Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 28

Putting the World Back Together, Again.

By Thursday, I’ve lost track of days. A kind man stops by the town office with plates of cookies, still warm from the oven. I’ve been up for hours and hours by then, some working, some staring out the window at the dawn pushing up over the mountain, a spill of pink that widens into gold.

I haven’t been flooded. I know no one who’s injured. Yet, all around, the torn-up world, the folks who are seeking dry shelter, clean clothing, the next meal. The roads are our arteries, and slowly, gravel load by excavator sweep, the world is being put back together.

Thunderstorms and flash floods are in the forecast. Through all this, there’s the subtle underlying sense of how quickly the world turns.

Stores warn of early closings. We’re in this place I recognize immediately, almost giddy, slightly horrified, where people let down their guard, laugh at things that maybe aren’t that funny. Slowly, wrapping order around chaos.

“Water symbolizes the whole of potentiality – the source of all possible existence.”

— Mircea Eliade

Water, Water.

These days, I’m working in a town clerk’s office, Greensboro, Vermont, population approximately 827. With summer folks, the population swells to three times.

Yesterday, the phone rang all day. We propped the door open, and people wandered in with questions.

Can I get to Craftsbury? Which roads are out? I have a dump truck; want me to haul fill? I’ve lost everything; do you have extra clothes, shoes, blankets?

Selectboard members set up a triage system to patch roads where anyone was stuck. Farm roads were prioritized for milk trucks. All day long, Vermont Public Radio updated us. Montpelier, beloved capital city, is underwater, threatened by a dam where waters rose precipitously.

Late afternoon, the selectboard chair rummaged for leftover potato chips from the July 4th celebration. By then, the sun had emerged. The July day was hot, redolent with blooming roses. I had my own petty worries: my car was low on gas, and I’ve kicked a front brake repair too far down the road, and I’ll need to find a mechanic stat, and who I’ll find isn’t yet clear to me. Later, I’ll call my brother and talk about my parents while weeding my neglected garden. For some time, though, we stood in the parking lot, breathing in sunlight, waiting for a contractor to look at one of the town’s paved roads that’s severed in multiple places, the asphalt broken into multiple chunks. When could he get here with an excavator and put that back together?

A friend drove up and told us about mutual friends in a nearby town. They had been out in the stormy night. Travelers on I-89 had been diverted off the interstate and wound up driving through the backroads of a rural town they didn’t know. By flashlight and headlamp, in a driving rain, water roaring down hillsides, the residents directed the strangers to a safe haven, where they weathered the night.

Vermont Floods.

Remains of the Inn by the River, Hardwick, VT

My friend who lives near a dam takes shelter with us. While she gathers her things in her house, I wait in my car, staring up through the closed sunroof in my Subaru, mesmerized by the rain, the rain, the rain.

Shortly before nightfall, we walk downtown where the water flows around houses, through the community gardens, and drowns the t-ball field. A crowd gathers beside the Lamoille River. At first, I think the storm has turned to thunder, a booming and smashing, and then I realize the roiling river is filled with boulders and tree trunks. I’ve been following and watching the rise and fall of rivers for years now, lived on back roads that have washed out, cautioned my daughters never to drive over running water.

But this.

The river is alive. The river rises like a wave, brown and frothy, taking precisely and entirely what it wants.

Home again, safe in our house on the hill, the rain pours down. Hope you’re all well and safe out there, too…. More info about my state can be found on VTDigger.

The 10,000 Things.

The last night I am in New Mexico, I can’t sleep, so I slip on my sandals and walk. The moon hangs over my parents’ house, luminescent as a giant drop from a sun-shot waterfall. It’s dark yet, a cool-nearly-cold breeze stirring the desert. No human wanders at this early hour. It’s just me and the singing crickets and birds, the sun pushing a golden curve over the black mountains, the desert stirring in a language I have no words for: the rush of lizards and hustle of rabbits, the sharp-eyed coyote and fox, the wild sunflowers silently bending towards the rising light.

So many pieces to this journey — from the shuttle driver who happily counsels a passenger not to rush as “we’re in the Land of Mañana,” to the flight to Chicago where the Brandeis student beside me whispers about her fear of flying, to the stunningly beautiful flight over the Great Lakes through voluminous white clouds. I keep thinking how unworldly, but that word is ill-chosen. Better said would be of this world. Then the brilliance ends as we fly into the soot of the Canadian wildfires. All through this day, I read Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate (the novel Ben Hewitt told me read), this novel about a family and the collapse of our world, and the brutal irony doesn’t escape me for one moment that as I’m mourning and fearing those sooty clouds I’m entirely part of this 21st century….

In Vermont, my daughters greet me with their 10,000 stories and cheerfully announce I’ve missed the two good kayak days through the lily pads. The humid night air stinks of diesel exhaust. In the parking garage, I strip off my leggings. My youngest drives out of Burlington, along the river through the Winooski Valley, and through the state capital. The girls tell me sunflowers are blooming around the statehouse, and my daughter’s dog fell off a dock into a lake (what clumsy dog does that?) and the swimming has been stunning in Caspian, the water perfectly clear.

My youngest tells me about exploring Burlington with her sister. She says she can’t believe how lucky she is to move there this fall.

In this dew-soaked morning, I realize I haven’t missed the hollyhocks’ bloom. Lucky.

…. Seriously, can’t recommend The Light Pirate enough.

Because everything is changing…. We should all be curious about it, because the way we live has to change, too.

— Lily Brooks-Dalton

Lonesome Trails, Amazing Views.

New Mexico is scorching hot. I’m visiting my parents for a few days, and even at nine, ten o’clock, the desert day hasn’t shifted to cool evening. The heat lies thickly. In Vermont, my daughter and a friend head to swim, as heat has moved into Vermont, too, bringing humidity and hail. In the hot desert, I think of the pond where they’ll swim, the cool clean water, the blooming lily pads like buttery jewels on emerald saucers. By dawn, though, a cool breeze rushes over the desert, under the moon.

I’ve spent nearly my whole adult life in Vermont, learning the names of wildflowers and trees, the rhythms of the seasons, how loons dive and surface, the brilliance of the Milky Way in January. In New Mexico, I know far fewer of the plants’ names, but the scent of the desert — the unmistakable piñon — is intimately familiar to me. My youngest years were in this country, so many hours spent in the red sand, collecting pebbles, white quartz. The scent — always near mystical with so much life in this vast space, from lizards to jackrabbits. Add to this, the sweep of the wind in the piñons and sage, that ancient breath.

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” 

— Edward Abbey

No Going Back.

July 1: I’m driving on a back road to a nearby town where there’ll be the traditional New England small town Independence Day festivities, when I suddenly realize I can no longer see the road before me. The road dips down and then rises up. I know this, because I’ve driven this road so many times. I know precisely where to swerve around the persistent pothole where the stream runs under the lowest point of the road. But the rise is hidden in smoke.

The day marks a line for me, a place I won’t forget. I’ve been here before; this is familiar territory. I remember the precise afternoon I knew I would severe my marriage. Likewise, today, it’s clear to me that this smoke, in what will likely be one unimaginable variation after another, will remain.

Nonetheless, I go on into the day, watch the parade with an old acquaintance and we catch up about kids, ruminate about our old college days. I talk to a woman who’s built a house of cans and bottles and tires. She asks me to stop by sometime. Heck, who could pass that up? Of course I will.

Then I’m back home again, working, working, on this third book, taking it apart, sewing it back together, phrase by phrase. I wind in how it feels to walk along the edge of a lake that may not be frozen and thread through the Himalayan blue poppy, a child’s nightgown, pebbles under a clear running stream. I’m after those same old things: how to salvage order and beauty from chaos and destruction and despair. A river of sadness is not the torrents of despair.

Swim. Bartzella peonies. My neighbor leaning out her door, green curlers in her hair, saying hello.

Wild Strawberries under Wildfire Smoke.

In Willey’s — the rambling general store where you can buy electrical supplies, French wine, local produce, bananas and darn near everything else except cigarettes — I turn a corner and find an old friend. She has a sunburn and I think: where have you been? We are both in some kind of rush that we talk, separate, and then knock up against each other again and again. The store is jammed to the ceiling with stuff, but it’s not that large. At the register and then out into the street, we keep talking. She’ll filled with such good energy I want to pocket some of her joy.

Every day, rain falls. Clotheslines droop. My feet are spongy in sandals. The Blundstones my daughter bought me a few years back split at the soles. It makes sense to wear these beloved shoes right down to wet scraps. I open and close the windows — is it hot? is it cold? The garden soaks up the water. The woods are lush and lovely, redolent with wet bark, the tanginess of split leaves.

The wild blackberries blossom profusely, the green berries now knotting. It’s nearly July, the season that means swimming and long lingering evenings watching the twilight drift down. Not so, this year. The pandemic made abundantly clear that we are connected to each other — both neighbors across the street and strangers around the globe — in ways that matter not one whit whether we like it, or not.

This summer breeds contemplation, more November than cusp of July. In that vein, here’s a few lines from the immortal T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets:

... The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasyNot lost, but requiring, pointing to the agonyOf death and birth. You say I am repeatingSomething I have said before. I shall say it again.Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession.In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.And what you do not know is the only thing you knowAnd what you own is what you do not ownAnd where you are is where you are not...

Wildfire Smoke, Vermont.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires suffuses our world, the briefest intimation of so much happening so far away. Sunday afternoon, I crouch in my garden, weeding, while talking on the phone to my brother. When I stand, the sun is a pool, the hue of fresh blood.

Later, before twilight, we swim with a friend, the smoke like a mist. On our way home, my daughter and I drive up the hill across our town, to the hillside where we often walk and look for the sunset. It’s after eight, but these are the longest days of our Vermont year. The sun is utterly absent, swallowed up in smoke and humidity, the light meager as November.

This, she says, is not good.

The following morning, our air clears. At dinner on our porch, a light rain patters. We keep eating, talking a bit here and there, lacing together our days. As for the humidity, I keep thinking…. bring it on. The myriad leaves and blossoms reach out, sucking it up, summer in all its messy intensity.

Ordinary Contentment.

Standing on the street in Greensboro Village, a pickup truck with a trailer full of hay slowly passes by, creaking through the tight curve. In the sultry sunlight, I wait, a shower of chaff drifting over my face, blinding me for just a moment. As I close my eyes, I see one sunburned arm waving through the open pickup window at me.

June. There’s plenty adversity that happens in this month, I’m sure, but the roses are blooming, the fields freshly shorn and growing again, the fledgling robins already swooping from the nest.

Some lines from the incomparable Jane Kenyon this Friday afternoon:

High on Nardil and June light I wake at four, waiting greedily for the firstnote of the wood thrush. Easeful air presses through the screen with the wild, complex song of the bird, and I am overcomeby ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye.

A Motorcycle is a Vehicle of Change…

On the cusp of the solstice, the evenings are chilly yet, mist pulling around our house.

I pull on a sweater — a wool sweater — as darkness falls and walk through the small stretch of woods into the cemetery. A stranger wearing a t-shirt and drinking a Fanta walks down. He looks at me as warily as I’m probably looking at him and then we exchange a mutual good evening and head each our own way, our mutual bit of our stories nothing but this.

Solstice — I’m hoping for sun and heat, for evening swims to stitch my summer together. I want to swim through pollen scattered on the still pond, glide through the ripples stirred by ducks, to have the mundane details of my life and my swimming companion’s life sewn together, swim by swim.

In the absence of swimming, I’ll sing the praises of those midday walks admiring the lupines and forget-me-nots, reading under the dwarf apple tree that’s long surpassed smallness, the fledgling robins clamoring for worms.

“A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn’t realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery’s favorite vehicle.” 

— Lily Brooks-Dalton, Motorcycles I’ve Loved