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Before the Birth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

13 years and a day ago, I walked down to our sugarhouse and closed the double front doors. Rain had fallen every day in that May, but that morning promised to be sunny.

After prolonged medical discussions, I had agreed to a caesarian for this second child. That morning, I leaned against the rough boards of our sugarhouse, with my enormous belly, looking at the wild red trilliums.

My six-year-old was eating breakfast with her father in the kitchen. I knew we would leave soon, that my two friends would be meeting us. But I kept leaning against the door, in one of those moments where time drifts away. I was so ready to meet this little child, to know who this new person in the world might be — and far above all — to know this baby was born well and whole.

I didn’t know then the natural sweetness of this child. I didn’t know, either, that her easygoing temperament would evolve as she grew into a wordless strength, that by the time this child was ten, her family would had shrunk to just a few of us. But I did know what an incredible piece of good fortune I had to be a mother to a second child. If anything, I know this more deeply now.

When she was born, this tiny girl could lie in my left arm, her head in my elbow, her miniature toes in my palm. She would lie there, blinking her little eyes, as though wondering, What now?

….may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back…

— Lucille Clifton

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Fleeting World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, in the dark, I walked behind the barn and closed the chickens’ little door to keep out marauders. The golden hen was on the step inside the door, her little head tucked down into her feathers. I sunk my fingers into her soft feathers and spoke to her. In the window just above her head, the moonlight reflected back in my eyes. In this sweet May night, redolent with lilacs and cut grass, it seemed impossible that anything adverse would happen to these little creatures. In a nicer world, I would have left the door open so the birds might sleep under the sky.

I locked the door against the fox.

In the chilly night, I stood with my daughter admiring the moon, in her final week of being age 12.

But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—

— Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest

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My Thieving Ways

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We sleep to peepers’ songs with the windows open, waking in the cool mornings.

The days are so long and light-filled that we’re out late, sometimes with gardening projects, sometimes kicking a soccer ball or just wandering around.

Behind the high school, I discover clumps of bluets about the size of a fist, the tiny light blue flowers with their golden-yolk hearts. With my daughters, I return with an old spoon and a yogurt container. The soil there is harder than I expected. My daughters drift off to the school’s hoop house, in search of a shovel. I turn the spoon around and jam its handle into the earth, prying out spindly roots. I cup them in my palm — three spoonfuls worth of beauty.

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

—Basho

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Hardwick Sign of Spring #3

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A dozen turkey vultures circled overhead, spiraling on wind currents, silently following us on a walk. They’re back, my daughter noted.

A day of serious wet: cold rain, rivers running high with melt-off, black mud thawing.

We walked in no particular hurry, talking, my daughter awkward in her sister’s too-large boots, pausing to study the vultures circling low, their wing feathers black against the clouds. As our path turned, the circling birds followed us.

I’m fascinated by the landscape around us of junco and robin, hawk and vulture, vegetable garden and cemetery. My daughter zipped her jacket against the raw spring. Those vultures are following us, she said. Creepy.

To pretend that all is right with the world when it is not, to use art as a pair of rose-colored glasses to distort the reality of the world, to paint over the agonies of our time, is to misuse art. Any light and life, joy and ecstasy we can derive from art in our time must be paid for with the admission that this joy and goodness comes to us out of the barbarous darkness all around us.

— David Budbill in Yvonne Daley, Vermont Writers: a State of Mind

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Hardwick Sign of Spring #1

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughter sunk above her knees into the snow over my garden. Somewhere, deep down, lies my garlic. Are you stirring, little white cloves? In your tender hearts, are green shoots stretching?

Bit by bit, the world changes. Starting with the soil, I’m searching for ten solid beacons of spring. How much better does the world get for children than mud?

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

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Barre, VT, Courthouse

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A retired Barre police officer sat beside me while I was waiting outside a courtroom in the Washington County Criminal Court, and he mentioned he thought he knew my former husband. He suggested that clearly I didn’t know my former husband all that well, and he told me some wrongdoings he knew my former spouse had committed. I protested that the man he referred to wasn’t my former husband.

The officer persisted. Listening, I began to wonder how much I knew about anyone, really, in the end. In my bag, I had a copy of Janet Malcolm’s biography of Sylvia Path, The Silent Woman, which I had read with enormous interest many years ago, right before I was married. In this book, Ted Hughes is quoted as writing, “I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life.”

I knew when I entered that courtroom, again, as I had before, that I would need to relinquish some of the darkest facts of my life. Just the facts, ma’am, and yet the facts seem so much. The reality is, of course, none of us own the facts of our lives. We’re hardly discrete entities, spreading into each others’ lives messily as we do.

Just the facts. Granite photos, the trio of a judicial panel, bailiff, what must be an endless of stream of adults coming and going through the security at the door. Outside, robins sang in the maples behind the courthouse. I’d been there so frequently, I knew the way out of the one-way streets.

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