August First

August 1, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

August 1st dawns quietly — the songbirds winding down, the dew slipping in silently overnight — save for the cats who mew in hunger.

Yet another summer day, a small kind of miracle that will disappear, a day promising to be packed with work and obligations, with laundry hung on the line, and a very long list on a scrap of paper beside me.

But it’s August. Just a few blocks from where I sometimes work in Burlington is a fine bakery named after an even finer poem by Hayden Carruth.

August First

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done…..

Hardwick Reservoir, Vermont

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’

Community Bonding

April 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Written with a finger on a muddy car door in Montpelier: Spring is here! Hooray!

I mention this to my daughter at dinner, saying, I think a kid wrote this….

Why a kid? she asks. Why not a little old lady?

Why not?

A single day of rain has pushed up green.

As January’s bitter cold links people when strangers comment about the cruel weather, spring does, too. It’s finally here. What a day….

This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet —

— Issa

Our Lives, Seen and Unseen

March 24, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few minutes early to collect the 12-year-old and her friend from track practice, the 19-year-old and I take a walk around a neighborhood circle near the high school, passing a house I considered buying but didn’t.

Full of excitement about her morning, my daughter talks on and on, her happiness as visible as red-breasted robins in a bare-branched maple tree. We pause for a moment before the three-story house, with large original windows on the first and second floors, bordered at the top by ornate stained glass. The owner confessed the windows leaked air profusely but couldn’t bear to replace them. The house is no longer for sale; my daughter and I speculate the family still lives there.

We walk by another house flanked by five sugar maples, the trees young enough to live for many more decades.

Robins, both visible and hidden, sing.

My daughter and I pass these houses and these possible lives our family might have taken but didn’t. Then we’re back at the high school, still in the cold and clear March sunlight, beside a maple filled with robins fluttering their wings, chorusing in the beginning of spring.

I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

— Galway Kinnell

Cold Spring

March 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A lover I had for a very brief time complained I wasn’t good at accepting gifts. Pride, he noted. About that, he was right.

And yet a life without pride in yourself and your actions? Lack pride and you become a muddied doormat. So here’s the theme that surfaces over and over in all our lives — where to find the sweet spot of balance.

Hard things have a way of bending you, and that bending can go either way, I tell my daughters. In this long cold spring, that sentiment runs deeply.