Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Bloomsday & Father’s Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

These two are aptly paired up for me as I learned about Bloomsday — this Irish holiday celebrating James Joyce and his Ulysses — from my father. I was probably 4 and sitting on the living room floor with my sister, a predominant childhood place involving wooden blocks and tiny dolls. My father was listening to NPR and mentioned the day was Bloomsday. Such a pretty word, I remember thinking. Much later, in high school, my sister and I devoured Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist.

James Joyce, so infinitely complex and rich — which, perhaps, pairs up perfectly with parenthood. Happy Father’s Day!

Welcome, O life!

— James Joyce

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Photo by Molly B.

Summer, Age 14

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

14 years ago yesterday, I sat in my friend’s kitchen nursing my newborn while she labored to bring into the world her daughter. Her mother-in-law served me a bowl of chicken soup from an enormous pot she had cooked.

Returning from a walk yesterday evening, I spy my daughter reading on front porch with her cats. Those days with an infant I hardly had a sense of evening from afternoon, in that churning wheel of nursing and diapers and tending.

Time passing threads all through my writing — how can it not? — and yet, sometimes I find myself staring through a window, thinking, here we are, right at this very moment.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

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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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