#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Round and Round

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Autumn is my Proust’s cup of tea, recollecting for me all those childhood afternoons I walked home from elementary school, scuffing through knee-piles of fallen leaves, as they crumbled and broke, releasing their rich humusy scent.

Each morning, my 12-year-old hoists her backpack and walks across the dewy lawn, leaping over the chain link and heading down the cemetery hill. Sometimes she looks back over her shoulder to see if I’m watching; sometimes she disappears into her day without a look back, unconsciously and imaginatively creating her own teacup of memories.

While the landscape shines postcard-pretty, behind our back porch the  box elders shake loose their leaves, and up-close we’re beginning to see what was hidden under the summer’s greenery. My 12-year-old fantasizes about a zip line from the porch deep into the ravine. Her eyes sparkle as she imagines flying down that ravine, deep into the heart of a place not yet well-known.

this piercing cold—
in the bedroom, I have stepped
on my dead wife’s comb

 

– Ueda

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Wide Wingspan

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As a kid, I believed bald eagles were in the same otherworldly category as unicorns: other than in a picture, I never imagined seeing these enormous birds.

Today, I walked towards my girls in the car, all of us in a little rush to get somewhere, when a bald eagle soared overhead. I called for the girls. They got out of the car, and we stood looking up and talking, watching the eagle glide over the rooftop and through the pines, before we continued on with what we were doing.

The eagles are always amazing, always stunningly intent on their prey. In times of enormous stress, I’ve imagined myself a coyote, feral-natured, a singular predator.

The world does change. We are neither one thing or another. Bald eagles may not be ubiquitous in my lifetime, but these beauties are edging into the landscape of my daughters’ childhood. I stood there, the golden autumn around us, taking note.

We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem”
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Tiny Footsteps

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Rain began in the night, the first we’ve had in a long time – unusual in Vermont where rain is often ubiquitous. I lay awake in the night, listening to the storm wash over the roof, listening to the wind and water blow in from the east. We’ve lived in this house such a short time that rain on the roof is still new to us. In our former house, the roof was so poorly insulated, weather pounded hard on the metal, and the girls and I find ourselves listening in this house: what’s happening?

I got up and went downstairs and outside in my bare feet, leaning against the house in the dark, sheltered from the rain beneath the porch’s overhang. In our old house, I often went outside in the night, and learned how to walk in darkness so pitch I couldn’t see my moving feet or, some nights, even my own hand held before my face. I drove away fear of darkness many years ago, and came to know the sparse starlight as a companion, the darkness rich with nocturnal forest life all around us.

Here, there’s plenty of wild, too. We’re just above a steep ravine with a stream, choked with trees, singing with verdant avian life. In the night, I leaned against the house, wondering who else in town was awake in this little hour, listening to the rain.

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?

– Anonymous

 

Counting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenager, working in a nursing home, relays nursing lore that bad news comes in threes. Is this true? she asks. I love that she thinks I may have this answer.

It’s not true. Bad news knows no numerical limits.

But braided in with all that bad news are also other things, too – whether confirmation of a longed-for pregnancy or a sunny day’s stillness, a warm bit of reprieve.

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

– Lucille Clifton

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Emerald Blossom

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A little girl, about the height of my hip, leans against me in the library, seeking gum. My stash melted in the freak heat wave. She looks at me, forlorn.

The adult I’m speaking with suggests they walk outside and pick a leaf of kale.

Later, when I’m outside, too, I see the little girl with a dark green leaf tucked in her fist. She clutches this edible bouquet, watching the big girls swing. Then she leans against my leg, still facing away, a kind of forgiveness. She eats the entire leaf.

How much I desire!
Inside my little satchel,
the moon, and flowers.

– Basho

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From the season’s last swim….

Anti-Complexity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

At a book discussion for Banned Books Week, a woman mentions Harry Potter was censored as “anti-family.” What does that mean? MacBeth offers no honeyed view of family. Should we not read Shakespeare? I walk home in the dark, the air balmy and the crickets singing, a crescent moon shining like yellow gold over our house’s metal roof, then listen to my daughters’ laughter floating on that oddly warm September air through the open screens in the living room.

I slip off my sandals and stand on grass, still wet from where I watered the cotoneaster bush I planted a few weeks ago. Every evening in this dry weather, I water this bush. I planted it because the house I grew up in had a cotoneaster outside my father’s study window. My brother, when he learned to ride a bike, plowed through that bush, numerous times. I picked the berries and strung them on thread for necklaces. My sister and I fed them to our dolls. My mother admired the sprawling bush’s resilience.

I think of Harry Potter, the boy who longed for his dead parents. Anti-family? As if family has ever been simple.

We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

– Jessmyn Ward, Men We Reaped

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