Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Of Tacos and the Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The after school kid topic today was how many tacos were eaten at lunch.  The girls each ate two.  The younger brother ate three.  Another child at the table quit after four. Teacher?  Four, apparently.  A fifth grade boy claimed the prize with eight.  Pondering this impossibility, the girls drew a diagram of how large his stomach might be and sandwiched in eight hand-drawn tacos.  A variation of anatomy, in the elementary school world, complete with graphic illustrations.

Don’t days sometimes seem a collage of pieces, one funkily shaped thing pressed in against another?  In my realm today of concrete things — washing dishes and writing tech bits, things I could hold in my hand — I had a conversation with one person about some of the deepest things in my life, a literal spading up of soul debris.

Aren’t the best novels that way, too, filled with the physicality of action and the deeper layers that turn our lives one way or another?  Surely, we’re shaped by the trees in our yards, maybe the nubs of apples fattening up that we finger every afternoon, or the roads we drive along particular rivers, watching their levels rise and ebb, or the patchwork quilt we smooth over a bed, every morning.  But within this, too, are the murkier regions of desire and raw longing, of resentment’s ice and anger’s torrents, and even when our surface belies a calmness, our inner workings foment.

Writing sifts down through those unclear, swirling layers, and tries to make sense of the impossible, accordions us out so we may see less of a mosh and something resembling sense. Know thyself, Socrates advised.  Writing arrows toward that knowing.

How would eight tacos fit into one boy?  We stretch, children.

THE LAYERS
Stanley Kunitz

…In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Do Women Really Want (besides blueberry pie)?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A houseful of children tonight.  Much swinging in the living room hammock (it’s raining, yes), a discussion at dinner about the two ten-year-old girls running as a joint ticket for president, a revealing of whom everyone’s parents voted for in the last presidential election.

One of the girls asks what I’m writing about, and I hold up a book and say, There’s a folktale in here about what women really want.  So, I ask the girls, What do women want?

They think.   This question is a stumper, no doubt about it.  One of the girls offers, Freedom.  I can see the glint in this child’s eye, the allure of this ten-year-old vision of freedom, not the Janis Joplin version, not anything at all but a clear sunshiny day and an ample bowl of ice cream.  I also see blueberry pie in her gaze, which I know this child adores.

At the end of this strange folktale, the Lady Ragnell is transformed from a hag into a beauty when Sir Gawain grants her the freedom of her own autonomy.

Pose this as a koan:  as women, we can’t obtain what we most desire, without the blessing of our spouse?  Is that a backhanded way of getting exactly what you need, when it’s already in your hand?  Is the story far more complicated, laced through Western centuries of female subjugation and denial, the banishment of childrearing to lowly status or else so sanctified mothering is glorified into absurd heights, a challenge we inevitably will fail?  Why do women so often cling to this notion of Prince Charming in all his glory, bending down on one knee to kiss our hand, as if that magical kiss will shatter our haggardness, transforming our ugly selves into princesses?  Why not demand the prince meet us in the kitchen garden, with everyone’s feet firmly on the ground and hands offered equally over the seeded beds?

Or is the story, instead, far simpler?  Put another way, perhaps what women desire is the depth of work and love, and the tranquility to lie down on the earth and gaze up at clouds scudding along an azure sky.

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Seeds and Sorrow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

All day long, maple seed pods fluttered down in a spring breeze, a shower of twirling seeds.  Where I live in Vermont, the seasons release easy rain and fierce rain, snow in leafy flakes and snow hard as buckshot.  Last week, the dandelions burst, and all day long, all night long, seeds lifted with their miniature canopies of sail and soared free from their stalks, heading out on their journeys.  Now, maple seeds are thrown in veritable handfuls from the trees and cast into the breeze, floating in an emptied glass of lemonade, on the little daughter’s new sweater left on the porch, against the window glass, into our hair.

June 6th.  Season of renewal, of surging growth.  My daughters and I walked along an abandoned railroad bed this afternoon, bending beneath greenery tenting over the railbed.  Domestic cows, wild geese, a cardinal, the crickets already counting down the days of warmth.

June 6th.  When I was in high school, a French exchange student told me, My grandmother is from Normandy, and she will never forget D-Day.

All day long, those seeds swirled.  All night, while we sleep and dream, and tomorrow morning, too, when the girls wake and wash and eat their sleepy breakfast, while we walk down our driveway to meet the school bus, the girls already thinking of their school day ahead, me holding my coffee and saying, Have a good day, goodbye, goodbye, see you this afternoon, those seeds will still be shedding on our shoulders and hands and before our eyes.  Then, for this year, too, that will be done.

Birthday Cake

….This is the season of mud and trash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, inarticulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another.

Hayden Carruth

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Ode to Wilbur’s Companion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh, pork.  While I spend a great deal of time in the world of words, I also spend an enormous amount of my hours in the world of food.  My daughters often ask, What’s for dinner? and, annoyingly no doubt, I frequently reply, How about great big bowls of nothing for dinner?  Think how easy that would be.  No prepping, no cooking, no cleaning.  No dishes.

My daughters, not surprisingly, hate this answer.

Today, I gardened (to my joy and maybe also the black flies’ rapture, but it’s also consumption-oriented).  I served hummus and crusty olive bread, and I ate the moldy cheese no one else wanted.  Watermelon and apples I diced into pieces for the younger daughter.  From the garden I gathered a plain salad of lettuce for lunch and the older daughter ate it with pickled jalapeños.  All through this day, my younger daughter moans,  I’m so darn hungry……

While I was working at my desk this afternoon, the younger daughter appeared and asked if we were eating Wilbur for dinner.  Not thinking – really not following this line of thought through at all, and definitely not listening to my Charlotte’s Web aficionado child – I said, Yes, resulting in the child turning her back on me and stalking outside.  The older daughter complained I was being insensitive.  I should certainly know the younger daughter loves that pig.  I lifted my eyes from my laptop and said, Tell your sister I think the pig is Helga, and Wilbur’s fine.

The pork chops were succulent and yet crisp, Jung’s two extremes meeting up on our forks.  Afterward, we tossed the bones in a pot and boiled them down for tomorrow’s soup.  I bartered syrup for this meat from an East Hardwick family, and tonight at dinner, I was glad once again to have the providence to live where food is raised and tended and, yes, butchered, because my girls are hungry……

EVERYTHING GOOD BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

has been written in mud and butter
and barbecue sauce…..

Bless it. We have so little time
to learn, so much…. The river
courses dirty and deep. Cover the lettuce.
Call it a night. O soul. Flow on. Instead.

C.D. Wright

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Hard Soil and Tender Shoots

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I’m no Jung scholar by any stretch of imagination, but I’ve been reading Hags and Heroes by Polly Young-Eisendrath (a real find of an author).  In the book, she uses attributes this to Jung:  In nature…. extremes are always touching…. the goal… of human development, in general, is wholeness.  In nature, in my garden, tender snow peas unwind through a rocky soil, their vines easily snapped, and yet, determined to live, they persist through this soil.

In order to live, these peas must, in fact, unfurl through their difference.  If I plucked this pea from the earth, the vine would wither in my hand.  The softness of this pea is inseparable from my soil, if the pea will survive.

Hence, the interconnectedness of all things; our survival depends not on distinguishing the discreteness of my property or my investments.  Our very meaning and well-being depend on the neighbor across the fence, the other students in a classroom, the dandelions beneath our feet, stratus clouds hanging low.

As an adolescent, reading myth and legend, I championed this view, the bumper sticker version of we’re all in the same boat.  However, it’s a whole other worldview to imagine not just our similarities (a child, a friend) are connected to us, but also what and who we consider most foreign and most extreme.  What we fear, and what we loathe, are woven into us, too.

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photo by Molly S.

The Dark

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Early this morning, not long after dawn, robins swooped by my kitchen window, flying busily with their beakfuls of twisted straw, tangled weeds, a red streamer from my daughter’s birthday.  Bending over the sink, I peered up through the window where these robins are resuccitating the nest beneath the bedroom’s balcony.  What possessed these creatures to appear again?  The girls and I have been banging in and out of that back door for weeks, even moving a refrigerator with great effort and noise.

I’m certain these birds appeared just this morning; I would have noticed them earlier.  It pleases me to think of this robin couple scouting out this thrice-used, well-mudded nest, choosing it while I slept, dreaming or not, just a few feet away.  Will eggs be laid and hatched?  Will the fledglings live?  None of this has come to pass yet.  But the night has borne us this robin family.

In the same way, the seeds in my garden are using the soil’s cover and night to germinate and sprout.  Too often, we fear the dark, with our easy reliance on electric light.  A real joy to rural living is the starlit nights and the nocturnal animal world.  I often step out on the balcony with my younger daughter before she goes to bed.  Listen, we say, what’s happening now?  These late spring, early summer nights are such a pleasure. With the windows open, the nightsounds flow through the screens.  Last night, a moth found its way through a broken screen and lay on my wrist while I read, so delicate it was hardly a presence, and yet its beige wings slowly folded and unfolded, before it rose and took flight.

The short night;
the peony opened
during that time.

–  Buson

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photo of spring beauty by Molly S.