Isolation Snippet

April 23, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My friend appears at our back glass doors and startles the three of us in the kitchen. She holds up a dozen eggs she’s dropping off and the seventh Harry Potter movie.

My daughter lifts a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

Yes, my friend mouths.

I step out on the deck and suggests she step back as the porch roof is about to dump snow down her back. My daughter hands out cookies while we’re talking about wanting to step into Harry Potter’s world. Maybe the kids are interested in flying, but what we’d really like? To sit in a train car and hang out with your friends.

Until then… this snow is melting today. Bit by bit, spring is emerging here.

Easter Sweets

April 12, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

We leave a plate of tiny cupcakes for our friends on their porch steps. They step out to talk over the garden fence. Purple crocuses bloom beneath their picture window.

Standing there, I remember when my older daughter was two — all those times when she cried, leaving this house, and I strong-armed her into a carseat. Last week, she spent the better part of two days of a nursing home shift sitting with a woman who was dying. The woman had been born in Germany, before the Nazi party rolled tanks into Poland and began World War II.

And so our days continue. Spring into more spring, summer nothing but a promise ahead.

On a run yesterday morning, my daughters stopped to talk to an older man at his mailbox. He told my daughters the few inches of wet spring snow was a poor man’s fertilizer. When they return, they find me writing at the kitchen table, curious to know if I’ve ever heard that phrase before.

Indeed, I say. He’s right.

In the city fields
Contemplating cherry-trees…
Strangers are like friends

— Issa

Duo Residence

January 28, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Ooooo, midwinter.

After work, while my daughter memorizes French for an exam, I head out for a walk. A slight snow is falling, just a few lazy flakes as if nothing much is going to happen, just that little bit of snow. It’s my most very favorite snow, just lovely, and in the cone of streetlight I have that enchanting Narnia feeling — as if it’s just me and the lamppost and that snow, and maybe the mysterious White Witch might silently appear. In that twirling-down-slowly snow, Turkish delight might still be an untasted promise in my life, rather than the too-sweet candy I remember.

That’s it, from my end of the world. I’ve been “dividing my time” between desk and couch, finishing up a manuscript. When I submit it Friday, I’m planning to ski out the back door — snow willing — and paint my daughter’s room.

Then, on to the next month.

But land is land, and it’s safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.

― Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

Vermont, Sometime in January

January 26, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Midwinter. Need I say more?

I remember a Vermont winter when I was in my twenties where January was sub-sub-zero. 25 below zero, in what seemed like a cold snap that wouldn’t snap.

Not so, this year. Rain, slush, ice. Some sparkling skiing days.

The cats drape on the couches, dreaming of tuna perhaps, their little furry faces rubbing our hands. Midwinter is that particularly good place for work — or at least the kind of work I do, much of it at a laptop and not re-roofing a house. My daughters and I talk about swimming, of wandering in wet sand along the ocean, of ice cream cones (so dull I am, preferring vanilla), but in January that’s all imaginary…. for the moment. In a warm, well-lighted house, that’s just fine.

Let’s pull some blueberries from the freezer and make muffins — and another little silver pot of espresso, too.

So much money made
by clever temple priests
using peonies

— Issa

End of a Not-so-long-ago Terrible War

January 4, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

While cooking a dinner I’ve made for years — udon and broccoli and a spinach omelette — I listen to NPR and wonder, like any reasonable parent, what kind of world my daughters will live in when they’re my age.

At dinner, our conversation bends around to current events — the man in the White House — and then to history. I tell the girls I remember my father telling me about the end of World World II. Although they won’t know each other for years, he and my mother were eight-years-old. World War II seems such an infinity ago that my daughters are amazed. This puts that terrible war within not only their grandparents’ lifetimes, but their memories, too.

Really? my older daughter asks.

Really, I answer. I wasn’t there, but that’s what I hear.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

— Sir Isaac Newton

Quiet Day

January 2, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pea soup with scraps of leftover ham bubbled on our stove all day — a weekday more like a Sunday. Walking through town, I met no one.

At the end of the holiday school break, I head out before dinner to empty the compost pail in the bin. Amazingly, the afternoon is light yet, not dim as the afternoons were not long before the holiday. I stand there for a moment, watching wet snowflakes twirl down, the snow and I heedless of any time.

A radiance rises from the snow-covered town cemetery just behind my garden, bright despite the granite stones.

More so than other years, this holiday my daughters and I seemed to have rounded that bend from the divorce. Maybe it’s nothing more than the distance of time and physical space. Maybe it’s simply that time doesn’t cure, but it does scab over. Oddly this season, I kept thinking of Mary Oliver’s line about her box of darkness, and how that, too, was a gift. Maybe that’s part of this whole holiday season, too: that light does, inevitably, come of darkness, always.

Happy wishes for another decade of living: 2020.