This Annual Fête

May 25, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

When I was just out of graduate school, I taught middle school kids for two years in a program where another tutor rubbed me wrong. She was forty and supremely confident; she and her husband had made what was likely a ton of money on Wall Street and now lived in Vermont. She laughed that they had spent $100K renovating a bathroom — more than I later paid for a house and 100 acres.

At the Memorial Day Parade, I met her family, with their two little boys. I was childless then, and longing for a baby. She had a dog on a leash. One son had contracted E. coli. The deal was, she said, I told him we would get a dog if he didn’t die. So, we got a dog.

Part of me wishes I could ruefully look back at my younger, snarlier self (who cares how much someone spends on a bathroom, anyway?) with humor and lightness. But really, the crotchety side of me is immediately recognizable — if anything, ground deeper, more articulate, wiser for the wear.

Lying on the Grass…

May 23, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

After a less-than-harmonious game of croquet, I lie back on the grass. Overhead, a rainbow. All this day, toiling away at things that may or may not matter…. and in this pause, a rainbow? Makes me wonder what else I missed.

Such a moon—
the thief
pauses to sing.

— Buson

The Black Line Within a Tulip

May 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While the big fad out there is to number things and experiences — the 10 best things to do with your whining toddler — and important stuff like that, one of my minor goals for the summer is to just soak up experiences as a kind of antidote to the ravages of last winter. By that, I mean the subzero days and nights of blowing snow.

In our house, we’re not going to count the days of summer, either. Why put a number on that?

Saturday morning, the younger sister sees the first of the red tulips we planted last fall has opened. She runs back in the house and demands her sister come out, and look down, into the flower. With the day ahead of us, come hell or high water, we stand there, the three of us, for a long moment, gazing down.

Brief Water Interlude

May 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the rain, the girls pushed the kayaks into the water. The wind blew up, and I sat on the shore, my plan to lie on the grass and read foiled. Later, I went down to the end of the pond and sat at the edge while the rain washed through and sunlight sprinkled the water. The inky black head of a loon surfaced.

The girls paddled over to me, laughing. A heron cut across the cloudy sky. The peepers chorused busily. A boy appeared with his fishing pole.

This cold May: every day, a little more green, a bit more Technicolor, antidote to That Winter…

…here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines.

— Ryōkan

Vermont Gold

May 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

To get to my daughter’s preschool, years ago, I had to drive up the Center Road from Hardwick to Greensboro, along enormous farm fields. In May, the fields were nearly covered with blooming dandelions — or dandies as she called them.

‘Tis the season now for blooming dandelions — their first and brightest bloom of the season, against blue mountains and iridescent green fields.

When I was very young, with my years still countable on one hand, my family traveled to Ames, Iowa, from the New Mexican desert where I had always lived. In Iowa, I discovered green: sunlight through leaves and running barefoot on grass beneath a sprinkler. In that early-childhood magical way, this upthrusting spring season always reminds me of the implicit goodness of being four again.

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew…

— Rilke

(Not a dandelion….)

Lemons and Rabbits

May 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

When my first daughter was two, my mother sewed her a dress she called “The Peter Rabbit Dress” — pink, her favorite color then, with a print of little Peter Rabbits holding baskets. A few years later, she was happy to pass this dress along to her little sister.

Last weekend, on an impulse, I bought this 20-year-old daughter a summer dress, with an elegant lemon pattern. I haven’t bought her a dress in years, since she began working and buying her own clothes, but this dress seemed exactly perfect for her.

At 20, she’s a variation of who she was at 4 — smart and funny, determined to make her own decisions, as fallible as the rest of us. Her birthright, though, goes far beyond a print of rabbits or lemons. As much as any man — despite Alabama’s draconian bent — she’s at the helm of her own ship, in seas of all weather.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Author: Brett Ann Stanciu