Under the Dentist’s Knife

December 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

As I’m finishing a book about, essentially, pain, maybe it’s fitting that I undergo my own particular pain experience.

In the oral surgeon’s chair, as he came at my face with a small, extremely sharp blade, he paused for a moment and said I was welcome to watch, but I likely wanted to close my eyes. I definitely closed my eyes. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to open my eyes. Almost immediately, my mouth was suffused with salty, rich blood: the taste of the sea and the earth.

While allowing my mouth and those stitches time to repair, I read Chanel Miller’s gorgeous book — this young woman known as Emily Doe, who was assaulted on the Stanford campus. Her book is filled with food — chocolate and pork dumplings — and begonias, with love of rain falling on skin and a young woman’s excitement about living in a city, but also filled with bodily pain and the complexity of living in a female body in America.

Of all the books I read this year, this author is likely my most favorite, this young woman who took this unasked-for experience, endured, and turned it into strength for so many other women.

Her victim impact statement that initiated the book can be read here.

I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm… Stay tender with your power.

—Chanel Miller, Know My Name

Somewhere In December…

December 17, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

We’re all home at 3, the youngest just home from school, the oldest finished with exams and lying on the couch with her cat who eyes me warily. What now? that cat seems to say. As if the cat himself is out of sorts with the weather.

Are any of us made to live so far north? I insist we pull on boots, go outside. The sun slips down over the mountain before four.

Then — here’s the thing — we’re talking about not much at all, and the younger daughter says something about the cat that’s not shall I say kid appropriate, and I just laugh. I mean, I really laugh. I’m not entirely sure she knows why I’m laughing. The other day she asked if I was intended to hang little white Christmas lights in the “residential quarters.” I did, and I do.

But just thinking about it makes me laugh again. Why not?

Like a wheat grain that breaks open in
the ground, then grows, then gets
harvested, then crushed in the mill for
flour, then baked, then crushed again
between teeth to become a person’s
deepest understanding…

There is no end to any of this.

— Rumi

Time Warp

October 21, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

So here’s a weird thing….. not long before dusk on Sunday, I was at the (closed) Goddard College library. I was there to record a small radio piece.

Save for myself, there’s no one on campus, so I wandered around. A few years ago, the college converted to low-residency programs. The campus now — with some buildings disintegrating into moss and rot — has an odd Planet-of-the-Apes-ish feeling.

I expected to read shortly some writing about the collapsing American Empire. For a few moments there, I wondered if I’d hit a time warp…..

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.

― Marshall Sahlins

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

October 16, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter looked up from her geometry homework and asked why I was laughing. I shared with her a few lines about soup and dogs from my library book — a book one of my blog readers and commenters had recommended —Kent Nerburn’s Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an American Elder.

I’m lucky enough to scavenge time to read — and I read fairly quickly — but this particular book I wasn’t in any particular rush to finish. So much of our world is talk, talk and words, words. This book is filled with silence, too. Sometimes in life, too, you’re fortunate to read a book at precisely the time in your life you need to meet that book.

Many thanks for the recommendation. I’m dropping this book in the library return box this morning, passing it along to another friend.

Everything happens for a reason. You’re here for a reason. It’s time you stopped worrying about some damn truck and got figuring out what that reason is.

Little Cabbages

October 13, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While spectating my daughter’s soccer game, I surreptitiously watch a little boy dig a small hole in the frost-killed grass. He’s met a new friend, I surmise, another younger sibling, and the two of them make homes for a handful of plastic dinosaurs — nests the boys call them.

On their knees, they’re completely entranced. When the game’s over, they wander away, each to their own family.

In our garden, it’s Brussels sprout season now. Beneath the black edges, the tiny vegetables are perfectly green, tender as spring.

My favourite vegetable, without a doubt,
Is the humble, but holy, Brussels sprout.

— Angela Wybrow

Capitalism and Commodification

October 4, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Everyone’s late to dinner last night, except the cats, who are never late to dinner, so I lie on the floor and finish reading Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Spoiler alert: there’s no laugh-aloud sections in this lengthy book.

Although I consider myself at least mediocrely educated, the book was a revelation to me — a enormous swathe of history, like Hemingway’s submerged iceberg, still mightily driving along our society.

Here’s a two-line excerpt.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

Meanwhile, little pumpkins in Vermont.

Stony Soil Vermont

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