Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

The Little Hermit Thrush

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Around my garden, hermit thrush are nesting for the season, singing their enchanting melodies, amazingly pure and piercing sounds from a bird so small it’s a handful of feathers and bone. The thrush is not a songbird from my childhood. As an adult, backpacking along the spine of the Vermont’s Green Mountains and sleeping outside, I first heard these unmistakable notes, and here, at this house on the edge of forest, these birds became my companions.

Now the thrush’s song has been a litany through my adult life, from before I become a mother to watching my children grow up. The birds lived here before I planted a garden, and no doubt will remain, long after my work with a hoe and spade have ceased.

Morbid? I don’t think so. There’s a real grace to be gathered here, listening to these symphonies of tiny songbirds – admission gratis. These mating calls are an audible tapestry that renders time not so sparse and dear but stretches it out into an immense arc of infinity. Sing on!

Nothing’s certain….

Watching, we drop to listen,
a hermit thrush distills it: fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end what source
links to wonder….

– Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”

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Woodbury, Vermont, twilight

 

Break That Cliche: Writing Lesson from the Kids

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My ten-year-old came downstairs the other morning dressed in shorts although it was only 39 degrees. No. I immediately said. But it might warm up, she insisted.

In this afternoon’s rain, the kids have headed down the road to the neighbors’ trampoline because it’s fun in the rain, apparently, even in a cold May rain.

These Vermont kids, like the unfurling leaves in my apple trees, are vigorously unstoppable with their own flowing sap. At ten and eleven, the world is as new to them as this magnificently unfolding spring. Lacking rigid expectations, why not leap in the rain? – Although I did notice the girls had the foresight to pull on extra pairs of socks.

 

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.

– Federico Garcia Lorca

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Vermont dusk

Prayer for A Little More Kindness

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This morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest kids shared their work and ended singing a country western song together. I’m no particular fan of country western, but listening to these small kids sing, I realized this song was really a hymn, a prayer for children to retain their sweet and noble natures.

The share had begun with stories the children had written, envisioning their grownup lives, but the song took the children’s stories to a different dimension, mixing qualities of the heart with their written projects. Maybe some of these kids will never remember this song, but my guess is more than a few someday, in the midst of their own unexpected (and hopefully marvelous) adult lives, will remember singing in their kindergarten classroom with real fondness. 

Am I still kind? Humble? Do I yet have the better part of who I am? Then again, maybe this song is really an adult prayer.

…When it’s hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Always stay humble and kind
Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you…

– Tim McGraw, “Humble and Kind”

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Photo by Molly S.

Commune Scene

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Green, green, green! Last night, reading about Vermont’s commune scene in the 1970s, I had to laugh about hippies coming to Vermont in the glory of summer, and then finding winter a different reality altogether. In a Vermont spring, every day, the black earth yields violet, buttery gold, emerald green.

Working in the garden in the late afternoon, I can fully imagine the hippie joy at this green paradise. Come the snowy season, though, and the idealism must have quickly faded. Having written a book about Vermont and youthful idealism, having given my own blood to this black and sometimes cold earth, on a day like today, Vermont is well worth enduring the stay. Today, I can pass on the Huck Finn advice.

(The back-to-the-landers of the 1970s) were acting, in part, on a characteristically American assumption that if things get bad where we are – too hectic, too dangerous, too messy – we can simply decamp to a new frontier and start again, that all we need to begin a new venture or even create a new society is a new piece of land.

– Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

 

What’s A Poem Worth?

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Yesterday, someone said to me, why would people write a poems if they weren’t going to be paid for them?

That’s a gulch of perception I may never be able to cross. What is a poem worth, anyway?

This morning in Montpelier, I attended an art show, where my daughter had a painting entered. In the opening remarks by Tom Greene, president of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he said creating art widens our experience and makes us more humane. I’m not sure that sentiment would have imprinted on me as an adolescent, but as an adult, far down in the cavernously lonely well of writing a second novel, those words shone like a bright beacon far above, a place I know – a place I continue to heads towards through the arduous work of writing.

What’s art worth? A truer question, perhaps, would be: how unimaginable our world would be without art.

"This is Just to Say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

– William Carlos Williams

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artwork by Molly S.

 

Girls

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A mother I don’t know particularly well commented recently that she feels so old, seeing her daughter head off to college, and I thought, Really? While babies and little ones are darling and endearing, those so-intense early mothering years wore me down. Now, as my oldest blooms into her own young adulthood, I’m able to take a kind of pleasure I couldn’t when she was younger. Maybe it’s just me, learning how to stand back , or I’m beginning to accept her life is her own birthright, that my daughter is the master of her destiny – not me. Maybe, simply, I’m learning to elbow away perpetual fears and take joy.

At a breakfast of crêpes, my younger daughter read aloud the word of the day: oenomel: something combining strength with sweetness.

I laughed. That’s me, I said. Or least what I’m aiming for!

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

– Sharon Olds

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Hardwick, Vermont