Fleeting World

May 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, in the dark, I walked behind the barn and closed the chickens’ little door to keep out marauders. The golden hen was on the step inside the door, her little head tucked down into her feathers. I sunk my fingers into her soft feathers and spoke to her. In the window just above her head, the moonlight reflected back in my eyes. In this sweet May night, redolent with lilacs and cut grass, it seemed impossible that anything adverse would happen to these little creatures. In a nicer world, I would have left the door open so the birds might sleep under the sky.

I locked the door against the fox.

In the chilly night, I stood with my daughter admiring the moon, in her final week of being age 12.

But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—

— Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest

Walls of Blossoms

May 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

One of the pieces of work I picked up this spring involved the famous CDC-Kaiser Permanente study about Adverse Childhood Experiences — fascinating, but not an uplifting read. This study, not surprisingly, recorded that one way to break the cycle of childhood maltreatment is through positive relationships and experiences — perhaps tending flowers.

Where I live now, previous owners planted walls of lilacs between our house and the town. The walls have gateless openings where we walk (or run) through, and the lilacs are different varieties and colors. These early spring/beginning summer mornings, when the dew is heavy on the grass sprinkled with white and purple violets, the air is fragrant. Mystery upon mystery: who planted these flowers and how can they smell so beautiful?

On the Memorial Day weekend, here’s a bouquet of flowers and mystery.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

— Loren Eiseley

My Thieving Ways

May 25, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We sleep to peepers’ songs with the windows open, waking in the cool mornings.

The days are so long and light-filled that we’re out late, sometimes with gardening projects, sometimes kicking a soccer ball or just wandering around.

Behind the high school, I discover clumps of bluets about the size of a fist, the tiny light blue flowers with their golden-yolk hearts. With my daughters, I return with an old spoon and a yogurt container. The soil there is harder than I expected. My daughters drift off to the school’s hoop house, in search of a shovel. I turn the spoon around and jam its handle into the earth, prying out spindly roots. I cup them in my palm — three spoonfuls worth of beauty.

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

—Basho

Lilacs!

May 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Every morning these days, my daughter and I look to see if the lilacs have opened. Today, today.

Their scent reminds me of some of the best things: early childhood, summertime dinners on the grass, the return of spring.

a scrap of iron–
without fail, menfolk
stop to look

— Uda Kiyoko

May Magic

May 22, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m reading a solid Vermont novel — Ruth Porter’s Unexpected Grace. Porter’s book focuses on everyday people and actions: a woman weeding her flowerbed before a lung biopsy, an older woman traveling on a train, families who care about each other, sometimes awkwardly as families can be.

At a reading a fairly well-known Vermont author gave recently at the local bookstore, a nonfiction writer in the audience asked why she wrote fiction. The possibilities, he commented, seem endless.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Fiction reflects life, and those choices are one of the things I find most interesting about fiction. Which way will the woman drinking diet Pepsi turn? How will her marriage weather the loss of her husband’s job?

“….I was just thinking it would be nice if the stars were aligned in my favor. There is magic and mystery in the world. It’s all around us.” She managed to get it out before she had to cough again.

Tall Daughters

May 20, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I ask my daughters if they’d mind going to Burlington on a late rainy afternoon. Heck, yeah. This proposal isn’t like asking a daughter to bury a garden fence to keep the woodchuck out.

Less than two weeks remain before the younger crosses over into age 13, into official adolescence, but, truthfully, she’s already stepped over that line. At 3 and 4, this girl’s favorite dress was a leotard with a ruffled tutu — a little green fairy. Always quieter than her sister, she’s still in the backseat, listening to her older sister and me, talking, talking. But now, she lobbies questions between us, needing to know.

Second time around parenting a teenage girl, my tack has altered: argue less, listen more. My friends with their newborn babies aren’t sleeping much these days, peering into tiny mouths for emerging pearly teeth. Babies are great, but the teenage landscape is when things really begin to get interesting.