Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Open Hearts

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The cliché about a small town is you know everything and everyone. By far the simplest part of my day yesterday was the boy who walked into my library, returned books, and asked how many he could check out. He’s the hungriest kid reader in the library, and we mutually agree he needs to stock up on books for the Christmas break.

Maybe 7 years ago, I laughed with this boy’s mother at a friend’s birthday party. Shyly, the little boy and his even younger sister crawled beneath her long skirt. I wrote his father paychecks the summer he worked for my now ex renovating the large yellow inn in town.

How little we really know, though — of each other, of our own selves.

I jammed so much into that day — hours of solitary work; a doctor’s visit with my teenager where she used her voice, ringing with the righteous truth of adolescence; an hour at a selectboard meeting with people I’ve known in one way or another for years, together in one room, united in concern for the future of the school and the town. The future’s unknown path hovers above us.

Outside the town clerk’s office — a former one-room schoolhouse — the moon shone in the cold dark, caught in the bare branches of a maple tree.

How time moves on — and yet it doesn’t. For a moment, I stood talking with a friend on the moonlit snow. Then she went her way. I went mine, home to daughters and an algebra problem with a flipped sign and the cats sprawled on the rug.

More reading recommendations from my father:

It’s the same with the wound in our hearts. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wounds continue to cause us pain… But here’s the trick — they also serve an amazing purpose. When our hearts are wounded that’s when they open. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations. That’s why you have to embrace each and every difficult thing in your life.

― James R. Doty, Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

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Summer memory!

In the Gloaming

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Even the kids remark on the darkness.

In our kitchen, the girls baking cookies after school turn on the overhead light. At my library, the little children play outside in the afternoon dark, rolling down the snowy hillside in their bulky clothes.

I turn on the outside light beside the door for the parents. It’s not yet 5 o’clock.

Around our house, a bitter wind swirls snowflakes with tiny teeth. On our red rug, the cats stretch, indolent. Through the vast space, on our heavenly blue-and-emerald body, we spin.

Already light is returning pairs of wings
lift softly off your eyelids one by one
each feathered edge clearer between you
and the pearl veil of day

You have nothing to do but live.

— From “Winter Solstice” by Anonymous

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Kindling in December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Frost twists upward this morning on the sticks of our lilac bushes. Come early June, we’ll live outdoors, surrounded by the fragrance of multiple blossoms. Not so, these New England winter days.

In a brief pass of sunlight, we hurry outside, take a walk through the woods, observe the ice curling over a running brook. Later, in my Sunday housecleaning, shaking rugs over the deck railings, I hear the girls in the cemetery laughing. From the barn, they’ve taken the sled in search of a snowy hillside.

Mid-December — the hard and holy time.

Upstairs, my daughter plays the clarinet, the melody languorously easing into the afternoon’s already fading sunlight.

Mid-December, holy perhaps precisely for its hardness. Draw the darkness fast around us; see what we hold, what we cherish.

I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

— Gary Soto, Oranges

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Reprieve

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This morning, I’m in the snowy garden assessing the remaining kale. As I lift the limp leaves, crusty snow crumbles fall into my boots and around my sockless feet.

Walking back to the house, my daughter’s outside in a t-shirt, feeding her chickens leftover popcorn.

Kale, garlic, onion, fennel-sweet sausage for a savory soup. Mid-December. Take heart.

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück

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Parenting

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On a Philip Larkin jag, I think of his lines as I’ve driving with my 19-year-old up the switchbacks climbing the mountainside from the Connecticut River to Danville.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
 
We’ve been to see an old man — a doctor and a Zen Buddhist — whom I’ve convinced has answers, actual answers damn it, to the riddle of her and me and her father. My daughter hates the old man. Actually hates him.
 
It’s December and cold as hell. The sun sparks from ice at the edges of the river where the wide current is just beginning to freeze. The sun is nothing but cold comfort, so low in the sky warmth is merely a memory.
 
Driving, talking, we pass a particular bend in Route 2 where, decades ago and years before she was born, the Volkswagen bus my daughter’s father was driving broke down on the edge of the road. He had downshifted, stalled, and in that moment, the engine froze and refused to start. For years, the bus was parked behind his sister’s village house.
 
I stop in Danville for gas and wash the salt and road dust from the windshield, remembering the ugly tan color of that Volkswagen. From here, the road home is familiar all the way. I’m always writing about roads, always writing about journeys, sometimes just down to the post office to open the mailbox to see what’s there — or not. 
 
Staring at the keys in my mitten, I remind myself my daughter’s journey is her own. Or, back off. Then I hold out my hand to her and ask, You want to drive home?
 
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Family Holiday Pact

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My brother calls, and I hear a terrific rattling. On inquiry, I learn he’s tipping up an empty cracker bag and eating the crumbs and salt at the bottom.

The rattling keeps up. I start laughing. He complains about the societal mandate of holiday cheer. My daughter, sitting on a yoga ball nearby, says to tell her uncle Yahtzee is part of our Christmas plans and a movie he introduced her to — I can’t bear to reveal the title — and my brother says that movie is fucking great. The movie is so bad I have a strange kind of affection for it.

Through the phone, I surmise he’s frying pork chops.

We come to our usual pact that, this time, no ER visits and no calls to the police. Mutually, we pledge to games (he and his girlfriend will trounce me in science trivia, I’ll crush them with literature), fresh air, and cooking. Mutually, we pledge not to holiday cheer but to fucking great.

State 14 ran my piece on house hunting. Eric Hodet’s stew on this site is particularly tempting….

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in…
“Days,” by Philip Larkin
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