Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

And Then This…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, in the early frosty morning, my daughter and I stood in her elementary school’s muddy parking lot, with no one around, in a brief pause between kids and adults coming and going. Red-wing blackbirds chorussed in the leafless branches of a maple tree. As long as I live, I can’t imagine ever tiring of that melody.

Even with the frost, the morning already smelled of thawing mud. We could sense the earth and its critters shaking off winter’s slumbers.

Like that: the light of April rushing back in. Spring.

….In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
time was endless….
– Louise Glück, “The Silver Lily”
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Stranger’s Gift

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A friend stops by the library on my shift and offers hand-me-downs from her coworker I’ve never met. I lift pastel cotton t-shirts, a linen skirt, an embroidered sleeveless blouse: summer things that whisper to me of sunnier days, bare feet on grass, a season not too far off in Vermont’s snowy April but requiring memory and imagination.

At the paper bag bottom are two handmade sweaters. A knitter myself, I lift the blue one and immediately see this is a pattern I would have loved to knit, in this well-spun wool. The knitter was ordered, with evenly placed buttons and mirror sleeve caps, and practical, too: one cuff has a pattern slip I might have made and not redone.

While my friend keeps talking, I ease my arms into the sweater, and, although I’m so small I’m nearly in the land of the Oompla Loompas, the cardigan fits me perfectly, all the way down to the right length of sleeves, as if this unknown creator was my doppelgänger.

The second, white sweater I merely admire with my fingertips and leave for someone else, whose name I’ll never know.

Don’t touch my plumtree!
Said my friend and saying so…
Broke the branch for me.

– Bashō

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Photo by Gabriela

 

The Pleasures of Parenting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Standing in line at the DMV this afternoon, I recognized a local poet in the waiting room reading The New York Review of Books. As the line was long, I stood watching the poet and his teenage daughter converse about something in the Review. She wore high heeled red leather boots, laces neatly tied around her ankles.

Still waiting in line while my daughters walked around Montpelier in gently-falling snow, I remembered an article my own father had forwarded me about the name of the Buddha’s son: Rahula, which means fetter.

Like most parents I know, my life is intensely fettered, by some unnecessary things perhaps, but bound also by the everydayness of waiting in line for a license renewal, something on the surface overly simplistic and sometimes downright irritating. Yet when my girls walked across the marble floor of that office building, with snowflakes melting in their eyelashes, laughing at some joke between them they had no need to share to with me, I wouldn’t have traded these fetters for the moon.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

– Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

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Here In Kid World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter sends me a photo via email with the subject line “Awesomeness.” How cool is that?

Yesterday, home after work, with dinner not yet made, and the house messy with potential buyers expected the next morning, a litany of chores from unwashed breakfast dishes to a fish tank bubbler needing repair, I first opened the box with my laptop battery. A $15 replacement I’ve put off for months.

The heavy lithium battery lay in my hand, and I guiltily wondered what strangers had made this toxic thing.

My daughter held the plastic bubble wrap. “Can I pop this? Please?”

I put her off, wanting to know if I’d ordered the right-sized battery, not paying any attention to my child at all, still thinking of my afternoon with its entanglements of adult problems.

From the plastic, she squeezed a bubble and held it up to the little lights in the house. Look through this, she asked. And then I’m finally smart enough to lay aside my jumbled thoughts and peer through her vision.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

R. L. Stevenson

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Photo by Gabriela

Squishy Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

‘Tis the season of mud in Vermont. I once had a neighbor (now relocated back to an enormous city) who hated mud. Her daughter and my daughter were both little then, with rubber boots and pink raincoats decorated with kitties, and the girls adored splashing in March and April puddles, digging with sticks in the ditches along our roadsides, and baking mud cakes in kitchens they built with fallen branches, on carpeted floors of pine needles. Sweet days.

The girls spent many more hours at my house than at hers, shedding their filthy and soaked clothes on our porch and sprawling before the wood stove to warm up, eating popcorn and drinking honeyed tea and giggling. Sweet days.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, “This is and no mistake.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Burlington, Vermont

One More Reason to Like Vermont

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Vermont’s Congressional delegation came to our local high school yesterday, Hazen Union in Hardwick – Bernie Sanders with his mighty vehemence and voice, Leahy with his longevity, and Welch with his even-handed thoughtfulness. Welch joked that Vermont’s delegation could meet in an elevator – and does.

But Bernie was the one who got the packed gymnasium cheering loudest. He began with acknowledging that these are tough times, strange days indeed, but, nonetheless, he said, I woke up feeling pretty good this morning. To his loyal crowd of fellow citizens, this boundless optimism shone: the steadfast belief in goodwill, the persistent faith in a moral universe.

All of us share this world for a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focussed on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the decency of all human beings.

– Barack Obama

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