While The Season Lasts…

October 7, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.

Autumn is quintessential childhood.

This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.

– Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

Look at This

October 5, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving my 11-year-old to school this morning, I remarked on the stunning foliage, and she answered in her even-keeled way, I kind of hate to say this, but the leaves are a little boring. What if we were along the Pacific Ocean, driving on a cliff, and looking out at the sea? Now, that would be really interesting.

Oh, my daughter, my daughter. Isn’t that the way of the world? I asked if she wondered if the kids on the Pacific coast might want to see Vermont’s gold and crimson leaves?

My daughter thought about that for a good while. Finally, long past the time I thought she might have lost interest, she offered, Maybe.

….O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow….

– Robert Frost, “October” fullsizerender

Imagine This

October 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other misty autumn afternoon I was standing in front of the Woodbury general store recreating the library’s sign when an acquaintance came out of the store with a gallon of milk and two quarts of Ben & Jerry’s. Naturally, I offered to relieve him of the weight of that ice cream. With the foliage burning an orange hue in the clouds, he and I talked about kids and our own childhoods, and how mightily imagination can work through a life, propelling people in all kinds of different ways – or not, if imagination is lacking.

I thought of a short piece I’d written for Kids VT about a 9-year-old boy who, hanging out in his dad’s East L.A. auto parts store with time on his hands, no kid companions, and piles of empty boxes, constructed an elaborate arcade from cardboard. By chance, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick appeared to buy a door handle for his Toyota corolla, and this short flick and a greater story evolved from their meeting. Caine is a smart and inherently likable kid, but the filmmaker equally interested me – in a story behind the story kind of way. Who was this adult who took such an interest in this lonely boy? Doubtlessly, the story widens….

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact…

– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Greensboro, Vermont

E.R. Visit

October 3, 2016October 4, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Doubtlessly, I talk too much with my teenager, as if I can fortress a wall comprised of vowel and consonant around her. Yesterday took an unexpected curve when she had a knuckle stitched up in Morrisville’s ER. Dark thread; alabaster skin.

In hours of waiting, just once I asked her to look at her gauze-wrapped knuckle. I asked, Do you see what my words mean?

This girl pushing-hard-toward-womanhood said one word: Yes.

Yes. A word overspilling with meaning, used in manifold humdrum ways (is it raining yet? do you want more kale? would you wash that laundry?) and then, in that afternoon, between the two of us – mother and daughter –that word arched between us in the clearest possible manner, resonating with all our 17 years together.

Do you see what I mean? Yes.

That yes acknowledged the misery of the present ER, the unwieldy bulk of the past, and yet that yes joined us, mother and daughter. Yes to my love for her, and yes in her acceptance of my love.

Parenting books are chock-full of advice, both decent and downright dumb. Seeing my daughter’s hand x-rayed, with her long elegant bones, ethereal in beauty, hidden beneath the bloody tear of her flesh, pulled me down into that near wordless place where only a few things matter.

Rain began falling as I drove home around Elmore Lake too cold for swimming this late in the season, and the autumn leaves golden and crimson on the familiar mountain. My brother, home with the 11-year-olds, holding up the pieces of my domestic life, had texted a request for paper towels and beer. My daughter and I stopped at the small Elmore store, where years ago this girl had eaten her first grape popsicle. My friend had carefully split that frozen treat in two equal halves for two 2-year-olds. She had used a plastic toy saw as a tool.

Going that final stretch home, I drove slowly, the two of us eating chocolate chip cookies and talking.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

– Joseph Campbell

Summer of 17, Greensboro, Vermont

Birds of Prey, And Us Non-Birds

October 1, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night at our little local library, a high school student told his story of visiting a falconer. The falcons, he said, have one primal force: to eat. He described feathered creatures who will sit for hours, waiting for a mouse to appear – almost sure prey at a hole – rather than using calories to fly randomly and seek the unknown.

The world of training these regal birds, the teenager relayed, centers on one primary object: a morsel of London broil on a leather gauntlet. That is so not the human way. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer days, single-minded patience and determination dictated human action, but it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine when the human terrain of desire – for food beyond sustenance, sweet, salty, and spicy; for silk and myriad dyed colors for fashion; for adulation on a small and great scale; for the comfort of coupling in bed, complicated or not – hasn’t constantly jumbled up civilization.

Aggravating, infuriating at times, this world I inhabit, and yet this morning, waking in the dark with a child murmuring in her sleep near me, what a wondrous world, too. Not far from my desk, a mouse scurries in and out of its tiny hole, busy with its own rodent variation of London broil. More generous this rainy morning, I think, Go about, little one.

Autumn Haiku

Even from my front porch
the rusted sewing machine
yearns for golden thread.

– Warren Falcon

Woodbury, Vermont

Construction Paper

September 29, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, colored paper leaves spruced up our kitchen windows. My teenager had spent some late hours busy with arts and crafts and Netflix. Our house is the better off for this.

Which got me to thinking… what are the things a kid needs? The obvious ones, of course: steady meals and sturdy shoes and an arc of adult arms. But beyond survival, I see how my own children thrive into their imaginative spaces, busily not finding but creating their own niche.

As babies, their whole lives commenced literally turned into my heart to suckle, but now I see my kids intentionally widening their worlds, painting their bedrooms but also expanding their realms through deepening friendships and giggling nights, or their own journeys on foot or bicycle or down the highway.

What does a kid need? Perhaps what as an adult I need, too: freedom to spread out and explore, and a home to hold your artwork.

Here’s a few lines from what I’m reading now:

There was a period… with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.

– Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

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