Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Tightrope and Travels

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Over the internet today, we heard news a local Vermont high school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. Immediately, my coworker and I thought of our children, although none of us had kids in that school. That experience – fearing for your children’s safety while they’re in school – I’m quite certain my parents never had.

This past year, due to a confluence of events, I’ve had to consider physical welfare and safety in ways I never considered. I’ve come to think of fear as the abyss around a tightrope, a void filled with invisible air currents, unexpected temperature changes, the swells of uncertainty.

If there is one thing that is certain, though, it’s that my own children and their generation will need to have their eyes open in all kinds of ways that never encroached on my New Hampshire childhood: rising waters, erupting violence; I will not continue the list.

Then today, randomly, at the bottom of a work-realted email, I read these lines from Desmond Tutu. There, I thought, is the tightrope to ferry my children across the abyss.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

— Desmond Tutu

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Where I Told the Children I Went Today….

Autumn Dusk

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With no snow, our late autumn Vermont appears like coals burned out, none of our summer’s radiance, our snowy luminosity. This afternoon, not yet four, with the light already leaking away, I lay down in my daughter’s forest lair, dead logs propped up against an enormous white pine. While she wandered away, busily scavenging planks for a footbridge over a culvert with a running stream, I lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes.

The afternoon was extraordinarily still, with not even a stir of wind, a chatter of chipmunk. I smelled mud, that thick, humusy scent of forest floor opened up. Still waiting, I opened my eyes and, through a part in the branches overhead, saw three crows traveling across the gray, cloudy sky, their wings steadily flapping, quite possibly not at all disturbed by the night falling down and the dearth of glow. And that, perhaps, might be the flight of autumn across our sliver of the world.

A lone crow
sits on a dead branch
this autumn eve

— Basho

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Ready

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A year ago, I finally wrote the query email that sold my book. With no internet access at home, I wrote the email in a corner of a public hallway in Montpelier, my back up against the literal as well as proverbial wall. I began, I’m going to go out on a limb here…

Later that afternoon, in a cold December rain, the day before Christmas break at my daughter’s school, I stood on the asphalt talking with her teacher, who, in his kind way, asked about our vacation plans while I willed myself not to begin crying. My entire world, interior and exterior, was suffused with dreary rainfall. I had no idea what would happen that afternoon, let alone in the next two weeks.

That was almost exactly a year ago. Did it take all of my life to write those words? To edge so far out on that limb there was no conceivable way I might crawl back?

The press published Leland Kinsey, a Vermont poet of phenomenal strength and beauty, a poet whose vision of the world cuts sharply, bloody at the bone, with rare grace. So much has happened in this year of my life, and yet, every time I sit down to write, I remind myself again that’s what I’m aiming for: push.

TO OUR VERMONT FATHER ON HIS EARLY WINTER BIRTHDAY

Our father who is in hospital,
hallowed be your name
though you are hollowed.
Your kingdom gone,
your will undone
on this earth, and there is no heaven.
You gave us, until this day, our daily bread.
and you forgave us our debts,
though you could not forgive your other debtors.
A fierce Scot, you were not led into temptation.
and tried to deliver us from evil.
You worked your life in the Northeast Kingdom
with power,
and no glory,
ever.

— Leland Kinsey

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Lake Elmore, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Singing in the Dark

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This time of year, the darkness knits around us. Waking early, I’m awake for hours working into the light. Very early evening, I returned with the children in the full dark, the stars overhead distantly radiant in the pitch firmament. The shortest day of the year is now so near, I can feel the arc of our universe nearly rounding the bend, gradually slingshotting us back toward light.

This is my one life. Say you know.
Say this means many things, say snowy owl,
say three feet of snow, say kestrel. My one
life is here at the table, next to me. Say you know,
say fine night for soup, glad to have you,
how was your drive….  Say here,
One Life, settle in with us. Here is the fire.
Say here is a warm stone. Say sing.

Say Sing, Kerrin McCadden

 

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Quiver of Arrow-Words

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My daughter’s friend offered a solidarity sentence about her friend at lunch today: The friend was irate. There had been a squabble about seating, and the allegedly irate child sat with her back toward another. While I’m not a fan of children hurling ire at one another, I admired the girl’s satisfied ten-year-old pleasure in using this mighty word. I pictured this girl with a bow held tight between her hands, arrow strung tight and ready to fly.

What is it a girl might need in her quiver of arrow-words? A child will need tumble and sungold-tomatoes, milk, and mirth. A woman needs moxie, wariness, appetite,
wonder, sorrow, and mirth.

No history books used in public school informed us (girls) about racial imperialism… No one mentioned mass murders of Native Americans as genocide, or the rape of Native American and African women as terrorism. No one discussed slavery as a foundation for the growth of capitalism. No one described the forced breeding of white wives to increase the white population as sexist oppression.

Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks

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In Between: Adolescence

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Raw. Mothering an adolescent daughter is like ripping a scab off your soul. My daughter’s agonized questions are existential: why do people suffer? What could possibly be the answer to this? A question I have asked since my own adolescence, more and more intently with each passing decade of my life, with each new encounter I have with the multiple varieties of human suffering.

Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood chronicles his young and pregnant wife’s death in an automobile accident. Luzzi, a Dante scholar, writes: My reading of Dante had always been deep and personal, but when I found myself in a dark wood, his words became a matter of life and death.

During both my children’s births, I felt myself poised between life and death, the scrim of our everyday world pushed aside in this small, sacred space. Surely, part of the keenness of adolescence is its odd pivotal place. Half in the clouds of childhood, not yet in the forest of adulthood, adolescence, for this brief (and yet simultaneously very long) moment, spins between these two realms.

 

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