Birth

February 3, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

An image appears in art, over and over, of a human down a deep narrow well: trapped. What’s at the bottom? What’s at the top?

17 years ago, I had a prolonged labor with my first daughter, where, hours into it, I knew I was descending headfirst down a stone-lined chasm. In all that darkness, I saw only my outstretched hand, reaching down. At the bottom, I knew with a certainty, as clear as I have ever known anything, lay my death.

I never reached the end of that chasm that night. Instead, I met my daughter, born via emergency caesarian. When I saw her tiny, wrinkled body for the first time, held up for me in the surgeon’s bloodied gloves, her eyes were wide open, and I thought with a fierceness I have never relinquished, She’s mine.

These few lines are but a piece of her traverse into this earthly world, and my soulful journey to meeting her is as real as the glinting scalpel in the surgeon’s hand that released her from my body. So, as fiction writer, when I write of rock-lined tunnels or starless nights, I’m not fabricating stories from nothingness. The interior roads we take may be unseen to the eye but are just as vital, just as humming with mysterious life, as a newborn’s eyes.

…(my mother) was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea--none of it
was enough, for her, without me.

–– Sharon Olds

Montpelier, Vermont

Midwinter Hunger

January 31, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A sizable deer appeared in my garden this morning among the bean stalks I never pulled, lifting its head, listening. In the woods around our small field, a flock of wild turkeys comes and goes, bent over dark creatures who remind me of Puritan old women dressed in black, crouched at their work. In the kitchen, my daughters mix pork, scallions, garlic, vinegar, for soup dumplings.

This stillness of winter is a false cliche; overhead, the crow flies for its meal. Squirrels run rampart over the compost. Even the wood stove devours. The children, asleep in their beds, dream of journeys. In the morning, sleepy at breakfast, they appear to have grown in those dark hours.

When we eat a steak, we build its proteins into our bodies and become part cow. Eat an artichoke, become part artichoke. Drink a glass of orange juice, become part orange tree. Everything eventually corrupts: from our first draft of milk, we are corrupted, the world is corruption, time is corruption, and we are forever hungering for more.

–– Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

West Woodbury, Vermont

Girls, Goodbye 2015, Walking

January 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Around six this afternoon, in our Vermont dark, I stood on State Street in Montpelier, waiting outside a movie theatre for my teenage daughter and her friend. The downtown was all lit up with lights, and passersby were merry with the holiday. I was standing with my brother-in-law, and we were laughing about a mechanical music from some source we couldn’t determine, oddly mimicking what might have been the songs of angels. While the girls were at the movies, we had been talking in a crowded coffee shop, and I had seen people come and go that I had known, years ago.

My brother-in-law I’ve known since I was sixteen, before I began driving, before I read Plato, before I married and had two daughters and threw myself into my adult life. Here we stood, in this odd, brightly lit place, on the heartbeat of a new year, in a little bit where time might have simply stood still, for just one moment. We spoke about (what else?) our children. As I laughed about how much his older son ate at my house last summer, my daughter and her friend arrived, in their long lovely hair and earrings, smiling and filled with the happiness of seeing a movie and their own friendship. As we said our goodbyes, we said goodbye to 2015, too; in this evening, the whole unknown expanse of 2016 lies before us.

From behind me, I felt arms suddenly around my waist, and there was a little girl in a familiar iridescent blue jacket – dear companion of my younger daughter – this sweet girl hugging me and saying, Happy New Year! before she disappeared down the street, too.

May Light always surround you;
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire.

D. Simone

Photo by Molly S./Montpelier, Vermont

What You Need in Your Life….

December 31, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

… is perhaps something I never thought much about as a teenager. My own teenager this snowy day has a koi she’s intricately drawing in pen and ink, solely for pleasure. As dusk began falling, she started the tractor of her own volition and plowed the driveway, then came in and baked a pan of brownies.

My nephew, age 12, sent me 14 “perfect Japanese words.” I could use a little more of this boy in my life….

komorebi: sunlight filtering through trees

irusu: pretending to be out when someone knocks at your door

shinrin-yoku: literally ‘forest bathing’ – a visit to the forest for relaxation and to improve your health

isundoku: the act of buying a book and leaving it unread, often piled together with other unread books

ukiyo: literally ‘the floating world’ – living in the moment, detached from the bothers of life

majime: an earnest, reliable person who can simply get things done without causing drama

yugen: a profound awareness of the universe that triggers a deep emotional response

yoisho: a word without meaning, said when flopping into a chair after a hard day at work

wasuremono: forgotten or lost things; an item left behind on a train or forgotten at home

hikikomori: when a young person who is obsessed with TV, video games, and the internet, withdraws from society

bimyou: not bad, or ‘meh’

shibui: old school cool

kuidaore: to eat yourself into bankruptcy

and…. what else?… ikigai: a reason for being, the thing that gets you up in the morning…. perhaps the word of greatest importance of all….

Sunday: Math Homework

November 30, 2015November 30, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

One embarrassing aspect of my parenting that keeps rearing its ugly head is my abysmal understanding of math. Or, as my brother might phrase it, the complete and total absence of even meager understanding. My daughter, grappling with variables and graphing, asks for help, and then is reduced to querying, How did you get through calculus anyway? Or are you lying about that?

As I was flanked on either side by math luminosity in my older sister and younger brother, headed up by my PhD-in-physics father, skipping out of math wasn’t an option for me… and yet somehow I always felt in Prob & Stats class like I was the dog with its head hanging out the window, tongue flapping, dreaming of distant rivers to swim.

Hence, my humanities path.

Now math returns to me frequently (often on Sunday evenings). With something approaching horror, I heard my daughter claim her teacher doesn’t want to see her math work, merely the answers. What? I demand. Show your work was a cardinal rule of my student life, along with always use a pencil, these dictums wound so deeply into me I can’t abide the thought of breaking these basic rules. That’s tantamount to crossing a street with your eyes closed. My daughter looks at me with complete exasperation, fully ready to do just about anything else.

While I admit Solve for x still runs a chill up my spine, I have learned a few things since those trig days. My advice: begin with what you know. Scope out your variables, size up your know-how, and savvy up a plan.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

— Anne Lamott

Elmore, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

adolescents