Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Farm Kids

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I left early yesterday morning, giving my daughter in her bed a cat and a kiss, and heading to a rural corner of Vermont where traffic wasn’t a problem — as if traffic generally ever is in Vermont.

I was checking out a high school ag program to write about. The students were funny, a little rough around the edges, the boys joshing each other. They cheerfully answered my questions — it took nothing more than for me to ask, Tell me what you’re doing, and the kids started their stories, knowledgeable and ready to share their know-how, as farm kids often are.

The landscape in that part of Vermont spreads flatly around enormous Lake Champlain, as if there’s so much more terrain than in my mountainous part of Vermont. Driving home, I thought about those kids, one girl who was determined to be an artificial inseminator technician, another who was headed to cosmetology school, all so young, just beginning their lives. One boy struggled with a steer, tugging with all his weight on its rope. A girl came over and took the rope from his hands, said Hey, now, and the steer followed her.

I left with a dozen pepper plants from their greenhouse. I’ve buried their roots already in the last bit of open space in my garden, with a silent prayer, Thrive.

losing you
was the becoming
of myself.

rupi kaur, milk and honey

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June 4

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Here’s the story of June: I walk behind the barn this morning and the tree branches grab for me. Just the day before, mere branches with fresh leaves — this morning, fierce growth.

May is delicate, fragrant. By July, Vermont’s wildness will be tempestuous, crazy with green. By August, we’ll be picking blackberries surrounded by wild apples, a profusion of fruit on vine and branch.

This year, I’m determined savor the summer, come what may — brutal humidity, a woodchuck with an appetite, or, what’s far more likely, what I haven’t imagined.

Nonetheless….. that’s my mantra. Snow will return, soon enough.

You got to understand: here
Winter stays six months a year—
Mean, mean winters and too long.
Ninety days is what we get, just

Ninety days of frost free weather….

— David Budbill

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Why Love Teens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my older daughter was a teen and invited over a posse of girls, I was always amazed by just the size of the girls — so much young female energy and just so much talk! They eat like crazy — and then eat like crazy again — but they’re just so darn enthusiastic, just so darn happy to be testing out the world.

Last night at our house, the six young teens, buoyed by a balmy early summer evening, slept outside. Why not? Under the stars, I could see my breath.

On the same day, the neighbors’ celebrated their four-year-old’s birthday. In the afternoon, he began riding a bicycle with training wheels. When my teens eat and eat, when I’m mired down in the complexities of living with teens, I remind myself that those sweet sippy cup days have now passed me by.

Tired, the girls struggled in bedraggled in the morning, hungry for waffles.

I emerge
from the museum
at dusk —
the blue Nile
floods over.

— Fumi Saitō

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Dirty Knees

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Mid-morning in sultry yesterday, I’m beneath the deck nailing a chicken fence on one end to keep my daughter’s chickens from venturing toward the neighbors. I’m thinking of my folded-up laptop on the table on the deck above my head and of the woman I just interviewed, how I want to write just 500 words before I’m at the middle school again, picking up my daughter. At the same time, I’m thinking of a house insurance bill.

Her golden chicken appears beside me and clucks softly, as if asking a question. Then I just stop for a moment and ask the chicken, hey, what’s up? I remember when my father, decades ago, put on his oldest clothes and crawled in the narrow space beneath our house, cleaning up the droppings from our beloved cat.

I hammer that fence together — maybe it’ll hold for a day or a year — toss the chicken a crust leftover from my daughter’s breakfast as she rushed to school, and then I write those 500 words.

Black gloves
I threw into a field
rise up again —
yellow flowers blooming
from their fingers.

— Fumi Saitō in A Long Rainy Season

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Moonrise: a Great Gift

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter, up late, says, I’m going out to look at the moonrise.

One long skinny band of cloud bends across the nightsky, luminescent with moonlight. The moon rises amber.

My daughter runs into the house for her sister. The three of us walk over the dewy grass. The world is in complete, beautiful repose, with the just-past-full moon silently rising, peepers gently murmuring, the cats in an open window watching, their little heads bent together, and all around us the fragrance of lilacs.

All winter, I’ve wondered about these lilacs — and here they bloom, better than I ever could have imagined.

The night beauty is so expansively calm it’s the best birthday present I could have desired for this turning-13 girl — an enchanting embrace from the universe cupping our home.

And then we go in to sleep.

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring

—Bashō

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Before the Birth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

13 years and a day ago, I walked down to our sugarhouse and closed the double front doors. Rain had fallen every day in that May, but that morning promised to be sunny.

After prolonged medical discussions, I had agreed to a caesarian for this second child. That morning, I leaned against the rough boards of our sugarhouse, with my enormous belly, looking at the wild red trilliums.

My six-year-old was eating breakfast with her father in the kitchen. I knew we would leave soon, that my two friends would be meeting us. But I kept leaning against the door, in one of those moments where time drifts away. I was so ready to meet this little child, to know who this new person in the world might be — and far above all — to know this baby was born well and whole.

I didn’t know then the natural sweetness of this child. I didn’t know, either, that her easygoing temperament would evolve as she grew into a wordless strength, that by the time this child was ten, her family would had shrunk to just a few of us. But I did know what an incredible piece of good fortune I had to be a mother to a second child. If anything, I know this more deeply now.

When she was born, this tiny girl could lie in my left arm, her head in my elbow, her miniature toes in my palm. She would lie there, blinking her little eyes, as though wondering, What now?

….may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back…

— Lucille Clifton

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