Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Ordinary Pick-Up

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the high school parking lot, we stand waiting for the kids to return from a soccer game, the air wet and unexpectedly warm. I remember the sunny crispness of that 9/11 morning when my two-year-old tricycled around the kitchen. There’s none of that, in this day alternately soggy or overly warm.

The bus comes, the kids get off, the bus goes, and still we stand there, talking and laughing, with our girls holding their bags now. The coach drives home.

One girl looks around. “It’s just us,” I say. Overhead, the clouds lift and moonlight shines down. We pause, and the mist ambles in.

Want “meaningless” Zen?
Just look — at anything!

— Old Shōju

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Cat Companions

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

While my daughters visit my brother in New Hampshire — eating meat, watching Stephen Colbert, the youngest driving his car — I hole up with my laptop and the cats.

My daughters handled a false oil light in the car, nearly had the hood open on the interstate, and — missing a detour — took a circuitous route along the mountainous Kancamagus Highway. (We’re on the Kanc, my youngest texted me. I wrote back, Why?) On their way home, they stopped and climbed beside a waterfall, then returned for dinner, merry and cheerful.

I clearly (and silently) remember what I was doing at 20 — swapping engines between two VW bugs, wandering lost around Boston. Be safe, I think, just be safe.

Home again, back to school and work tomorrow — as much truth as I need at the moment. Despite what anyone with a twitter account might insist, the truth is whether your family is safe, or not, and no sharpie line can change that.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power…. Power is not a means; it is an end.

— George Orwell, 1984

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Drinking Water Beneath the Moon

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After a day of one thing after another, we suddenly arrive back at home together — my older daughter returning from a 12-hour shift, my teenager and a friend dropped off by another mother. I stand in the driveway talking with this mother, while my daughter runs in the house and hurries back with a gift of eggs from her chickens.

The little neighbor boys, munching dropped apples, wander over full of pleasure and wonder at seeing us, as only four- and two-year-old are. What are you doing? they ask. An existential question, I whisper to my friend. The teenagers are ravenous and cannot stop talking. Leftovers, I suggest. Put the leftovers in the oven for dinner.

Later, the girls have disappeared into the dark. I leave a sinkfull of dirty dishes and sit outside beneath the crescent moon. The neighbors have put their children to bed. It’s just me and the crickets and that autumn chill creeping in. Over the horizon, the sky turns a dark-turquoise shade of blue to impermeable black. Beneath this, the girls run up the road, out of breath, laughing.

In this autumn,
Why I get older?
The clouds and birds.

—Basho

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Photo by Molly S.

Days of Afternoon Sun and Insects

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Late afternoon, insects — hundreds, nay, thousands — hovered over the soccer field, mixed in with dust motes and seed chaff.

The teenage girl snapping photos for the yearbook said, Gross. The parent beside me marveled at the teeming life. Bat food.

The other parent and I exchanged random bits — traffic in Waterbury, a small write-up in the local paper, why our country can send a man to the moon but hasn’t created decent birth control. Little bits of our own, bat-esque food.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

— Rilke

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God, Ghosts, Aliens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughters start a fire in the rock pit in our yard at the end of a sunny day, a day of hiking and laughter, of putting away a gorgeous onion harvest, of weeding and transplanting daisies from a friend, of painting the lower barn door blue (please, mom, why not just white?)

There’s no one else, no visitors, no company stopping by, just the three of us cooking outside sprawling on the grass as the dusk gradually filters down and pulls out the brilliance of pink zinnias, a tangle of nasturtiums, gold in a maple in the cemetery. We’ve nowhere else to go but into the house and sleep.

My older daughter shares a conversation she had with her coworkers that night, about the probably of God, of ghosts, of UFOs, and the girls dive into what they’ve read about Roswell.

Under my bare feet, the grass holds the day’s warm sunlight yet. Listening, I remember the barren patches in this grass when we moved in. The grass is lush now, like a well-tended cat’s fur.

My younger daughter, with a new kind of adolescent edginess, announces her own nihilism. I offer, But here’s the rub there: what about life? What about you? and then I wise up and shut up. A few tendrils of mist settle into the valley below us. In the night, rain will move in, but for now, it’s just us and the sunlight, and all that evening ahead.

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