters’ births, the world’s illusions were ripped back. The rawness of blood and tears, of the ineffable power of a newborn’s gaze, filled my world with sacred might.

The ice groaned, shifting. I was certain of its strength for no real reason at all. In my thin jacket, I stretched out on the ice, let the cold hold my bones and flesh, and that vast sky steal my breath.

Roadside View.

In these tail-end days of January, I’m alone midafternoon when I stop by the edge of the road. We’ve endured a cold for days that’s not so much bitter but a raw damp that my brother says reminds him of the ocean. The kind of weather for wearing wool sweaters all day, that make you wrap your hands around cups of coffee. So many years ago, I lived for a winter in an apartment on a brick Main Street building in Brattleboro. The building was heated by radiators, clanging and spewing steam all over that large building, in a heating design where I was mere witness, the grateful recipient.

This dreary afternoon, I follow three-toed turkey tracks down a driveway. In the snowy field, the large birds set up a clanging holler when they spy me, ruffling feathers and jostling. It’s just me, I’d like to tell them, a small woman who’s forgotten her mittens and hat. I stand for a bit. Down the hillside, the frozen lake spreads immensely around the spits and coves of the shoreline: breathtakingly awesome.

After a bit, the turkeys seem to care little about my dull presence, gleaning through the thin granular snow.

January: wonder & diligence.

Twenty-five years ago, on a frigid January night, I went to a birthday party and ate chocolate cake. I would have my first baby in a week, and I had gone at that pregnancy with wonder and diligence, heavy on kale and broccoli, scant on refined sugar. The cake was marvelous.

In this warm January, a friend lingers with me over coffee. Melting snow drips from the porch roof as we talk about travel, making art and making a living, parenting. I’m reminded of a line from Raymond Carver that the mightiest force in his life was his two children, Carver who wrote brilliantly about laundromat hours. Wonder and diligence. Our conversation winds around to The List, the eternal draft of chores and visions, the crossing off and adding on, the drafting and revising, the diligence that strings our days together, a crude framework of parenting.

End of January: the weather is slushy and icy, sunbeams a rarity, hardly the season of wonder. My firewood holds the month’s damp, as if resistant, too, to the lousy weather. I lay chunks of wood beneath my stove, drying them a little before I chuck them in, burn the wood to ash.

My little cat flicks his tail. A cardinal nestles in the mock orange’s bare branches, crimson feathers in the muted world. I lay my hand on my cat’s silky back, murmuring, “Well, what do you know….”

And a Raymond Carver poem:

“Happiness”

So early it’s still almost dark out.

I’m near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other’s arm.

It’s early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.