Hand-me-down mud boots.

July 20, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

These few days I’ve spent in New Mexico, my mother is a constant presence and absence. She’s powerfully here, in her sunny kitchen or in the stacks of empty flower pots in the garage. Yet, she’s vanished, too. All night, the desert breathes into this house, sage-sweet wind and coyotes barking and the robin songs here, too, like in my Vermont world. These days, the skies have been layered with lightening and sooty storms, golden sun, the blowing gritty sand that scours my skin to softness.

The world far beyond my small family’s sorrows teeters towards deceit and collapse. There’s no inoculation against any spiritual ailment, really. Measles, sure, but never the terrifying largeness of grief or rage, or losing safety or love. Which leads me back to the photo above, my little daughter as she was at our kitchen door, in her hand-me-down mud boots and a handmade cotton dress, carrying stalks of garden-cut kale. A reminder never to sentimentalize or diminish the rugged and real lives we live.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

— Mary Oliver

“Everything blooming bows down in the rain…”

June 21, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

In the sultry dawn, I’m wandering barefoot in the garden, snatching the lingering strawberries before birds have nabbed the remainder. By late afternoon, thunderstorms have settled in. I’ve left a wooden chair on the porch, a throw rug over the railings, both sodden now. Book in my hand, I lean against our house’s dusty and pollen-layer clapboards, reading in the coolness that’s washed in. Our porch looks out over a bed of bleeding hearts, false Solomon’s seal, hostas. Beyond that, the cemetery, the river valley below. Behind our house, the wild presses in. Ferns tall as my shoulders, goldenseal, the groundhogs, thrush, chittering sparrows, the cut of ravine and the great life there.

Equinox; the lushness burgeons. Bring it on. The rain blows through the bedroom screens whose windows we left open all day. The box elder shoves between the porch railings. The grapes rise hungrily against the barn. All night our rooms are filled with moonbeams, the blowing dew, the mixture of milk trucks rattling down the road and the calling frogs.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:

white irises, red peonies; and the poppies

with their black and secret centers

lie shattered on the lawn.

~Jane Kenyon

Seven years ago…

June 18, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Seven years ago, my daughters and I moved from a rural hillside down to a village, about five miles away. I’d closed midweek, with plans to rally help for a Sunday move. The evening that I closed, two friends who had followed the jagged path of my divorce loaded up my car and their cars, and we carried in the first load of my family’s belongings.

It was heavenly June, warm without undue heat. I had no furniture. A friend had brought dinner, and we sat on the back deck, eating and talking. I wondered, which way would my story go? Last night, I remembered this first meal here, when a neighbor stopped by with cake and rhubarb sauce: how complicated life is and, sometimes, how very simple.

Now, in this beginning to a lush summer, I water my seedlings in these early mornings, listening to the birds and spring crickets, the drenching dew over my bare toes. The spinach is already wilting. The tithonia drooped dramatically, beginning for extra water. The blueberries have hard knots nestled among their leaves.

So much of life seems impossible — birth a baby, endure a divorce, survive a death, write a book, write another, pack up a house and move (bring the beloved tricycle, too) — and yet we do these things. We all do these things.

Seven years ago, would I have seen myself watering the sprouting green beans and listening to a woman on my neighbors’ porch sing the blues, the sky streaked with turquoise and crimson? I gathered a bowl of strawberries from plants I’ve let run rampart all through my garden beds. Messy, weedy. My youngest was given these plants when she weeded as an odd job in middle school. This year, the plants have given us so much sweetness.

Record temps are moving into Vermont, the world shifting rapidly. Around the globe and in my town, people are on the move. Which way will this story go? For a moment, I gather berries in the dewy morning. So much more day to come. But a steady start, my soles on the damp soil.

Dad and Father’s Day.

June 16, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

When I was a kid, in moments of stress or elevated high jinks, my dad’s sense of humor rose. He was prone to things like putting grapes up his nose while my mother wasn’t looking to make us kids laugh. This was the camping trip to the Grand Canyon, when the clutch went on our old Jeep, and my dad was fixing it whatever he might have had at hand — a pliers and a fishing hook , maybe two rocks rubbed together in prayer, for all I know.

That same trip, someone was on the lam who had once also been a Navy Seal. We hiked into the canyon, passing sharp shooters at the rim. Don’t look, my mother said. Sometimes I wonder, Whatever happened to him? Did he have kids?

My parents never hesitated to get out our atlas, the essential road tripping gear. Looking at the map with my youngest recently, I chanced on Medicine Bow, Wyoming. We camped beside a man who lived in his canvas tent. While we were hiking, a lightening storm blew up, and my father hustled us down. As a kid, our sometimes peripatetic life was status quo, all kinds of living mixed in. I could list a 100 things without stopping that my dad taught us, all darn useful — like read Plato and follow water when you’re lost in the wilderness — but the one I keep returning to these days, now that I’m along in my life, is his utter persistence. A parent now myself, I think of him in the Grand Canyon with three young kids and a skeptical wife, with hardly any money and a broken-down Jeep. He patched it together. We kept on with that journey, thousands of miles, all those nights in the desert under the stars. At the wheel, he drove that Jeep for many more years.

Old cheese, new peonies.

June 13, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The girls come find me where I’m swimming, the water brackish, strewn with pollen. A blackbird keeps me company. The girls have snagged out-of-date cheese that’s perfectly fine and a tomato that’s sweetly ripe. At home, I dice last year’s garlic. I insist the girls admire the Bartzilla peony that’s blooming now, two blossoms and more fat buds of blossoms. The Bartzilla was a gift a number of autumns ago. My youngest planted the hairy root with me, skeptical. Now, for these few days, this peony’s a marvel.

All day, I’ve been thinking of this Mary Oliver poem. Well worth a share.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace,
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again —
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

Don’t confuse hunger with greed.

June 7, 2024 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At breakfast, I mention to my daughter that June 6, today, is D-Day. I’ll write what perhaps she would not want me to write: that she’s standing at the counter making avocado toast and drinking yesterday’s cold coffee. She pours sriracha over the cut avocado. She’s 19, and, lord, a sheer miracle of youth, this gorgeous young woman.

I say, The soldiers were your age. Younger.

We stand staring at each other in our small kitchen of June sunlight. On our table lies a pile of unopened mail, our tabby cat Acer grooming his whiskers, car keys and lip balm, a hunting knife that could extract a man’s heart.

In the evening, I’m at the local arts center to see Nora Jacobson‘s documentary about poet Ruth Stone. The evening is still light when I drive home. I take the long way and pull over beside a field to admire the ragged robin, its pink spreading where the dandelions have gone to seed and green. In my Subaru, it’s me and that box of my mother’s ashes. I once knew a woman who kept her stepfather’s ashes for three years in a Datsun. Impossible, I thought. Now, I think, Sure, possible.

A day of such historical might, such profound sorrow. Yet, our own domestic dramas, the kitchen table stories: how real and meaningful these are, too. As a woman, as a writer, I’ve been thinking for weeks about Ruth Stone’s admonition: “Don’t confuse hunger with greed;/And don’t wait until you are dead.” In my garden, I grab a branch of lilac – the goregous white double blossoms, withering with rot – and breathe in the sweet fragrance.