Things on My Kitchen Table

August 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email in-box, these lines from Toni Morrison’s Paris Review interview appear:

I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space—a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out—life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in.

For a single mother who often works at home, clutter is a major issue — and I don’t mean the Marie Kondo kind of clutter with too many piles of perfectly fine clothes or an overstocked kitchen.

I simply mean the clutter of living. On our kitchen table when I came home from work yesterday were bowls of just picked blueberries and green beans, a full coffee thermos I had forgotten, opened mail including a jury summons and a pay stub, a tube of hand lotion, an unopened packet of spinach seeds I intended to plant that evening, a $5 bill, a list I wrote for the 14-year-old (mostly checked off), what appeared to me as a random assortment of dates on a scrap piece of paper, a wildflower identification book, a half-eaten cucumber surrounded by a sprinkling of salt. And a fingernail clippers.

My daughters were cooking dinner, and the dining room table was set and (mostly) cleared of clutter. Life without clutter would be sterility, boredom, an emptied-out house. Or so I tell myself.

Sometime in August

August 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I’m picking up the pace on a wool sweater I’m knitting — a roundabout way of realizing the patches of red on some maples (and no longer just the sick or stressed) mean I actually will be wanting to wear those knitted strands before too long.

Still, summer folks fill my library these days. They all have houses along Woodbury’s lakes, or visit people who have houses along lakes. They’re full of good will, polite, curious about our winters, ready to swap tales of their winters. One family had twins last October. The parents plop the babies on the library floor, and take a deep and exhausted breath.

Driving home, just before the swamp separating Woodbury from Hardwick, the sun hits the goldenrod just so, with scrubby pink clover along the roadside. Rags of mist amble along the swamp, around the bend in the mountains.

For a moment, it’s just me and the road, the gold and the emerald and transient strands of cloud. August, at this very moment. At home, the girls have made blueberry pie, and that’s equally fleeting.

All the way I have come
all the way I am going
here in the summer field

—Buson

Book From the Past

July 26, 2019July 26, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Stopping by the new coffee shop in Hardwick last weekend — Front Seat Coffee — I discovered this gold-covered book which I am darn sure was The Book of my childhood. My dad actually bought this book for our house; he didn’t check it out of the library or stand in a bookstore reading it — his two main ways of gleaning information when I was a kid. He bought it and used it.

Need heating vents upstairs? Consult the book. Toilet broken? Get out the book, kids. Hot water heater on the fritz, again? Book. Move the washing machine, install a kitchen sink, put in a window or an outside door? Book, book, and book.

Inside are the classic ‘exploded view’ diagrams where my siblings and I honed our reading skills. Everything’s there, except how to smartly deal with the IRS…. a whole other lesson.

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!

— Faulkner

Living the Dream — and Not.

July 3, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

For four summers running now, my youngest daughter, her very closest friend, and I go camping every summer on Burton Island, far north on Lake Champlain. The lake is noticeably cleaner than it was four years ago; the girls are definitely older. We recount the year the raccoons ate our food and the year I forget the stove. This year became the year we forgot the tent poles. The girls fashioned a tent from a tarp and rope.

Always, this island enchants me with its summertime mystique, the fluff of seeding trees wafting like fairy confetti in the warm breeze. We’re never eaten too badly by bugs. The girls drink a crazy amount of hot chocolate.

I wake up early in the mornings and read by the lake — this chilly year in my jeans — watching the loons and the ducks with their offspring.

It’s both sweetly idyllic — how could such innocent happiness not be? — and simultaneously not idyllic at all. I write this not to draw attention to my own particular family scenario, but because so much of social media pushes families to believe that everyone is living that glossy, idyllic life. So, in my family, we are, and we aren’t. And I’m darn glad for every bit that we are.

Age 14

Reappraisal

June 23, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my oldest was seven or so, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed the way I think about food and the food industry that, inevitably, feeds the vast majority of the country. His newest book, How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics, is a book I’m reading exactly at the right time in my life. While I’m unlikely to be looking to score a few tabs of acid — I am a single mother who intends to stay on one particular side of the law, for one thing — the book is primarily about reappraising your life — in the supposed midstream, after a few years — maybe decades, compounded by child raising — of living.

What was I looking for at 21? Same, but different….

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

— Michael Pollan

Bloomsday & Father’s Day

June 16, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

These two are aptly paired up for me as I learned about Bloomsday — this Irish holiday celebrating James Joyce and his Ulysses — from my father. I was probably 4 and sitting on the living room floor with my sister, a predominant childhood place involving wooden blocks and tiny dolls. My father was listening to NPR and mentioned the day was Bloomsday. Such a pretty word, I remember thinking. Much later, in high school, my sister and I devoured Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist.

James Joyce, so infinitely complex and rich — which, perhaps, pairs up perfectly with parenthood. Happy Father’s Day!