Robin Survival?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

This is now the sixth year we’ve lived in this house. I count these years by June 15th, the date I signed for the house, two days before my oldest graduated from high school, the date the sellers took us out to lunch and I stared through the diner window, wondering if buying this house was a good idea.

On this sixth year, a robin family has joined us, building what appears to be a well-made nest, strands of straw hanging from roof rafter. The nest is beneath the porch roof, covered from the weather. The nest is so close to our house that the mother robin flies away whenever we open the back door. My daughters and I wonder, Why not choose a rafter in the barn? A good old-fashioned tree limb?

The robins’ destiny is, of course, neither here nor there. We didn’t make the nest, and whether this family survives is largely beyond my purview. Certainly, my curious housecats will not harm these young ones. Yet I’m curious as my cats, wondering what drove this family to our porch.

June. We are surrounded by a hungry world that eats wee robins. I’m rooting for these young ones, hoping they’ll pull through. Come what may.

The Pleasurable Stink of Wet Wool.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Rain begins spitting midday. I’m on a clearing-my-head walk through the forest, and the songbirds are crazily lovely, singing mightily away, simultaneously solo and in concert, and the flowers — my goodness — the flowers. The forget-me-nots trail me like loving, silent cats.

There’s a thousand things going on — that thickening rain, the myriad leaves in ovals and spikes, the blooms and the seed heads. I take the long walk back to civilization, emptying my mind as I go. When I return to the human threshold, there’s a little reluctance to head on back in… I stink of wet wool, the better for these minutes.

There is No Such Thing as Atheism.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

One of my favorite parts of our house is the small glassed-in porch at the bottom of the stairs, just large enough for two small loveseats. In this high school graduation weekend, we’ve spent a lot of time hanging out, talking, talking, the weather alternately switching from cold rain to sparkling sun. The cats sequestered themselves on the stairs while my daughter’s dog lingers around her feet. The dog wants to play. The cats cherish their dignity. The humans hover around this heartfelt drama.

Graduation and its platitudes… and yet the moment is such a pivot point, a marker between childhood and what will (god willing) be a very long haul of adulthood. Unplanned, the day spans the present, old friends I haven’t seen in years, and ends with a chess game with my brother at the kitchen table. Graduation isn’t weekend to solve anything, fix out the phone bill or shore up the back deck.

On this graduation weekend… the best commencement speech I’ve ever read is David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” gritty, savvy, and full of heart….

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive….

— David Foster Wallace

Fox Running Down the Road…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Midday, driving from here to there, a fox runs across a field towards me, its jaws clamped around what appears to be a yearling groundhog. I immediately slow my Subaru. The fox runs quickly, darting across the road. I pull over and jump out, watching the fox run along the shoulder. It’s backwoods Vermont, and no one’s around but me and this fox intent on carrying home its slain prey.

Surely the fox knows the road is empty of humans but for me, and I am no threat. Running, running, the fox disappears into the hayfield. In no great rush, I admire the lake through the trees. It may rain, or not. The hazy swimming weather has been usurped by cold, by the strange smoke from the Canadian wildfires so far from us. Here, this midday, it’s just me and the fox and the groundhog turning doubtlessly into fox kits.

Eventually, a pickup appears and stops. The driver’s an acquaintance, and he rolls down the window and asks what’s up. I lean against the door. He and I grouse for a bit about town business and human chaos. When he’s gone, I linger just a little longer, remembering the rushing fox, those moments of human and wild.

“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you…” 

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Loons, Wiser Than Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Back when my girls were in the early sand bucket age, loons were a rare sight on the lake. The grownups would knock off whatever chat we had going when we spied those distinctive birds — spotted backs, red-eyed. I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw a loon as a girl.

But even now, those calls — how eerie, how utterly mesmerizing, how definitively not of the human world. This afternoon, before a planning commission meeting and just as a little light rain begins, I walk over to that beach where we drank so much coffee. There’s two cars in the parking lot, people staring at the lake and the sky that’s bruised with storm. The loons holler across the rippling water. Vacation in Vermont and you might think summer is all sweetness and ice cream — but here’s a slice of cold rain, those two black-necked beauties, and an infinity of sky.

Myself, the Householder.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Furious, long before four this morning I’m at my desk with coffee and manuscript and my needy cat who must have his nose rubbed. A few months ago I asked a neighbor to knock off his cash carpentry payments to my ex-husband, a father who’s never made a child support payment. The neighbor brusquely told me I didn’t understand the complexity of the situation and walked out.

Now, he’s sent word that I made him and his wife feel unsafe. Oh Lord…. me and my 4’9″ stature and my insistence that I do know the complexity of my story and my uncomfortable female rage. I’ve doubtlessly repeated this, but his is a Kafka-esque flip of the word unsafe. And since when are other people’s children negligible?

I’ve been here before — like too many others, as this is hardly my unique problem — and I do what seems sensible to me. I tell no one where I’m headed and hike through the forest and up along a ridgeline. The hike cools my head. I discover white trilliums and wash my face in a low-running stream. The woods are hurting for rain, thirsty, thirsty.

I left with a question — what will I do? — and returned with my answer. Out of chaos, always, springs the pulsing might of creativity. At home, I hole up with Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, and Biggs points me to Toni Morrison. In the evening, I pull a few weeds from the lily-of-the-valley that guard my house’s foundation. Such a delicate, pure, tiny flower.

 Q. You don’t feel that these girls (of teenage mothers) will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?

A: They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them all in my arms and say, “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me — I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.

— Toni Morrison, Time Magazine