After Midnight

July 23, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rain falls in the night. The cats press at the window screen, curious, wakeful in their quiet way.

In this post-midnight hour, I close my library book about Trump and deceit — how language is both truth and weapon. From the stack of books donated to my library, I pull a collection of essays.

While the rain continues to fall lightly — and I think of my thirsty garden drinking, drinking, the trees with their copious roots and the innumerable blades of grass — a domestic black-and-white-and-coffee-colored tiger curls at my feet while I read about a liver transplant.

We are made of the dust of old stars, our grade-school teacher told us; we are made of lives and sediment and the mulch of life. But I was also made of something rescued from the graveyard…. you can’t quite forget the how it felt to lie in the close darkness of that grave; you can’t forget the acrid smell of the earth or the stink of the moldering grave clothes, especially now that you know, as you never did before, that you’re headed back to the grave again, as is everyone, and you know this with a clarity you cherish and despise.

— Richard McCann, The Resurrectionist

June 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

To water or not to water?

The Vermont gardener question.

With my sandy soil, I’m watering — a showery hymn to growth.

One of the hottest and driest places I’ve ever been is Utah’s Hovenweep. A few years ago, my daughters and I spent one eternally long August afternoon beneath an aluminum picnic shelter, watching the sky. Thunderheads moved majestically slowly, then veered away, taking their rain — if they ever shed it — elsewhere.

Here in Vermont, we’re hardly parched. And yet, water, water…..

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust…
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

— Marge Piercy, “To Be of Use”

One Year

June 15, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Friday mornings find me in the Buffalo Mountain Co-op’s cooler, stocking Vermont milk, yogurt made just up the road, kimchi from ust down the road.

What a feast these bottles of milk would be for our little cats, who lie at home, curled in their blankets on this rainy morning.

One year ago today, in the early afternoon, I signed for this house on a hot, early afternoon. When the owner handed over the keys, I took one off and handed it to my daughter, who was about to graduate from high school.

Now, the girls and I have been joined by two cats and a small flockette of chickens.

Here’s a few lines from early morning reading:

For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion.

― Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Three Quarters Through the Night

June 8, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

It’s a bird-eat-bird world the young woman with a hawk on her arm tells the kids in my library. The kids ask question after question, from Why is the bird’s head bobbing up and down to Why is that little screech owl in such a big box?

That bird-eat-bird world is a hungry world.

Returning home, my older daughter rolls out pizza dough. The chickens have been squawking at a woodchuck running behind the barn. I eye my newly-planted garden. The younger daughter appears with six eggs in her basket. Overhead, the turkey vultures glide in spirals.

This morning, in the early dark, rain falls. I stand on the porch in the dark, listening, too early yet for even the songbirds to have risen. The darkness smells of wet earth. I think of my bean plant seedlings, their first leaves unfurling, stretching out further, drinking in this June rain.

Green, how much I want you green.

— Lorca

Why Love Teens

June 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my older daughter was a teen and invited over a posse of girls, I was always amazed by just the size of the girls — so much young female energy and just so much talk! They eat like crazy — and then eat like crazy again — but they’re just so darn enthusiastic, just so darn happy to be testing out the world.

Last night at our house, the six young teens, buoyed by a balmy early summer evening, slept outside. Why not? Under the stars, I could see my breath.

On the same day, the neighbors’ celebrated their four-year-old’s birthday. In the afternoon, he began riding a bicycle with training wheels. When my teens eat and eat, when I’m mired down in the complexities of living with teens, I remind myself that those sweet sippy cup days have now passed me by.

Tired, the girls struggled in bedraggled in the morning, hungry for waffles.

I emerge
from the museum
at dusk —
the blue Nile
floods over.

— Fumi Saitō

Moonrise: a Great Gift

May 31, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter, up late, says, I’m going out to look at the moonrise.

One long skinny band of cloud bends across the nightsky, luminescent with moonlight. The moon rises amber.

My daughter runs into the house for her sister. The three of us walk over the dewy grass. The world is in complete, beautiful repose, with the just-past-full moon silently rising, peepers gently murmuring, the cats in an open window watching, their little heads bent together, and all around us the fragrance of lilacs.

All winter, I’ve wondered about these lilacs — and here they bloom, better than I ever could have imagined.

The night beauty is so expansively calm it’s the best birthday present I could have desired for this turning-13 girl — an enchanting embrace from the universe cupping our home.

And then we go in to sleep.

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

—Bashō

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

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