Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Buried Treasure

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I look out the upstairs window where I’m working and see my teen and her friend busily digging a hole where young lilacs are growing along the cemetery fence.

They’re planting a half-gallon mason jar — their time capsule — carefully filled with things like a map of our camping trips and lists of their favorite things to eat. I watch them talking, and then they tie a pink scrap of fabric on the chain link fence, as if that marker will weather through the years.

Right there, I think, is childhood in a nutshell: a world that intersects with my grownup days, and yet lives busily — in fun and in seriousness — in their own. I haven’t seen what they stashed in that capsule, but I expect to see what emerges, whenever that may be….

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them — they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

— Rilke

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Things on My Kitchen Table

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email in-box, these lines from Toni Morrison’s Paris Review interview appear:

I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space—a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out—life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in.

For a single mother who often works at home, clutter is a major issue — and I don’t mean the Marie Kondo kind of clutter with too many piles of perfectly fine clothes or an overstocked kitchen.

I simply mean the clutter of living. On our kitchen table when I came home from work yesterday were bowls of just picked blueberries and green beans, a full coffee thermos I had forgotten, opened mail including a jury summons and a pay stub, a tube of hand lotion, an unopened packet of spinach seeds I intended to plant that evening, a $5 bill, a list I wrote for the 14-year-old (mostly checked off), what appeared to me as a random assortment of dates on a scrap piece of paper, a wildflower identification book, a half-eaten cucumber surrounded by a sprinkling of salt. And a fingernail clippers.

My daughters were cooking dinner, and the dining room table was set and (mostly) cleared of clutter. Life without clutter would be sterility, boredom, an emptied-out house. Or so I tell myself.

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Wandering, Mid-August

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Three boys loop in circles on their bikes, eating popsicles and talking. Walking by, I note one boy rides an old banana-seat bike, not unlike my brother’s when he was a kid.

Monday evening, the neighborhood I walk through is unusually busy with people — a woman yanking yellowing pea vines from her garden, a young man powerwashing his deck, two women deep in conversation walking tiny dogs.

I pause at a woodshed where friends have built a tiny house to raffle for the local library addition project. The raffle’s this weekend, and we speculate about who might win. Kids, we hope. Not simply a cute toolshed.

We’ve hit mid-August when the cricket songs have shifted to a longer, slower sizzle, that gradual unwinding of their energy until the singing simply dwindles away in the fall. August is the season of gardens gone rogue — this year my enthusiastic nasturtiums have nearly eclipsed my peppers. The mornings are dim now; the mist moves back into the valley for the cool night hours.

In the rose bed, whose flowers have long fallen, a single trumpet lily blossoms, and I wonder whose hands planted this beauty? Walking by, its fragrance pulls not only the pollinators but myself.

Here’s a line from a fascinating book I found in Maine — Don Kulick’s A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea.

A language dies by contracting, by having its layers of complexity peeled off like an onion skin, getting smaller and smaller until there is finally nothing left.

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Sometime in August

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I’m picking up the pace on a wool sweater I’m knitting — a roundabout way of realizing the patches of red on some maples (and no longer just the sick or stressed) mean I actually will be wanting to wear those knitted strands before too long.

Still, summer folks fill my library these days. They all have houses along Woodbury’s lakes, or visit people who have houses along lakes. They’re full of good will, polite, curious about our winters, ready to swap tales of their winters. One family had twins last October. The parents plop the babies on the library floor, and take a deep and exhausted breath.

Driving home, just before the swamp separating Woodbury from Hardwick, the sun hits the goldenrod just so, with scrubby pink clover along the roadside.  Rags of mist amble along the swamp, around the bend in the mountains.

For a moment, it’s just me and the road, the gold and the emerald and transient strands of cloud. August, at this very moment. At home, the girls have made blueberry pie, and that’s equally fleeting.

All the way I have come
all the way I am going
here in the summer field

—Buson

 

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Why Memories?

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I’ve never been a woman to “make memories” or cherish photo albums, but here’s the thing: memory and story are so intertwined. The other night, eating dinner around a fire with the parents of my brother’s girlfriend, we began stitching our baggy and cumbersome story into their long and craggy story.

The daylight dispersed, dark pressed in around us, rain began falling in sprinkles, and still, patiently, back and forth, question by curious question, we kept at it.

Come January, sea fog, a curious barred owl, driving through a pounding rainstorm — these elements of August days we’ll remember in January.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

― E.B. White

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Down Easting

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Here’s a snapshot of both the easy and hard parts of family: my brother and I — in Acadia with my family and his family — hike The Precipice, scaling a rocky ledge studded with iron hand holds and ladders. Before ascending, I read the profuse warning signs at the bottom. His girlfriend asks me, You’re not frightened of heights, are you?

Naturally, I lie, and follow my daughters up a hike I would never in my rational mind have attempted. The views and the hike were sublime — the enchantment of pink granite, ocean views, an unusual arid climate in New England that reminds my brother and I of hiking in New Mexico. That’s parenting in a nutshell: you head into what can be terrifying terrain, with these incredible, ineffable rewards.

He reminds me where we hiked as kids, where we ate cream scones. But I was never here as a kid with you, I remind him. I think you’re wrong, he counters. We go back and forth, swapping stories, noting where our memories meet up and where they divulge.

And my daughters? What do they think? Are they mesmerized? Irritated? Bored? We hike on and on, until the youngest is beyond ravenous, and then we eat.

Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.

— E. B. White

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