Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Companionship, Mothering

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

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

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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

IMG_2527

Stillness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

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.

IMG_2532

Photo by Molly S.

Chimney Sweeps

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

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

IMG_2434 copy

Woodbury, Vermont

The Change

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The children came up with a phrase one nighttime this summer when they were supposed to be tucked into their beds and sleeping like little dears, but were not. The older boy said, The change is coming. We can’t sleep.

I told him to go to sleep, and I went downstairs to talk to his mother.

This illusive change reappeared in various contexts in the coming weeks. Missing chocolate bars and crocs were blamed on this change, a screen pushed out a window, irritable tempers. For all this and more, the change took the blame. But I told you, the boy laughed, I warned you the change came!

The change has arrived here. Walking after dark with the younger girl, she remarked on how quickly the days are ending now, and the sky presses lower, filled with dark. The garden’s growth has entirely dwindled, and our northern piece of this earth is slowly rotating towards cooling. Ever cheery, my younger girl remarked, But this makes the house so much cozier. It’s board game season.

Work

The voice of the laundry says, Hang me;
hang me, or I will mold.
The voice of the clothesline says,
tighter or I will sag…
While the subliminal shrews are ferociously
eating, always eating, in order to waste away.

–– Ruth Stone

IMG_7459

Work/Photo by Molly S.

Autumn: Coyotes Howling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, reading in bed with the windows open, I heard a pack of coyotes yipping 0n the forested hill behind our house. Abandoning my book, I lay with my eyes closed, listening to the way those wild creatures howled, throaty and jagged, as if biting each other’s calls.

Slipping downstairs, I passed my younger daughter’s room where she slept with her friend, the two of them twined in one bed, their breathing a whispery draw and release. I walked out into the Vermont rural dark, so heavy I saw the lights of the neighbors across the road as a handful of pearly light in tree branches. The hydrangeas, fragrant, faintly glowed in my window’s diffuse light. The coyotes cut into the night, two packs in the wooded hill behind the house and garden, the beasts wholly bodiless to me in the night, my heartstrings thrumming with their calls.

This evening, my older daughter returned from walking in the dusk and said the packs were howling again, not down in the valley where we’ve heard them for years,  but far closer to our house. I asked if she was afraid. She said, It’s a little scary to hear the coyotes so close, but at the same time, I can’t help listening.

We talked a little about the back and forth calling, the mystery of sound from these hidden creatures, and then she said, It’s beautiful.

We shall not cease from exploration
And then end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

–– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

FullSizeRender copy 6

Burlington, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.