Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

And then I found….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I dropped off three 14-year-old girls in the rain to rake leaves, seriously pursuing their entrepreneurial odd-job endeavor, then parked my little silver Toyota along the road and walked.

November: the season when the cold clouds come down to your face. As a kid in New Hampshire, I remember this as the season when the stone wall behind our house no longer warmed up in the sun, and we had the delicious pleasure of playing outside in the dark — before dinner.

I walked up a dirt road I had never followed, then saw a sign about a marker. I followed small white squares through the woods, startling six deer with brilliant white tails, and found a marker for the colonist who cleared a farm, built a cabin, and planted orchards. 1789. Down a hillside, a stream murmured.

The marker was placed by his descendants, in 1930, on the original site of the cabin. Father of 11 children, I stood there — me, the rain-wet trees and sodden, fallen leaves, the pale gold apples yet on the gone-wild trees — and wondered, And what of his wife?

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.

― Mary Oliver

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Calais, Vermont

Wrong Way Closed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

While poor California is burning, Vermont is flooded.

Driving to Burlington to meet my older daughter at the airport, my younger and I are suddenly stopped on Route 15. Road closed. I pull into a gas station and run up to a young man and ask him for intel. He’s from somewhere else and tells me Wrong Way Bridge is closed. That’s all he knows. The Lamoille is impassable at this point — the river, I’ve already seen, has risen wildly above its banks.

I stand there, thinking, unwilling to follow his advice to cut back through the mountains. I’m driving my older daughter’s car, which has — naturally — no paper map.

I approach a man who’s just bought a six-pack of tiny Coke cans, and ask for advice. He’s much taller than me, and bends down to look at my face, putting us at eye-level, then takes me to the edge of the parking lot and tells me where to turn, which roads to follow. It’s beautiful country, he says, where I’m sending you.

He tells me to turn left at the Y, but he’s gesturing right. I ask for clarification, and then he has me repeat the directions back to him, so he’s sure I know where I’m going.

We drive along the western side of Mount Mansfield, through farms with their cornfields shorn to stubble. November. His breath had a vague scent of whiskey, but the directions were spot-on, and countryside? Enchanting.

I think these days when there is so little to believe in — when the old loyalties — God, country, and the hope of Heaven — aren’t very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends.

— William Carlos Williams

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Burlington, Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email inbox this morning, a lovely poem by Raphael Kosek, beginning:

My daughter is driving
across the continent, eating cheddar
in Wisconsin, waking to a cougar’s yellow
rasp, sleeping tentless
in a corn field….

Last night, with the power out, my younger daughter and I walked around town, the Main Street stores either marked closed with a cardboard lettered sign — gone home — or filled with folks simply hanging out, talking.

Later, we’re stuck in traffic, where the highway has washed down into the Lamoille River. We’re driving home from the one lighted town around here, my daughter eating fried rice with chopsticks, talking. We’ve nowhere in particular to go. I’ve let that constant press of time slip away. As we come into the town where we live, the darkness ubiquitous but for a gleaming slip of crescent moon, we’re still talking, just the two of us. She’s no longer the darling five-year-old I once tickled daily — daily tickle? she’d ask. How the world changes, and how it doesn’t. Short as time is, time is also long, too. We stand in the cold November night, beneath the starlight, listening.

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Losing Our Leaves

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Here’s this in my sometimes too-much-adult world: my 14-year-old and her friends have been diligently doing odd jobs for weeks now — stacking wood, planting bulbs, painting, and raking leaves.

She showed me a photo today of herself and the friend she’s known for years leaping backwards into an enormous pile of leaves they’d raked. I sure hope the homeowner laughed as hard as I did.

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life.

— Robert Bly

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Wanderlust, Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We’re at the Burlington airport at four in the morning, in a rainy darkness, in that discombobulated airport way — where the everyone in town seems to be at the airport and then, outside, it’s just me and my teen driving through intersections amped down to blinking lights.

The way is familiar, but the night is so solid — and, honestly, I’m so tired — that we might be in upper New York state for all I know, and not Vermont, or maybe wandered farther away, all the down to mountainous Virginia.

The commuter traffic begins only as we’re nearly home. Then, with still an hour and a half before high school starts for the day, my daughter walks around the house, doing this, that, and finally stares at me on the couch. I close my lap and ask simply, Yes?

She looks out the window where the dawn is trying mightily hard to push away some of the dusk. Wanderlust, I see. There’s nothing more to say.

“There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?”

— Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border (elegantly written by a former border patrol officer — I can’t recommend this book enough)

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Photo by Molly B.

Potato Pie Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My oldest daughter texts me early this morning — she’s driven through slush to get to work. And so it begins, the snowy season. The days already burn low, dim by late afternoon. It’s Not the Swimming Season.

To counteract, I contemplate potatoes. Sausage and potato pie? I ask my youngest. Cook together?

Having lived in New England for most of my life, this side of the stick season is familiar to me, intimately so. During Saturday’s sunny afternoon, I coil up the garden hose, pull weeds from the garden, play soccer with my girl, then lie on the grass while she samples bitter apples.

My father sends good news — it’s Arkhipov Day — a celebration of a man who served humanity and not the nation-state. Read details here.

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