No Fear

October 19, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’ve heard authors read work from mesmerizing poetry to an essay about a colonics session – but the Argentinian cartoonist I just met likely ranks at the very top. Incredibly famous outside the verdant realm of Vermont, the cartoonist sat on the floor with the kids and told stories and made the little ones laugh, and assured them they could all draw, too.

Even after the adults tried to close the hour, he kept on answering the kids’ questions, saying, This is an important question. This is good.

At the very end, a boy asked how he could become a cartoonist. The cartoonist said, Like this. Tell your parents you will need a book without these things – and here the cartoonist drew four parallel lines on a piece of paper – those are not helpful. You will need a black marker. And then you are on your way.

Great rule of thumb: when in doubt, get rid of the lines.

In my opinion, childhood is one of the most intriguing phases in life… For instance, when they (kids) draw, they do it with such freedom…! We adults can’t ever experience that level of freedom again, simply because we are scared of looking ridiculous or failing or making mistakes. When they draw, my kids have no fear. And that’s the hardest trick for an artist.

– Liniers

Light

October 13, 2017October 13, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On a late afternoon, I walked out of the Montpelier Library and down the street. The trees along the street were shedding their pale yellow leaves in a balmy, golden light; the sidewalks were busy with children, the afternoon commute already inching its way home.

I walk this way frequently, and always, at one particular place, in front of the stately Montpelier Inn, I remember one evening I stood there, many years ago, with my baby daughter on my back. It was late October then, although I don’t remember any cold. Instead, I remember swaying from foot to foot, already habituated to holding a baby – in my arms or on my back – and watching the twilight creep in, the day’s pale light slowly passing to dusk.

I remember that afternoon-slash-evening as one of the longest pauses in my adult life, waiting for someone who never appeared. Later, I realized my message had gotten lost along the way.

It’s odd, how even in the sunniest and lightest moments of our lives, there’s the past we keep walking through – and I do keep walking, every time, heading back into the busyness of my life – this afternoon, at least, graced with that lovely autumn light.

The trees go on burning
Without ravage of loss or disorder.

From Donald Hall’s “Letter In Autumn”

Small Find

October 7, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Rain unearthed a tiny toy from the cotoneaster’s soil I planted a few weeks ago – a plastic white ram smaller than the length of my thumb.

The soil’s sandy here, loamier on the house’s southern side where an immense mock orange stretches nearly to the second-floor bedroom windows.

My archeological find, near the barn’s ramp, is good child’s play area, near the house but not too near, cool in grass in the summer, with the cement a fine place to spread out small toys. Orange tiger lilies and silver-lavender allium spread tenaciously along the barn’s side, and I’d like to think some small child knelt in the grass there, happy to be home from school, entranced in the roaming world of her or his ram and animal companions. I’d prefer to think this creature, its back legs gnawed or worn at its hooves, wasn’t discarded carelessly.

I gave the animal to my daughter, youngest at the house now. Folded in her hand, she carried it on a walk all through town, then laid it on the windowsill beside a geranium, in the sun.

Somewhere, Heidegger says we are constantly tumbling towards death, and every once in a while we get a clear glimpse of this fact. We must then adjust our minds to accommodate the new knowledge. It makes us sadder, but also more urgent in our living, more aware that lives are fragile, ephemeral, not to be wished away. It make us, it should make us, humble.

From my recent interlibrary loan, Pitiful Criminals, by Greg Bottoms

October 1

October 2, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’ve seen fall foliage seasons where walking down our road was like wandering through a 3-D painting – so stunningly gorgeous the colors were nearly unbelievable. When my daughter was one, we spent a morning along our nearly empty road, me piling fallen red and gold leaves into her lap, while she lifted them with her tiny fingers and cooed.

The season may not have that radiant flame this year.

And yet, it’s fall, the season that reminds me perpetually of childhood, of staring through my third-grade classroom windows at the woods just beyond the playground and longing to play outside, of walking home in too-hot knee socks, with a sweater tied around my waist.

Hiking in the White Mountains this afternoon, then stretched out on a rocky peak, I remarked on the sweetness of fall apples.

Nothing like them, my brother said.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

From Robert Frost’s “October”

Dinner Prep

September 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just before the twin towers were destroyed in New York City, we moved into a new kitchen we had built on one side of our house. Our old kitchen had a single window. The new kitchen was its own ell, with three walls of windows, the true gem of that house.

I remember washing Red Russian kale leaves in a white enamel sink we had scavenged from somewhere, mesmerized by the sunlight over my hands, and how the kale spines flashed silvery like minnows under the water. I was listening to NPR and staring at my garden’s kale as if I had never seen it before.

Soil in that garden later became contaminated with clubfoot, and I ceased planting brassica. Transplanted healthy plants miserably withered and died within a few weeks, and none of my remedies worked. Now, miles away in this new garden patch, snipping my first kale leaves, I thought of that afternoon so many years ago, with my toddler daughter tricycling around the kitchen, surrounded by sunlight streaming over freshly stained pine, the only adult in the house listening to the radio, wondering what would happen.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

– Ryokan

Art? Why?

August 28, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, while the 12-year-old girls swam in Greensboro’s perfectly clear Lake Caspian, I read on the beach, just me and a few gulls, a pair of kayakers pushing off. An older woman wandered down and waded into the water and said only kids could swim in that water, and then left, too. The girls had swam out and were experimenting with laughing underwater.

Later, we went to Bread and Puppet’s outdoor theater, sprawled in the hot sun. Coming home, the girls swam again, while I eavesdropped on a pleasant conversation between our former pediatrician, his wife, and friends.

I kept thinking, What does art matter, anyway?, all this barefoot and Blundstone-shod performance in the field? What does poetry, fiction, song, mean, anyway? The more I thought, I wondered if my question was wrong, if the answer lay in who was listening, like myself listening to those 12-year-old girls. Maybe art is like that a cappella hymn, voices raised in harmony and confidence, to the variated audience, the shape of the earth, the enormous pine trees, and all that sky, blue and shifting with clouds, over field and forest, highways and water, on and on, and on.

Maybe my question, like a koan, holds the answer.