Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Cusp

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

On the eve of another year, my daughters and I talk about that trite tradition — resolutions — and I think of these lines from Rilke:

Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near, your house lies where it begins,
whoever you are…
The world is immense…

Not so long ago, walking outside our house meant wandering down our dirt road and looking for pebbles or newts. While the big world has always been around us, how much mightier the possibilities seem now. And that, I suppose, sums up where we are now.
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December Thaw

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early Friday morning, finished with my few weekly minutes of food co-op working member hours, I stand at the window with an employee, watching the rain.

Rain in December. At home, my daughters are eating breakfast and complaining about the coal-colored day. Then yesterday, about the time I’m folding up my laptop and thinking of chopping a cabbage for dinner, my daughters return home, full of joy about a long run and exploring the edge of Lake Champlain.

End of December: I’d hung the laundered Christmas tablecloth on the clothesline to dry. December thaw in Vermont. Here’s a piece I wrote in State 14 about working for the census, long ago when I was a brand-new mama.

This cold winter night,
that old wooden-head buddha
would make a nice fire.

—Buson

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Holiday Chat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Perhaps in no little part due to my hammered-up lower jaw, I let the holidays simply unroll (albeit with some effort before).

Here’s a scruffy shot of my brother cooking Christmas dinner, while I shiver, and we talk about Marx’s assertion that people make their own history but not in self-selected circumstances, family camping trips and the collapse of the American Empire.

Afterwards, he hung up his beer cans on the line with clothespins. That’s some quality family time.

Winter solitude —
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

— Basho

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A Note From Faraway

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Via a Christmas card, my younger daughter learns someone has been watching her fall soccer games online. While baking cookies, she watches a game, wondering what they’ve seen. From the kitchen table, I look up from my laptop and see a game filmed at her high school, the fields brilliant green.

The scene is so utterly typical small town Vermont: the cheering parents, the sunshot gorgeous autumn afternoon, the game narrated by a dad who’s clearly taking pleasure in being there. I remember the rush to get to those games, how parents juggle work, rushing to the sidelines, asking how far along is the game? What’s the score? How many of your kids’ soccer games do you get to watch in a lifetime, anyway?

In this zero-degree day, we stand in the kitchen, eating warm gingerbread cookies, watching her team. The game and that sunlight looks too good to be true. What luck, I think.

Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared.

— Rachel Cusk

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#10 Pond. Summer swimming currently on hold. Calais, Vermont.

Under the Dentist’s Knife

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

As I’m finishing a book about, essentially, pain, maybe it’s fitting that I undergo my own particular pain experience.

In the oral surgeon’s chair, as he came at my face with a small, extremely sharp blade, he paused for a moment and said I was welcome to watch, but I likely wanted to close my eyes. I definitely closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to open my eyes. Almost immediately, my mouth was suffused with salty, rich blood: the taste of the sea and the earth.

While allowing my mouth and those stitches time to repair, I read Chanel Miller’s  gorgeous book — this young woman known as Emily Doe, who was assaulted on the Stanford campus. Her book is filled with food — chocolate and pork dumplings — and begonias, with love of rain falling on skin and a young woman’s excitement about living in a city, but also filled with bodily pain and the complexity of living in a female body in America.

Of all the books I read this year, this author is likely my most favorite, this young woman who took this unasked-for experience, endured, and turned it into strength for so many other women.

Her victim impact statement that initiated the book can be read here.

I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm… Stay tender with your power.

—Chanel Miller, Know My Name

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