Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Ordering our Space

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My daughter brought in her treasures from her creme stand today, preparing for winter. The creme stand, passed down from her older sister, is an open-sided playhouse complete with salvaged gems:  a dented wok, a rusting percolator found in a farm dump, a broken food mill, and bottles and jars and containers. Back in the summers when I sold maple syrup, I bought hundreds of dollars worth of bottles every year, and I often acquired special bottles at her request. Bottles in the shape of a smiling sun, a crescent moon, a sugarhouse, a miniature heart. Whatever hasn’t broken has been bequeathed to the second daughter. Following her older sister’s lead, these bottles are filled with colored water, and hence the need to gather before the water freezes in the coming cold.

Likewise, today, I’m gathering tomatoes, pulling spent plants, putting to end-of-season rights what I can. So today, this Sunday at home, my daughter put her things in order, too.

We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves.

––Thich Nhat Hanh

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Photo by Molly S.

Book in the Hand

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A cardboard box of advance reader copies of my book–my first book–appeared in the mail. Returning home from work and school, my daughters and I had gone in through the kitchen door, and it wasn’t until I was at the kitchen counter slicing tomatoes for dinner that through the window I saw the box on the stone step at the back door.

It was the most curious feeling to pull out crumpled paper and find my bound  books, so beautifully designed, crafted with such care and attention–this novel I have spun from nothing but my own experience and language, through all those hours scavenged, often late at night, early in the morning, during child naptimes. Like nothing else, this book in my hand is a bridge between the mysterious well of my working imagination and the world, a tangible here I am.

Whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page. […] Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.

–– Sharon Olds

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Companionship, Mothering

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When I went through my time of parenting two-year-olds, I thought that was difficult. Exhilarating, exhausting, maddening at times: but yes, difficult. Oh, how young I was.

To parent a teenager is in some ways like walking through a ring of fire. Going forward, I will doubtless be scorched, and my emergence is not guaranteed. Last night, my daughter asked me with genuine anguish, But why do people suffer? When I was sixteen, I asked this question, and I’ve continued to ask this question, in a multiplicity of ways, through decades. I can spew off varieties of answers, but ultimately, to my daughter, with her honest face, I come up short.

Late in the night, with my children sleeping, a solitary light burning, the windows open to the crickets with their sound of tiny shaking bells, I read a passage from a chaplain who had been at the scene of a horrific plane crash. When I finished the book, in those quiet, dark hours, I thought of my child. Just as she fought in her birth to be free of my body, I see this girl thrusting her way from the tatters of her childhood, striding so urgently toward what she believes is the golden realm of womanhood. Here I am again, ready to catch my daughter, wanting only to be here.

“… I don’t know why that young child was killed. This is a true mystery. And so I enter into it with you. I cry with you if you allow me into that space. I’ll walk with you. And this is something that a lot of chaplains I know that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan–talking with their soldiers–they’ll say, Look, I’m gonna journey with you on this. I’m not here to explain it. I’m gonna journey with you. There’s a sense of humility there that I think connects with people, because I think in their heart of hearts we know, Oh, I don’t have an answer. So let’s walk into that mystery together.”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Anniversaries and the Children

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Anniversaries held keen importance to James Joyce. June 16, Bloomsday, was the date he and Nora Barnacle first went walking. This date–September 16–marks a different kind of anniversary for me, the date of an accident in our family a number of years ago, a genuine shifting point in our lives. I wrote an essay about that accident, which was published, and I was paid a good amount of money for it.

While the experience was excruciating, so much came out of that night, like a fount of energy, a swirl of all kinds of things. Looking back now, I see how, even then, in what appeared to me a stillness of stupefying suffering, our very lives continued to pulse, to throb on with the very things that make us human–desire and love and laughter. Much as I might have longed to retract into into my own misery and fear, I was pulled forth by the insistence of such simplicity as hunger, dirty diapers, a child’s hand in my own.

….and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes….

–– James Joyce, Ulysses

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Stillness

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The middle of September arrived today, with a reprieve from the prior days’ intimations of winter and dark, the imminent long gray Vermont cool-down of each fall, the lingering death of summer before winter’s glittery beauty. Through the window in the dentist’s office today, the sky shone flawless azure, tantalizing in its loveliness.

“Summer Morning,” by Charles Simic

…I hear a butterfly stirring
Inside a caterpillar,
I hear the dust talking
Of last night’s storm….

And all of a sudden!
In the midst of that quiet,
It seems possible
To live simply on this earth.

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Photo by Molly S.

Chimney Sweeps

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Until recently, I never really thought all that much about cleaning. A chore, an activity, play some music and make some headway. I’ve been in filthy houses, spick ‘n span abodes, the whole gray gamut of in-between. I once participated in an extremely late night board meeting in a school my children never attended, and towards the end of the evening I looked around the room, noted the chaotic clutter, and wondered how anyone worked in that classroom.

Today, as the cold weather begins digging in, I swept the ashes from my wood stove and readied my beloved stove for the months ahead when I will never allow the fire to burn out. The chimney, too–from basement to roof over three stories tall–needs cleaning. I pulled out the stovepipe and thrust my arm into its chimney’s cold center. I found thick layers of creosote, crumbly and pitch-sticky, two strange opposite and simultaneous qualities.

In the sooty, dirty basement I’ve knelt before the opened clean-out door and shoveled bucket after bucket of creosote scabs, then held a mirror flat in my hand and showed my little child the daytime stars in the heavens, visible only through that extended canal of darkness.

I’ve never cleaned this chimney before, but I feel certain my teenage daughter and I, with our strong backs and gritty muscles, could force that sharp-edged wire brush down that channel, scrape free the debris of last year’s long winter’s cold, and shove that brush, pole length by pole length, down to the chimney’s very root. This chimney is the lungs of our house, the passage of air and smoke that allows our hearth to burn, hot and truly. My teenage daughter is determined to begin this heating season with a scrubbed right chimney, and no fears of our house engulfed in nighttime flames.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.

–– Louise Gluck

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Woodbury, Vermont