Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

And the Bands Beat On….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter plays clarinet in the band. Her school’s so small the band is both middle and high school, younger kids mixed in with the kids who are driving and working jobs and on the cusp of grownupness. It reflects the small town kind of world we live in, that, by the nature of its size, encourages acceptance. I linked up with a woman I’ve known since our oldest kids were nursing babies, 20 years ago.

Twenty school bands from all over the state played in a parade last night in Montpelier. As I walked around the high school, looking for my daughter, the evening sun in my eyes, I followed the tunes from one band to another. So much live music! So many kids!

For that brief time — the best of parenting. Laughter and silliness in the heady May evening, beneath trees just barely beginning to leaf out. I drove my hungry kid home, listening to her, as we drove through the dusk tumbling down, back to our house and the cats at the door, mewling for affection.

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Shape of May

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I always imagine Medieval life as so much field around all those storied castles. In May, the Vermont landscape is wide open. The forest aren’t leafed out yet. The bushes are sticks without greenery. The shape of the land is there for the looking.

The comparison ends there, I know. Contemporary Vermont isn’t bound by class or infused with religion. No holy temples are built here, save what each family builds for themselves.

But there’s still all this land, fallow, ready for seed. All this potential, of yet another growing year.

Singing, planting rice,
village songs more lovely
than famous city poems.

— Basho

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Ode to Dirt

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While my youngest cleaned out her chicken house, I kicked apart the compost and did a little ‘reorganizing’ of black earth — that chocolate for plants — mushy sunflower stalks from last October, paired with last week’s old rice.

Outside all afternoon, I remembered why I love living in this house, on this village hillside, in Vermont — especially when I found a cluster of heart-shaped leaves on the south side of our house, tucked up against the foundation wall, soaking up sun. The blossoms were the purest of white, the tiny petals streaked with deep purple. Common violets.

In this season of growth, four teens in my kitchen…..

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Gold Smudge

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My work these days reflects the weather’s dreariness — grant-writing — work I implicitly believe I should feel jazzed and excited about — and maybe I will, maybe I’ll get there, but grants so often feel like closed doors, of no room at the inn and all.

To counteract that — and the terrible string of cancer deaths from a Waldorf school where my daughter was once a student — I’m holing up reading novels. Despite the rain, my daughters and I are in the woods every day. Even on late days when I’m at work, they send me photos. One daughter is just out of childhood, the other has but a handful of years left. Observing them, I wonder what of my parenting will stick with them.

The younger daughter and I found our first unopened trillium yesterday. The older daughter asked the blossom’s color. The younger asked if it mattered. Yes, her sister answered.

Everywhere, yellow smears of blossoming forsythia.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Natsume Soseki

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Croquet before the green….

May!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Hurray! May!

The May I was pregnant with my second child, rain fell every one of those 31 days — from a few sprinkles to all-day, shiver-inducing soakers. There’s an old adage, or so I’m told, that the rainier the May, the hotter the summer. That year, at least, was so.

Silage corn pushed through the black earth in the days after her birth, tiny nubs of green.

Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers.

— Issa

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Sticks and Girl

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My daughter picks at dirt on the cuff on her jeans, troubled by this, which interests me. She’s a remarkably easy and even-tempered girl, and I sometimes wonder at her own and distinctive understanding of the world’s order.

In my bare root order, I have a handful of what seem to be sticks with filigreed root balls. Walking behind our garden in the damp April evening, she asks me if I’ll still live here when these sticks become trees.

I’m planting for the property, I answer. That answer suffices for her. She stands with me, as we envision stick widening into trunk, twig fattening into branch.

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