Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Little Bits of Beauty

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Taking out the trash from the library today, I stopped by the crabapple tree planted at the back school entrance no one uses anymore. My goodness! An utter profusion of beauty by the stinking compost!

On this warm day, in sleepy, quiet Woodbury, the first and second graders walked over for their final visit to the library this school year. I read only one book to them — Jim LaMarche’s The Raft — and remembered the summer I was 10, and my family camped for weeks in the west. I brought the book I discovered with great glee in my father’s very grownup shelves of Hume and Kant and Heidegger. What else but Huckleberry Finn, still one of my most favorite novels.

The children listened quietly this afternoon, checked out their books, and I walked back to the school with a girl who wouldn’t return next year, her arm around my waist.

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened…

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Left the Shoes on the Back Porch…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day of brilliant sunshine, rain moves in during the night. My daughters’ cats, in the screened windows, wake me with their hungry mewing, against the background chorus of steady rainfall and birdsong.

Arriving home from work, I see my daughters have been swimming that afternoon, their hair in damp lanks around their shoulders.

As if in an instant, summer has unrolled in Vermont — verdant and colorful — while simultaneously the woods darken mysteriously with foliage.

90 days, poet David Budbill wrote. Frost-freeze — maybe — for 90 days in Vermont. Hallelujah.

Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.

— Buson

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2,000 Miles, a Handful of Hours

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

What a strange, odd thing to travel 2,000 miles over the earth’s curve, all in the piece of one day. We began in that incredibly quiet hour between 1 and 2 a..m., standing in my parents’ kitchen, drinking coffee with the tenor of silliness that early hour deserves.

For a just a moment we stood outside in the New Mexico rural dark, under the unsurpassable beauty of the constellations and the Milky Way’s arch, and then our contemporary travels began by Subaru, by shuttle, by sandals running through an airport, by plane and by Toyota, and finally home to bare feet in the garden, where I ate tart radishes.

Modern miracles, all of this locomotion. But at the journey’s end was the greater wonder: our rows of lilacs — lavender and deep violet, pearly double-blossoms — all in bloom, ineffably scented — breathe in, breathe in — humming with pollinators, quietly going about their business.

You are brighter than apples,
Sweeter than tulips,
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,
You are the smell of all Summers…
From Amy Lowell’s Lilacs

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Edge of the Earth Might Be Here…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

…. or not.

There’s nothing quite like visiting your very early childhood territory with your youngest child, who’s now 14 and partly worldly as heck and partly a jigsaw-puzzle-loving kid.

An unrequited desire of mine had been to visit somewhere or someone from my past — a college best friend or a former lover. Instead, on near impulse, my daughter and I visited northern New Mexico. Hiking through the national forest, I realized I’ll never be able to view New Mexico as a dispassionate visitor, only — mysteries of mysteries — through the dewy and amorous eyes of very early childhood.

Edge of the world? Surely in early childhood the edge is always tantalizingly near…..

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How Does Your Garden Grow?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.

My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.

What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?

Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.

Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.

— Basho

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Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Nearly two years ago we moved into our house — from the house where my daughters had lived their whole lives. Now, two years in, this new-to-us 100-year-old house, the house has morphed into home, with a particular shade of yellow I painted the dining room, our first chicken buried in the backyard, the front porch filled with piles of library books, Yahtzee score cards marked up, kid sweatshirts.

Infinitely lucky we three females are, to move five miles down the road, from a forest to a town, our cardboard boxes ferried by friends.

Here’s my State 14 postcard.

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