A Little Bit of Sweetness….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My sixth-grader and her class visited the middle and high school yesterday, dipping in their 12-year-old toes for next year’s migration from the crayon-scented world of elementary school to the locker-walled hallways.

Her sister, hanging out in art class, gave her a glazed blueberry donut.

Later that night, walking through the halls with the kids and my friend, I remember my own adolescent claustrophobic years, calling my high school “the cannery” as I felt like a fish parched for wild waters.

As a sprig of forsythia in a vase greets visitors into my kitchen these days, that donut likely welcomed my daughter into the next phase of schooling. Sweet….

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me…..

From “Instructions on Not Giving Up” By Ada Limón

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Delight of the Dandelion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This is May’s golden heart, when blooming coltsfoot crosses over with dandelion blossoms. Years ago, when my daughter was four, her preschool was in a white clapboard Unitarian Church on a lake frozen solid white all winter, in summers sparkling blue. We canoed far out into the lake’s center, or swam at the sandy shore. To get there, we traveled along a back road flanked on either side by enormous hayfields. For a just a brief period, the flawless green was transformed into rolling gold. Endless bouquets and braided crowns. Her four-year-old spring was fragrant with the slightly acrid milk of dandelion stalks.

I remembered her childhood while writing poems today with third and fourth graders. What kind of things fill a Vermont child’s spring? Tulips, a cardinal, water balloon fights on bicycles. Now that’s worth writing a poem about.

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Sandwich board outside The Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont

 

Roaming Kids

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I unclogged the kitchen sink yesterday afternoon with a sewer snake and a five-minute tutorial courtesy YouTube. In my childhood home, my dad had a yellow hard-covered book he consulted for his share of plumbing. While the reference method of home repair has changed, the essential has not. Just before I unplugged the sink, I wrote an article for work at the kitchen table my mother painstakingly refinished decades ago, and then I chopped up a watermelon for the kids, who appeared sweaty and panting from bike riding. They conceived a plan to cook outside, and built a blaze with birch bark.

My teenager appeared with her boyfriend, and we sat outside in the wood smoke that shifted with the breeze, laughing about marshmallows and hair gel, and remarking about the cooling air and the clouds fattening with rain. Tiny knobs of blossoms hung from the current bushes, and all around us, green growth surged mightily.

I had finished a reasonable amount of work (and triumphed with the drain, too), my daughters weren’t bickering, the black flies were negligible, and then eventually we left the fire and went walking in the rain, as I did as a child, too.

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

– Bashō

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Mini Road Trip

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last night, as my younger daughter was getting into bed, her sister says, Want to go on a field trip?

In the dark , we drive around the mountain on our dirt road, passing precisely no other vehicle, and suddenly the nearly full moon appears in the sky, luminescent, unearthly, so near I imagine I could stretch out my hand and touch this gleaming orb.

While my older daughter leans against the car hood, busy with her Cannon, the younger girl and I admire the constellations, the night’s darkness ameliorated by the moon’s brilliance. Cold for May, I tug my down jacket tight.

The peepers sing. We breathe in the aroma of wet soil, standing at a hayfield’s edge, with no need or rush to go anywhere at all, drenched under star and moonlight.

 

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

– Buson

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Raw Material

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter lay on the couch all day yesterday with a bad cold; since she was a little girl, her response to sickness or misery has been quiet, a pulling into herself. Her sister rises up and fights.

Neither good nor bad, each girl arrived in this world with a distinctive personality emerging even as a young child.

When they were younger, I made a failed attempt to conceal what I believed were the harder realities – grave illness or betrayal. The truth, really, was that I didn’t want to hold those things; how little credit I gave to the children, and to resilience itself. Mistakenly, I believed resilience was a well that be tapped dry, rather than, like creativity, a bottomless collective spring.

I alone could never drink it dry.

Our writing is a living portrait of ourselves….. Write for the sheer pleasure we take in doing it, but also for the knowledge that it might just shift this world of ours a little. It is, after all, a beautiful and strange and furious place. Literature reminds us that life is not already written down. There are still infinite possibilities. Make from your confrontation with despair a tiny little margin of beauty. The more you choose to see, the more you will see. In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart. Rage on.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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Not By Light Alone

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Darn near every moment these May Vermont days, the greenery deepens, fattening mightily, rushing headlong in the chlorophyll world as if making up for winter’s lengthy dormancy.

Walking in the dusky, gently falling rain last night? How could we not love this? All that growth – leaf, blossom, peepers, owls – chorusing around us.

Likely the most unresolvable argument of my life was about darkness, with a person who insisted I not embrace the darkness, not press it near my heart. Every one of my days for nearly the past 19 years has been filled with growing babies and children, teenagers now, with beeswax crayons and playhouses made from sheets, and an endless round of apple slices; at the same time, I’ve also lived through the planting, harvest, and demise of many gardens. Every year, I pass the unknown day of my death and the days of the deaths of everyone I love, and I know, even as the thrust of spring is so mightily powerful and unstoppable, all this will change, too. Our world holds both courage and cowardice, generosity and betrayal.

I’d rather know that, too, than not.

Thanks to State 14 for picking up a blog entry of mine. What a pleasure to be included with their fine writers and photographers.

Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.

Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.

They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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