#amwriting

Childhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, these two 11-year-old girls have been weaving their lives together, spinning stories, jumping on the trampoline, creating bracelets from colored rubber bands, hatching a plan with their fathers to go paddle-boarding tomorrow – these two girls who have known each other since before their own memories began to hold shape. Long past the age of teething and cloth diapers and still not yet at the age of first love and heartbreak, they’re at an age of real appreciation for each other, an easy comfort with their bodies and laughter.

In the adult world that seems to be spinning into madness, I’m struck again by the brevity of childhood – and its singular importance. Soak it up, I think, looking up from my desk as the girls wander in. Eat watermelon, filch peonies from an empty vacation house’s garden, lie on the grass and giggle. Soak up the season of childhood. 

Let it linger, children.

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars….

(the adults) soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”

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primroses, July, Vermont

 

Our Garden of Early Delights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season’s
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

The Tall and the Short of It

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Running through the Atlanta airport – far larger than the Vermont village we live in – my 17-year-old daughter is the sharp one among us, pointing her younger sister and I through the crowds to the T concourse, up an escalator and a second one, laughing as we rush for our plane, breathlessly relaying how she ran in high heels last winter, alone, for the final flight into Burlington before a snowstorm.

In an underground train, the younger sister reads aloud, “Hold on when the train starts,” and then immediately asks, “Hold on to what?” Surrounded by people, the younger girl and I look up. We are both under five feet, and I stretch my hand up hopelessly for the overhead strap.

As the train lurches forward, we both clutch her older sister (a girl who is, as Raymond Carver wrote, a long tall drink of water), and everyone around us laughs out loud.

With a delayed flight, we currently remain in Atlanta, waiting with chipper Vermonters we don’t know but are beginning to, exchanging weather, geography, and history stories – beneath a stunning double rainbow.

Here’s a few lines from Thomas Christopher Greene‘s novel If I Forget You I’m reading:

She climbs into the yellow cab that is first in the line of yellow cabs. Henry is running now. He is at the window. She looks up at him – those eyes, unchanged, the pale blue of sea glass – and he stretches his hand toward the closed window and the cab lurches out into traffic, merging quickly, a damn sea of yellow cabs, and he tries to keep his eyes on the one that carries her, until he is no longer sure which one it is and a phalanx of them moves up Broadway and out of sight.

 

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Atlanta airport, GA

More Than the Whole

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, my daughters baked a raspberry tart, gathering like any craftswomen the pieces of their creation: oats, sugar, butter, fruit. Thinking over the book I’m writing, like any writer I gather my pieces – characters in their tangible and intangible complexities (a green and gold wool vest, a port wine birthmark, the memory of driving rashly along a rainy street), story, and language – shaping this creation.

But a book is greater than the sum of its pages and cover, and I kept thinking of Akenfield, a nonfiction book about a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, told primarily in the villagers’ own voices. The village, too, of course, is more than the sum of its people: nurse, blacksmith, head mistress, gravedigger, odd-job man.

Now that the tart is half-eaten, made in merriment by two sisters, I see that sweet delight is more than the sum of its parts, too.

… I am willing to forgo a lot of the things other people now take for granted in order to keep Akenfield, by which I mean the deep country. The power of wonder is here…. It is man’s rightful place to live in Nature and to be a part of it. He has to recognize the evidence of his relationship to the great natural pattern in such things as flowers, crops, water, stones, wild creatures. Where he destroys such evidence… he gradually destroys a part of himself.

From the village poet in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield

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Galisteo, New Mexico

Night

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When we were girls, my sister and I shared innumerable books. In elementary school we began with library books (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself), and by high school we were onto James Joyce and Tom Wolfe – most recently Anthony Doerr. It’s a habit that’s spanned throughout our entire lives.

One slender book has always remained in my consciousness. Even now, I remember reading this book for the first time with my sister, the two of us horrified, by happenstance of geography and time blessedly never stepping even near the peripheral edges of the profoundest human suffering. The book is Night. 

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

– Elie Wiesel

September 30, 1928-July 2, 2016

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

 

Thorny Land

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenage daughter fears snakes. Walking in the arroyo yesterday, this Vermont girl quizzes her grandmother about the possibility of encountering a rattlesnake. Never seen one, she’s assured. Moments later, a rattler slithers near her feet, and she screams.

She glares back at me, as if I’ve magically created what she considers a devilish creature. Between us lie spiny cholla cactus, red sand, thumbnail-sized wildflowers I don’t recognize at all. We are no longer in the lush land of the Green Mountains.

Searchingly, she peers into a cluster of tumbleweed and then back at me.

Gone, I say. She waits a moment longer and then offers, You can go first now.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

– Georgia O’Keeffe

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Santa Fe, New Mexico