Reasons…

April 6, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Rainy afternoon. I wander through the neighborhood where I once considered buying a house. Someone else lives there now. With new paint and two rocking chairs on the front porch, I need a moment to recognize the house, to remember the kitchen door I went through, envisioning in those days how my life might bend.

These years, walking by, I’ve watched the vehicles’ license plates change from Maine to Vermont, a tricycle appear, a front step break, two hydrangeas expand in the front yard.

April: season of mud and rain, snow and patience. Some reasons are obvious. Snow vanishes first on south-facing slopes, but other patches around us aren’t so readily knowable. Why does snow cling to some fields and not others? Quickly running water beneath, perhaps, the softening of what our human eyes can’t see, the knowledge gained only by years of our wandering footsteps.

So it goes. April, thaw, brown to pea green.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun…
From Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

Plot Point, Soul Journey.

April 3, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My older daughter relays that she stopped for brand-new greasy donuts at 3 a.m. with her sister and a carful of teenagers headed to the airport. She parked beside a car with a man, she says, who must have lived through better moments.

We’re waiting for coffee on a Sunday morning jammed with people getting the Sunday vibe going. I make a vague comment about the soulful journey. Despite the eyerolling of my companion, I’m serious. Maybe the man was simply heading from home to work, or vice versa, but 3 a.m. in rural Vermont often means staring at a lonely emptiness where the way down leads to a few single dismal plot points, and the way up — imagination has plenty of material there. I don’t mean this in any jest, having hit a multitude of my own 3 a.m. moments; there’s a sizable respect between me and 3 a.m. Laughter and donuts, of course, are my preferred side of those moments.

April is the Vermont season of patience, of cold and thaw, and cold and more cold, of rain and the remembrance of November, the splendiferous muscle of crocuses. April is the long haul of spring, of faith in the green that tantalizes. Vonnegut writes, “The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.”

Might.

April 1, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Two years ago, my youngest and I quarantined for whatever the period was then, five days perhaps. I painted the inside window trim on the front and upstairs glassed-in front porches the loveliest pale blue. My daughter recovered quickly, almost instantaneously; I tested negative, over and over, kept painting and listening to the Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd, hours and hours and hours.

Soon after, I was vaccinated at the high school on a cold April day. It was snowing lightly, as it was today. I knew some of the volunteers who had come out of retirement to aid the state in vaccinating. Afterwards, I sat in the gym as we had been asked to wait. I sat near a man who I had worked with before the pandemic, before I changed jobs, too. We talked about work and kids and how our lives had changed, and we kept talking even after each of us had been told we could leave. I had plenty to do — oh, how there’s always plenty to do — but I lingered. Each one of us had our story that day that seemed filled with such quiet, such orderliness, so much hope.

My daughter was learning to drive that spring. She drove to spring soccer practice, and we sat in the car before one practice, listening to the Chauvin trial verdict. The geese had returned to the open river. While she played, I stood outside the closed town library. The bulletin board was empty of notices of events, as if time had dwindled to nothingness.

Spring: a mighty season. The earth will do what it will.

“Spring Snow”

Rain of remembering;
late snow turning to rain.
Then in the cold house,
alone in bed,
the soft stutter on the roof,
random phrases; your voice,
only your voice. How can
it be that voice that touched
me everywhere?
And what you said,
if only I could hear it again
in its intensity.
Essence distilled
in the moment of waking,
the delicate mold and odors
of the breaking apart of winter,
in the soft snow that comes
between the past and the chill
distillation, the whisper of air
split between the perfume
of melting crystals; the clasp
and letting go.
— Ruth Stone

No one owns the mud, either.

March 30, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

As the snow melts, the mud comes up. A friend says, But it’s so dirty. I think, Bring on the dirt.

On a sunny afternoon, I disappear early, head out to those secret places where I know the redwing blackbirds sing. There’s nothing I can hold in my hand, nothing I can pocket to bring home and leave on the kitchen table for my daughter, no sign of where I’ve been or what I’ve done, save for the mud that sheds from my boots on the door mat. That, too, is my affair. I sweep it up and empty the dustpan over the back deck.

“Advice from Rock Creek Park”

What will survive us
has already begun

Oak galls
Two termites’ curious
self-perpetuating bodies

Letting the light through the gaps

They lay out their allegiances
under the roots
of an overturned tree

Almost always better
to build than to wreck

You can build in a wreck

Under the roots
of an overturned tree

Consider the martin that hefts
herself over traffic cones

Consider her shadow
misaligned
over parking-lot cement
Saran Wrap scrap in her beak

Nothing lasts
forever not even
the future we want

The President has never
owned the rain
— By Stephanie Burt

A Whole Person.

March 28, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Everyone has their own familiar paths and places. This empty stretch of interstate in the Netherlands between Vermont and New Hampshire my daughters and I have traveled countless times now, in all varieties of weather and moods. Now, so many years into this, one daughter is grown, the other on the cusp. My daughters look at my brother and me with a mixture of so many things — what, precisely, neither he nor I need to speculate. Laughing, he suggest to them that he and I equal a full person, our meager strengths and copious broken places complementary. I suggest, Maybe even a little more than one person….

I’m grateful to be invited to read and speak at the Cabot Public Library Tuesday, April 11, 7 p.m. in a real-life deal. Come if you can.

And — definitely worth a read — Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America.

Poverty was a relationship, I thought, involving poor and rich people alike. To understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that bound poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle. Eviction was such a process.

Saturday, Snow, River.

March 25, 2023 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A snow-globe snow flakes down all afternoon. In a meeting, I sit near the window and look over the river. Plenty of listening. Plenty of talking. Ice clings in chunks to the shoreline, but the current runs swiftly. This March day is just at that brink where snow piles on last year’s dead grass, melts on the pavement.

As sometimes happens in this group, the conversation winds around to the world’s wider themes — the pandemic and literacy, disparity of wealth — very big picture things — how the world is broken in places and how these pieces may or may not fit together. There’s plenty of coffee, and sandwiches, too, that someone has brought from somewhere, and I keep drinking the coffee and studying those currents, how the water crashes up over rocks and flows on again, heading that long way to Lake Champlain and north through rivers heading towards the North Atlantic. Someone beside me remarks that he’s not convinced our world can be put back together.

In the very big picture, however, things are always going together, breaking apart, heading together again. I keep watching that dark river and the foamy curls of waves. The coffee is lukewarm and lousy at best. Nonetheless, I keep drinking it and drinking it. We keep talking and listening.