Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Small Travels

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Last night, with the full moon rising, a raw wind stirring up, and my daughter saying as we walked into town, Hey, it’s cold, and what about those dark clouds following us?, I remembered walking around this house when it was empty, on a bitter winter’s night, thinking whoever lived here would have an exquisite view of the rising moon.

While spring is the season of sprawl  – get out the garden shovels and pea fencing, wash the winter’s dust from blankets and rugs and pin them on the line – November is the season of drawing in. Gather the stray soccer balls. Press the garlic down deep.

Holding the umbrella,
The mother is behind.
The autumn rain.

– Nakamura Teijo

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One Word

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Texting is like tossing paper airplanes to someone, back and forth, with tiny notes.

My daughter texts me about the usual humdrum of who’s picking up her sister or grocery lists, sometimes bigger issues like financial aid deadlines, but also notes like, Want to know something weird? Well, who wouldn’t?

Some days, nothing. Some days, a veritable JFK International of these flying notes.

The other day, she and her friend shoulder their heavy backpacks and head off to their college classes. I’m at my laptop, working, when a single word comes through: rainbow. Just that.

I type back, Double.

Yes, she returns.

That was all. She was already on her way, having tossed me that sweet missive: see this.

The rainbow stands
In a moment
As if you are here.

– Takahama Kyoshi

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In Between Seasons

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And then suddenly it’s November, and the foliage is flattening to gray, the tamaracks beginning to burn their golden torch flames. Like a memory, the bones of trees appear again – oh, branches have been under your leaves all summer. In an odd way, it’s an incredibly graceful time of year.

Maples often shed from the top down, so the tiptoe branches are stritching against the sky, while the lower limbs are yet golden, barely rust-speckled.

I thought of these trees, half in one season, half in another, when my daughter was loonily recovering from a tooth extraction. I couldn’t resist asking, when she was cloudy and laughing, Are you grown up?

Just recently, she insisted that, since she’s no longer a minor, she’s an adult.

But yesterday, cloudy with anesthesia, she revealed that she’s not wholly, entirely, all grown up.

One foot in, with her long legs stretching, she’s far more in the adult world than the lingering tatters of her childhood, but yet….

Blooming

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My neighbor planted sunflowers way late – so late all I did was nod at her belief those seeds would bloom. Now the sunflowers are humbling me.

Halloween and these beauties are not even marked by frost. I’ve been humbled by worse things than a sunflower though…..

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

– Loren Eiseley

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The Shape of A House

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In the moonlight last night, with the stars overhead, my daughters and I walked up the hill to our house with a single window lit. Our former house, tall and narrow with a cupola, always reminded me of sailing ship, steady through sunny days and pelting sleet.

Our house now is square, its windows like eyes to the mountains and the valley. Entering feels like greeting the embrace of folded arms.

In the village at night, the houses are alive, even those sleeping with darkened windows. Enter our kitchen door and discover our white tin table strewn with hand-scrawled notes, hair ties, library books, a wooden car my child made, Halloween chocolates. What’s on the tables of all these neighbors, I wonder. Just how fine a photography mosaic all our tables might make.

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

– Ezra Pound

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O, The Maple Loveliness

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On a cheesecloth foray for the 12-year-old and her friend (a must have for making mummy luminaries), the kids and I stand in a parking lot, and I point out a maple tree across Route 15. More or less, the foliage is finished around us now, but this mature maple had gold at the crown sprinkled down to green at its lower branches.

We were in one of the uglier areas of town, swampy, with a gas station/liquor store, a depressing Dollar Store, some rundown houses and trailers. The tree, however, was so exquisite that my daughter’s friend remarked it appeared to be pruned. We laughed at that  thought – as if a ladder could scale this great beauty, as if human hands might shape this natural perfection.

Across the cemetery is another lovely maple; down Spring Street are the silver maple gems…. and on and on…. And if you’re in Montpelier, admire the maples on the library’s lawn.

Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabel
Made Maple first take notice of her name.
She asked her father and he told her, “Maple—
Maple is right.”…

From Robert Frost’s “Maple”

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