Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

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.

Late Night Reading

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

As summer blended into autumn, the days were warm enough to swim, but we simply didn’t.

Instead, I lie awake at night, listening to the tree frogs thrip, thrip, thrip, singing as though this season will linger on and on, and then it’s me and the cat lying on the couch in the middle of the night, reading about economics and slavery, and when that’s too much for those tiny wee hours — while the stars pass over our roof — the cat suggests Alan Watts, which has somehow been shoved down the back of the couch. The book is an old paperback that I either swiped from my dad’s shelves when I was in college, or he passed along to me. Which of us can remember any longer?

Finally, the rain pours down in an enormous wash.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

~ Alan W. Watts, Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown 

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Photo by Molly B.

What Are You Saying?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The other day, I let a very pregnant woman and her little daughter who was eating an ice cream sandwich step ahead of me in line at the co-op. Outside, on the street, the woman buckled her child into a carseat. I stepped into the passenger seat of my daughter’s car.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that my daughter — now fully an adult with adult responsibilities — was a little girl, too.

Yesterday, on a rocky hike in the White Mountains, she and I walked down the mountain together, while my younger daughter and my brother outpaced us.

At four, ice cream sandwiches were a very big deal. At four, this daughter was obsessed with snipping up paper with kid-sized scissors. At twenty, we talk about what it’s like to be a woman in this world, about going to school and work, about family and friends, and how things sometimes go awry.

Beneath all this, while we walked from the ridge down into the cool forest where the leaves were just beginning to turn an autumn gold, I kept thinking of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers. Since she became a teenager, I’ve returned to this thought over and over — what are you really saying? What’s the subtext beneath your words? Some of that subtext I know, some tugs at my own guilt and trepidation, and some is just pure joy, knowing this young woman in a richer way.

What is required of us is restraint and humility.

— Malcolm Gladwell

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Woodchuck

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Geese fly overhead in the dark evening, so near I hear their wings beating. Frost hovers, gathering strength.

Yeah, my daughter says, that’s what geese do. They’re out of here!

The garden’s gone wild at the end of the season, its queen the mightiest and heaviest sunflower head I’ve ever grown. Its stalk might rival a sturdy sapling.

The woodchuck’s gnawing my cabbage heads near the garden gate. In another year, I might have set the trap, but this year…. Gnaw on, chuck. Winter’s coming. The cabbages are profuse.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

— T. E. Hulme’s “Autumn”

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Sunflower Songs

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Beneath a clutter of last winter’s sweaters and board games, I discover a few poetry books. We’ve lived in this house for two years (and three summers of gardens). This weekend has been tidying-up chores, inside and outside.

The garden flowers sing their holy colors hard, hard, these days — pink cosmos and zinnias, that tangle of nasturtiums, the ever-present small beings of marigolds, and the sunflowers — without whom Vermont autumn is unimaginable.

…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, from “A Home in Dark Grass”

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Mooncrazed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Walking beneath the full moon last night, my younger daughter remarks how quickly the moon rises. Our conversation winds into the complexities of the moon phases, and I finally I admit I just don’t know the answer, but my father would.

Although we’re wearing jackets and jeans, the evening’s particularly warm for fall, the moon creamy and luscious. In the dark, flying geese overhead honk.

I mention something about “heavenly bodies,” and — despite my vehemence that this is, indeed, legitimate, these heavenly bodies — my daughters insist that’s too weird.

I don’t use my past reply about common knowledge, because my kids now have this kind of common language that might as well be from some remote Amazonian tribe to my ears. Apparently, I’m one of the last humans in their world to know this term “VSCO girl,” although the subtext beneath the so-called VSCOing activities and accessories remains a little vague to me. Likewise, when I shared some historical lore about the preppy movement (I notice Amazon has helpfully described the official handbook as facetious in case anyone missed that), I’m met with disinterest until I mention the flipped-up collar trend.

That’s just bad taste, both daughters immediately agree.

In 30 years, the full moon will grace Friday the 13 again. Walking along a dirt road in a light breeze, the girls mention how old each of us will be in 30 years. 30 years, I say, is a long time. And then: I was 30 when I became a mother.

Few lights shine in houses along the road. There’s no one else around. Back at our house, the moon is barely creeping over the horizon. We sit on the back porch while the moon rises, quickly. A luminous, heavenly globe.

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