Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

If There Was Only One Leaf…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

This sunny, gorgeous weekend was a high school ritual completely unfamiliar to me — the fall rites of Homecoming. The girls’ varsity soccer team played first, followed by the boys. One boy — young man, really, on the cusp of adulthood — arrived with a couch in the back of his pickup. His teammates promptly carried it out and set up living room cheering quarters at the far end of the field.

Unlike the high school I attended (way back sometime in the 20th century), there’s no cheerleaders. The boys pull their weight in playing and cheering — and the girls do, too.

Near the end of this long afternoon of playing, a tiny girl in a polka-dot coat wandered over to keep my older daughter and I company. She picked up a crumpled leaf from the grass and handed it to me, full of wonder.

Happiness… even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

 

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Pregame visit with cat.

 

 

 

 

 

Capitalism and Commodification

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Everyone’s late to dinner last night, except the cats, who are never late to dinner, so I lie on the floor and finish reading Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Spoiler alert: there’s no laugh-aloud sections in this lengthy book.

Although I consider myself at least mediocrely educated, the book was a revelation to me — a enormous swathe of history, like Hemingway’s submerged iceberg, still mightily driving along our society.

Here’s a two-line excerpt.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

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Meanwhile, little pumpkins in Vermont.

 

Coyote Calling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

October already, again, the fall has bent around again, and before long, snow will fall again. What will we do? The same things, I suppose, we always do. Boil beans and onions and chilis for soup, keep the house warm, lace up the ski boots and slide over the fields.

At our old house, further along in the autumn, we’d walk down to the bus stop in the dark. The girls and I would listen to coyotes howling in the hills. Here, in town, we’ve heard coyotes, but rarely. It’s foxes we see here.

My daughter returns home from school enchanted with learning French, dreaming of distant lands. She has her summer tan yet, her hair sun-bleached.  She’s dreaming of her driver’s license, of flying to Africa, stuffing her backpack and hiking the French Alps…..

Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

— Tom Hennen

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Listening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Two parents once came up to me after a school board meeting and thanked me profusely. They felt so much better. At the time, I thought I hadn’t done anything. No decision had been made. But I had done something. I had simply let them talk; I listened; I empathized.

Recently, I emailed my former neighbors — rabidly, on the attack — and asked how dare they employ my ex-husband? How dare they pay him cash when he hasn’t paid child support in years? I expected my former neighbors to be defensive and angry, but, instead, the email I received back was kind and thoughtful and incredibly insightful. They’ll likely keep employing him, but at that point, I didn’t even care. Their empathy for me had opened up my heart to be empathetic for their plight, too.

What makes me remember this on a breezy autumn is maybe nothing but my own unhappiness about the adult world, both in general and in particular. Recently, I realized with the work I’m doing now, I could actually pack up and take a geographical cure from my immediate adult world, head somewhere else to work for the next four months. Like, perhaps, a desert cave.

Bad idea, I think. Those former neighbors and I have finally made our peace, and this one is likely to be lasting.

On a withered branch
A crow has alighted:
Nightfall in autumn

— Basho

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End of September

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

To counteract this seasonal shift from summer to autumn’s short days, I take the cleaver to gardenstuff — a carrot, a leek, an onion, garlic, parsley — and stew them with lentils and salt. Lentils, once the bane of our household (not lentils, again?). The younger daughter, still in her sweaty soccer practice shirt, eats hungrily.

Her older sister takes a knife to apples, listens to Stephen Colbert, rolls out dough. Pie, at least: it’s autumn.

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IcyHot

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

These days are nearly feverish — too hot or bordering cold.

Driving home from soccer, my daughter sets her feet on the dashboard and rubs IcyHot on her shin. The car fills with the medicinal scent of mint. She and her sister laugh and laugh, the older daughter sharing stories of work: You can’t make this up, it’s so crazy….

Nearly a year ago, the younger daughter was plagued with nosebleeds. One evening, frightened, I called the ER and spoke to a nurse, who thought nosebleeds were no particular big deal. Chastened, I took his word. The nosebleeds stopped.

Autumn is the season of trees, green turning to gold. Walking home in the dark last night, I cut up through the trailer park where the Milky Way sprawled over the sky, then turned into the woods where I could hardly see my way. The scent of wet soil rose up through the leaves, and I pushed on.

Many things of the past
Are brought to my mind,
As I stand in the garden
Staring at a cherry tree.

— Basho

Here’s the piece I wrote for State 14 about the Youth Climate Strike.