#amreading

One Tiny Town

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The girls worked for a hours today on a creation so consuming they couldn’t remember whose idea it was: a tiny town. This project is the satisfying stuff of summer days, with time and outdoor space sufficient to spread out with cardboard and scissors, markers, tape, and framing nails.

Dr. Spock – whatever his flaws might have been – never put down children’s play. Our Vermont world is up one small town today, and better off for its creation.

Flight requires defiance of gravity and is really, when you think about it, a bold act.

– Elizabeth J. Church, The Atomic Weight of Birds

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July, Woodbury, Vermont

 

Flowers of All Sizes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter picked a piece of a dill flower in the garden today, then noticed her sprig was a miniature version of the whole. Curiously inspecting, she saw the symmetry reflected again in a smaller blossom-within-a-blossom.

For the longest time, my child examined that flower, wondering how tiny flowers could be. Down to molecules? she asked.

Forget those high school chemistry drawings and imagine this: molecules in the shape of flowers.

Maybe a little summer boredom isn’t such a bad thing….

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

– Yosa Buson

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West Woodbury, Vermont

The Body Doesn’t Lie…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. a friend of mine told me in graduate school. She had suffered trauma as a young child, and, as an adult, found her body retained that trauma – silently all those years, as if in a repository.

This afternoon, with no one around but my children and friends, a loon and a handful of low-flying, squawking gulls, we swam in Greensboro’s Lake Caspian after a thunderstorm. The cool water held the dark blue of the stormy sky, reflecting the tempestuous, infinite sky above.

All this evening, while painting my daughter’s room three complementary shades of blue, I listened to NPR pour out a stream of collective body wound: a whole nation writhing in myriad variations of misery.

My teenage daughter asks question after question, and I go back to that afternoon sky, where the water and sky hold together, reflecting their finer hues.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Writing Lists

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At a meeting recently, the person beside me pulled out a handwritten list and flipped it over a few times, reading. Because I’m me, I naturally tried to read that list. In between crossed out items, I read fold laundry.

A serious list-writer myself, that particular chore has appeared numerous times on my lists, along with buy cooking oil and go to dump. Isn’t a list a written map, in some ways, of who we are? Years ago, in between buy toilet paper and teach Molly to read, I had  find publisher for novel. I’ve now crossed that item off my list, and now, simply, on every list I begin is write every day. While lists are inherently interesting, what may be more interesting is what doesn’t make lists. For years, while my marriage was disintegrating, I likely should have written either fix this or file divorce papers.

At this point, in my forties, I’d far prefer my lists to read write and fold laundry. I would have scoffed at that simple normalcy in my twenties, but now – a little more steady everydayness goes a very long way. That’s one more reason to savor homemade pickles – although here I am, writing, among veritable mounds of unfolded laundry…..

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

– Alice Walker

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Woodbury, Vermont

A Little More Joy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, sitting on blankets on the grass at Muddy Creek Pottery, while children sang for an audience of their parents, I thought what a better world we would live in with more song. Just singing: voices raised in harmony, trained or not.

Afterwards, my child showed me her handmade treasures: the pottery plate she so carefully designed, a silkscreened butterfly, hula hoops…..

For no other reason but simply to mark that childhood needs as full a measure of joy as possible, I mark my daughter’s happiness this week, with her hands and her clothes dirty, face tanned, her days filled with a familiar friend and a new friend, her sleep sweet.

Do not seek to follow in the
footsteps of the wise.
Seek what they sought.

– Basho

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Caspian Lake, Vermont

 

That Shockproof Shit Dectector

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter got her first job on a payroll today. While she’s worked in our sugaring business from toddlerhood on, and babysat the neighbors’ little ones, this job marks her first foray into direct-deposit, need-your-social-security number employment. She’s excited; I’m proud of her, as always; but there’s also this tinge, for my very first time as a mother, that now she’s really heading into adulthood. Oh, I can’t help but think, now you’re among us, on this side.

She’s savvy and courageous in ways I never was as a teenager, and has what Hemingway described as “a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” She has no intention of becoming a writer, but that characteristic, I’m sure, will serve her well.

Fortunately, life is slow. Telling me her news, in her yet-childishly careless way, she dropped ripe tomatoes on the kitchen floor, dashing my salsa dinner plans, and laughed hysterically.

While I’m thumbing through my marked-up Hemingway books, here’s more writerly advice:

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.

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