Journeys, More Journeys

May 11, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Near the end of the last century — which really wasn’t all that long ago — my then-boyfriend and I spent a lot of time driving around the country. We were so young, and time seemed like an endless well we might draw from forever.

The other night, driving to the airport in the descending dusk, I remembered blood-red sunsets as we made our way across the midwest.

I think of the decades of my pre-children life as two-dimensional, although I know that’s not true. But when I became a mother, my own life grew, too, in ways I had never imagined.

In Burlington, I looked for a cup of coffee, but in that end of the city nothing was open but a Shell station where I saw a man bent over, mopping the floor. I stood in the new spring warmth and didn’t go in.

At the airport, two taxi drivers were laughing outside, talking in an accent I couldn’t recognize. Inside, it was just myself for a while, leaning against a wall and reading, and then slowly the airport filled up. Neighbors unexpectedly met each other, and I heard the update about a maple tree, blown over in a recent thunderstorm.

Then from that infinite night sky, my two daughters appeared, one tanned and one sunburnt, bursting with stories of their journey.

The only journey is the one within.

— Rilke

Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico

Zeke, the New Friend

May 9, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 12-year-old returns from the southwest with the story of a bobcat who slept in the raingutter in her grandparents’ roof. She’s worried about the wild cat, who she thinks is too thin, unlike her own glossy, well-fed kittens.

The cat is my daughter’s main story of her faraway trip — this wild beast who seems remarkably tame and drinks from her grandmother’s bird bath.

Driving home in the dark, I’m listening to my two daughters’ disparate conversations about enchiladas and pueblo ruins and a stranger’s delayed flight. My daughter in the backseat keeps mentioning Zeke.

Who’s Zeke? I ask.

She answers, We named the bobcat Zeke.

Black-Blue, Turquoise-Blue

May 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Sharing poems with little kids this week, I keep reading this one:

I’m glad the sky is painted blue,
And the earth is painted green,
With such a lot of nice fresh air
All sandwiched in between.

While Long Winter in Vermont has its endless permutations of snowfall and cold, Spring in the Green Mountain state yields treasures every day — coltsfoot in this unexpected place, emerald so luminescent it seems nearly impossible. How quickly this season sometimes moves.

Last night, from the windows at the top of our house, I saw blue-black thunderheads far down the valley, and white curtains of rain. Rapidly, dead leaves blew against the glass, and handfuls of hail.

This is the morning for the other poem the kids especially liked, about a rain-glazed red wheelbarrow and white chickens.

Waking

May 4, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not plausible, perhaps, but last night the current bushes still appeared as a handful of sticks. Early this morning, the world still damp with dew and rain, green leaves have emerged from those brown sticks, their tender folds already beginning to open.

No other words for this: spring in all her viridescent beauty.

She is working now, in a room
not unlike this one,
the one where I write, or you read…

Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

— from Jane Hirshfield’s ‘The Poet’

And A Little More Snow — What?

April 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Talking to my mother on the phone yesterday afternoon, I noticed through the window the heavy rain had bits of white. Snow? The white disappeared.

This morning, three inches of white spread over the porch and garden, the neighbors’ roofs and the cemetery stones and — yes — those little blue wildflowers whose names we haven’t yet determined.

I was barefoot and sweating in the garden on Saturday: Vermont.

Years ago, when I first moved to a steep backroad, I had the snow tires removed mid-April — how I regretted that. A neighbor cautioned me, like some strange commandment, Never take off your snow tires before May. Subconsciously, her advice must have rooted deeply. Maybe I should be grateful for her advice, but maybe the snow will melt this morning, too.

Robin Songs

April 22, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Certain Saturdays at my library the parents arrive with their babies, the little ones dressed up in their cutest outfits — fox prints, flowered rainbows, little ears on hoods.

The enthusiastic parents are as likely to talk about politics or soil chemistry as teething and sleep patterns.

They are all so new, parents and babies alike, that I’m a little awed, a bit overwhelmed at times, just by their sheer niceness.

My soul is not new, ragged and hardworn like the leather on my favorite pair of boots — been around. I mean this entirely without judgement, as I expect 19 years into parenting, these folks will be a bit ground down, too — although likely just as lovely.

And yet…. it’s spring. While the crocuses haven’t yet bloomed by our house, the avian life is bursting. Herons, turkey vultures, redwing blackbirds. Robins sing in a maple, a pure and unadulterated melody of beauty — no past, no future, simply there.

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

—Issa

Photo by Molly S.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

photography