Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 24

Fresh Lilacs, Late October.

My daughter sends me a photo of an apple blossom she discovered in Montpelier, Vermont, just this weekend, end of October. For anyone not a Vermonter, this is odd news that evokes suspicion and distrust. In New Englanders, distrust is a carefully curated character trait. Good lord, don’t be naïve. Naïve people don’t put on snow tires, and those people drive off roads.

Later that same afternoon, we walk through a pasture and then cut through a town cemetery. There, the lilac bushes are sticks, as you’d expect at this time of year. But at the very top of one bush, lavender flowers bloom. My daughter stands on her tiptoes and gently pulls down a branch. My house is surrounded on three sides by lilacs; late May is a joy. But this year, there were hardly any blossoms. Now: lilacs in late October in northern Vermont? Any sane person would look at this askance.

Nonetheless, I stand on tiptoes, too, and breathe in that ineffable scent of fresh lilacs.

Here’s a few lines from poet Amy Lowell:

Even the iris bends

When a butterfly lights upon it.

The Power of Maples.

This year, my extended world includes widows, including women mentors I looked to when I was a young mother. These women are all somewhat older than me, with long marriages. It wasn’t that long ago I was in the world of the new babies, the swapping of baby clothes, the intent to get the low-down about cloth diapers versus disposable.

There’s a line from one of my most favorite novels, Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford, about a woman widowed in World War II. Like a teacup, she would crack, but not break. Same.

Rain’s washed our world last night, and the sun is radiant this morning. While hanging out the laundry, I think of an acquaintance who says he’s still trying to figure out his life. But aren’t we all as grownup now as we’re ever going to get? The birds and squirrels scavenge in my flower garden, gathering for their families.

Here’s “The Power of Maples” by Gerald Stern which seems apt on myriad levels today:

If you want to live in the country
you have to understand the power of maples.
You have to see them sink their teeth
into the roots of the old locusts.
You have to see them force the sycamores to gasp for air.
You have to see them move their thick hairs into the cellar.
And when you cut your great green shad pole
you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;
you have to place your table under its leaves and begin eating.

Impossible Zen.

There was a time in my life where I didn’t yet know about the tamaracks. It’s an odd thing to think about: there was a time in my life when I hadn’t yet met my daughters, either, when I hadn’t read a novel, kissed a boy, slept under the constellations.

I head up through the woods to the tamaracks’ marshy place where I’ve never seen anyone else, a swampy patch off a road. In the gray afternoon gloaming, I wander off the path. I’ve forgotten my boots. I trip on a rock and fall on one knee. The twilight settles in silently.

On my way home, I stop in at the co-op. The co-op’s not really a co-op any longer, the handwritten baby announcements and politics scrubbed out in this new business model. In the produce area, an acquaintance is buying peppers. We stand at the wall of produce, kicking around a few thoughts. We agree, this has been a year of unbelievable things; there’s no need to list. I offer my micro philosophy I’ve mulling around, very Zen. As I’m talking, I remember the whole problem with Zen, anyway, is its impossibility.

At the register, the cashier can’t figure out a bag of greens. But what is it? he asks. The man in front of me says he liked the sunflower sprouts, so he’s trying the radish ones now. Micro greens?

Through the wide windows, I realize I’ve been out for much longer than I realized. Darkness is falling quickly now, car headlights sweeping through the village. The man lifts his bag of slender greens, crimson roots, and turns it around and around.

Good luck, I offer.

He nods, and then disappears into the night.

“Our stories from around here…”

I convince a friend to pull on her raincoat and meet me along the rail trail. The story this summer and fall has been rain, rain, more rain; the river runs high. Grabbing alders, we stumble along the edges, marvel that the two cars rammed deep into a bank have finally been removed. What remains is a sandy patch.

This amble is not conducive to talking: we toss bits of our lives between us as we struggle through the mud. Eventually, we make our way back to the trail. The bridge there is intact from July’s flood, but where the river rewrote its course the bridge hangs over the river, the bank jagged black earth. The rain falls hard now, streaming down my cheeks.

Vermonter Kenneth Cadow’s novel Gather (just named a finalist for the National Book Award) is fresh in my mind, a contemporary version of Huck Finn. Walking back in the rain that’s determined not to let up, my friend and I talk about growing up in New England: how powerful the autumn is, redolent with the scent of rotting leaves, the earth shaking off her pretty leaves, exposing the bones of mountains, rocks, the hungry rivers. Another friend sent word recently of this particular date’s power for him: the date his world shifted, spun from destruction to creation.

Walk finished, I’m grateful, ever so grateful, to return to my hot hearth, my wool sweater steaming, redolent of the sheep and grass that gave me these materials to knit….. and so it goes….

From Gather:

But I feel like you need to understand this. Our stories from around here come out like the way we keep our work shed: you go in there, see what you have lying around, some of it being old as hell, some of it being stuff you might even have had the money to buy for yourself. You move something, you find something else. You brush it off a little, then you use it or set it back down. But you need it all to piece together how things come to be the way they are now, how you come to be who you are.

Words: Tragedy, Unfairness, Fortune.

Word comes into my email inbox at the end of the day that the literary journal Alice Says Go Fuck Yourself has accepted an essay of mine for their Bad-Ass Mothers theme. This delights me immeasurably. My silliness aside, there’s nothing light about this essay.

My small concerns asides, it’s a week not to be flippant. Acquaintances in our world here have suffered a tragedy, in a house with small children. A friend of mine who knows the family rails at the unfairness of the world. I remind her of what she knows well, that unfairness is a human construct. I’ve never seen evidence that the laws of universe pay any heed to that notion.

After dark, I wander through the neighborhood where cats sometimes appear and brush up against your ankle, purring. The clouds rub away, and a crescent moon gleams, buffed up and shiny, as if newly minted. All my life, I’ve been following this moon, Lady Moon, acquainted with her numberless faces, as she has shed her silvery light on mine. The streets are nearly empty tonight. Ursa Major hangs over a house where a blown-up pumpkin glows in the front yard. These days, I imagine Lady Moon charming my long-ago relatives, in a time so long ago we humans hadn’t yet divided the earth into countries.

On this walk, I remember a favorite line from Ann Patchett: “There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.” That, perhaps, is its own koan.

Continuing without a sign.

An inveterate list-writer, at the end of each day, I’m often summing what I’ve done. Somedays, my hands and my hand seem to come up empty. Or my heart has articulated a question.

I pass a few days drinking coffee and talking with my daughters, walking through the woods, along rivers and streams and a rock-throated gorge. They’ve teased me for years about my focus on the gritty and hardscrabble, my fascination with wandering into abandoned cellar holes, my curiosity about abrupt turns in human stories. But when has the world ever not been falling into pieces? There’s this, though: surely at times the world’s misery spins harder and swifter and unbearably more painful.

In those cellar holes, gardens of flowers and sustenance once bloomed at doorsteps, their seeds dormant in the soil. Sunday, nearing dark, I brake for wild turkeys meandering across a dirt road. There’s no one around. I pull over and walk down the road to snap a photo, but the turkeys suddenly rush, hearing my footsteps, and I’ve forgotten my phone in the car anyway. I’m at a driveway that bends up the hillside, the house of out sight. Many years ago, the man who lived there offered me his dead wife’s fur coat. He must be long gone, too. I’ve long since lost any sense of who lives there now.

“Matins”

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

— Louise Glück

Autumn Mysteries.

Around a bend in the interstate, a rainbow leg glows. I’ve handed over the keys, and I’m in the passenger seat, knitting forgotten in my lap, as we hurtle along the pavement, rushing over bridges that rise over the Winooski River. Mid-October, dark is not far in the offing. I’m texting my daughter at home who’s feeding the cats and stirring the embers in the wood stove. It’s hopeless to tell my daughters that not so long ago whether someone was home or not was a mystery. Domestic life relied on a vein of faith.

Has the world less mystery now? Surely not. This autumn rainbow beckons us. Around us, an infinity of things we will never understand.

Between us, there’s a bit of discussion about which exit to take, but my driver humors me. There’s those maples before the gold-domed statehouse I want to see, the silver maple beside the library that holds its green longest. By then we’re laughing about a little joke between us — bulk foliage and bulk syrup — tossing those words back and forth for no clear reason at all except for a moment of pleasure.

Autumn: the swinging door between summer’s glory, the myriad folds of winter.

Above the fields,

above the roofs of the village houses,

the brilliance that made all life possible

becomes the cold stars.

Lie still and watch:

they give nothing but ask nothing.

From within the earth’s

bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

my friend the moon rises:

she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

— the incomparable Louise Glück, “October”

Post-Flood, Montpelier.

As if overnight, the fall foliage has vanished, swept into gray. The secret of Vermont’s autumn is the long lingering twilights, languorous and violet. Branch by branch, the trees are emerging from their summer splendor. Before frost yet, my garden rages on, orange tithonia, candy-colored cosmos, the morning glories that intrepidly vine through sunflowers and tomatoes and borage.

This weekend, I walked through Montpelier. So much of Vermont’s capital remains boarded up after the July flood, in need of money or labor. Other folks have shuttered up and headed elsewhere. It’s impossible to pretend that the world around us isn’t swirling in chaos. Nonetheless, when I come in with my fingers and toes cold, I build a fire. The neighbors string up gold lights. Quickly, quickly, and immensely slowly, the season settles in.

“You must try,
the voice said, to become colder.
I understood at once.
It’s like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,
braced in stone. Only something heartless
could bear the full weight.” 

— Jane Hirshfield

A Mixed Delight.

All week, we say to each other, This might be the last nice day or Only a few good days left, as if our Shire-ish Vermont realm teeters on the brink of disappearance. Not so, of course.

I leave work early and disappear into the town forest, stepping off the main trails which suddenly seem populated, and hurry down the narrow bike paths, picking up speed and running in my shoes that I’ve meant to replace with their torn toes and worn soles. Add that chore to the list of the mundane: clean the upstairs closet, shake out the living room rug, replace the burned-out lightbulb over the bathroom sink.

October is a hard reckoning month in Vermont, the sizing up of the summer (not enough swimming, surely not enough sunlight) and the letting go of gardening as winter edges in, steadily, inexorably. I rake leaves, mulch the garden, put away my shovel and hoe.

For years, I canned crazily, hundreds of jars of beans and tomatoes and apples. This year, the mainstay of my garden is flowers. Months ago, the flowers gained the upper hand, and I can scarcely pick my way through the tangle of vine and petal: a patch of succor for pollinators, slow moving now, and birds.

My mother asks what’s new, what’s happening: skeins of geese fly over our house. Like the skeins of yarn I unwind and then rewind into fat balls. Sprawled on the windowsill beside my desk, my cat studies a gray squirrel fattening its cheeks with sunflower seeds. Red, gold, green: autumn.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. 

— Jack Gilbert

Starlight Walking, a Pause, a Choice.

Walking back from a library program after dark, I cut through the cemetery. The cemetery is unlit, and I’m walking slowly, staring at the Milky Way sprawled overhead, the enormous immensity of the cosmos. In the dark, I hear a cough. I haven’t been paying attention. At first, I think the cough has come from the person smoking on the balcony not far from me, in the house chopped into apartments at the dead-end road, or the people coughing might be around the gap in the fence surrounding the cemetery. I’m headed that way; the gap leads to the woodsy path that will lead me home. That particular place in the path often has trash – Little Debbie’s wrappers and empty Twisted Tea cans.

So here’s the thing: I’m not at all afraid. Despite the village around me, the night is deep. I’m well-hidden, so concealed I stand there thinking, staring up and seeing a shooting star.

I’ve written a fair amount about being a single mother, a broken half, the jilted family, the rage of abandonment. But it’s equally true that I’ve been single for so long now in a society that seems so devoted to coupleness, that I rarely speak of my solitary life. I know very few single parents, at all, for whatever reason. So this night, I do what I’ve taught myself all these years: I drink in my fill of starlight, that piercing Ursa Major hung over the black horizon of the mountains, let her drench me with her power. I make my choice and retrace a few steps, see my friend and her partner on the street below driving along in the dark, friends who would have happily given me a ride, had I asked. But these nights are still balmy and the bitter cold hasn’t set in yet.