Roaming

May 23, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughter and her friend, walking in a pause of rain yesterday from Memorial Day parade practice to the town library, paused beneath an apple tree along the river. She told me this driving home, before the library was out of sight.

Her friend shook the tree trunk while she stood beneath the white blossoms, looking up.

She said, I was in a snowstorm of petals.

More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California.

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

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A Little Bit of Sweetness….

May 18, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My sixth-grader and her class visited the middle and high school yesterday, dipping in their 12-year-old toes for next year’s migration from the crayon-scented world of elementary school to the locker-walled hallways.

Her sister, hanging out in art class, gave her a glazed blueberry donut.

Later that night, walking through the halls with the kids and my friend, I remember my own adolescent claustrophobic years, calling my high school “the cannery” as I felt like a fish parched for wild waters.

As a sprig of forsythia in a vase greets visitors into my kitchen these days, that donut likely welcomed my daughter into the next phase of schooling. Sweet….

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me…..

From “Instructions on Not Giving Up” By Ada Limón

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Roaming Kids

May 14, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I unclogged the kitchen sink yesterday afternoon with a sewer snake and a five-minute tutorial courtesy YouTube. In my childhood home, my dad had a yellow hard-covered book he consulted for his share of plumbing. While the reference method of home repair has changed, the essential has not. Just before I unplugged the sink, I wrote an article for work at the kitchen table my mother painstakingly refinished decades ago, and then I chopped up a watermelon for the kids, who appeared sweaty and panting from bike riding. They conceived a plan to cook outside, and built a blaze with birch bark.

My teenager appeared with her boyfriend, and we sat outside in the wood smoke that shifted with the breeze, laughing about marshmallows and hair gel, and remarking about the cooling air and the clouds fattening with rain. Tiny knobs of blossoms hung from the current bushes, and all around us, green growth surged mightily.

I had finished a reasonable amount of work (and triumphed with the drain, too), my daughters weren’t bickering, the black flies were negligible, and then eventually we left the fire and went walking in the rain, as I did as a child, too.

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring

– Bashō

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Raw Material

May 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter lay on the couch all day yesterday with a bad cold; since she was a little girl, her response to sickness or misery has been quiet, a pulling into herself. Her sister rises up and fights.

Neither good nor bad, each girl arrived in this world with a distinctive personality emerging even as a young child.

When they were younger, I made a failed attempt to conceal what I believed were the harder realities – grave illness or betrayal. The truth, really, was that I didn’t want to hold those things; how little credit I gave to the children, and to resilience itself. Mistakenly, I believed resilience was a well that be tapped dry, rather than, like creativity, a bottomless collective spring.

I alone could never drink it dry.

Our writing is a living portrait of ourselves….. Write for the sheer pleasure we take in doing it, but also for the knowledge that it might just shift this world of ours a little. It is, after all, a beautiful and strange and furious place. Literature reminds us that life is not already written down. There are still infinite possibilities. Make from your confrontation with despair a tiny little margin of beauty. The more you choose to see, the more you will see. In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart. Rage on.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

Not By Light Alone

May 8, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Darn near every moment these May Vermont days, the greenery deepens, fattening mightily, rushing headlong in the chlorophyll world as if making up for winter’s lengthy dormancy.

Walking in the dusky, gently falling rain last night? How could we not love this? All that growth – leaf, blossom, peepers, owls – chorusing around us.

Likely the most unresolvable argument of my life was about darkness, with a person who insisted I not embrace the darkness, not press it near my heart. Every one of my days for nearly the past 19 years has been filled with growing babies and children, teenagers now, with beeswax crayons and playhouses made from sheets, and an endless round of apple slices; at the same time, I’ve also lived through the planting, harvest, and demise of many gardens. Every year, I pass the unknown day of my death and the days of the deaths of everyone I love, and I know, even as the thrust of spring is so mightily powerful and unstoppable, all this will change, too. Our world holds both courage and cowardice, generosity and betrayal.

I’d rather know that, too, than not.

Thanks to State 14 for picking up a blog entry of mine. What a pleasure to be included with their fine writers and photographers.

Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.

Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.

They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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Whose Baby Are You?

May 7, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Searching through my younger daughter’s baby pictures the other day, gathering a handful of images for her sixth-grade graduation ceremony, I sometimes wondered, is this her? Or her sister? Once upon a time, I couldn’t believe parents might confuse their children’s baby photos; now I join those ranks of beleaguered – and, admit it, lame –parents.

In her face now, I see her woman’s visage emerging: my brown eyes, her father’s thin shape. As a writer, I’m trained to note specifics, like the way she regularly trims her own bangs these days. But details are only bits of her story, keyholes for my curious eyes.

These early wet May days, wildflowers bloom profusely – trilliums, bellflowers, spring beauties, Dutchman’s breeches – each day seemingly a new variation, every stalk and petal one tiny voice in the overall chorus of spring. The symphony rages mightily. So, too, with my daughter, in this spring.

I find myself listening to the symphony-in-the-creation of her.