Why Love Teens

June 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my older daughter was a teen and invited over a posse of girls, I was always amazed by just the size of the girls — so much young female energy and just so much talk! They eat like crazy — and then eat like crazy again — but they’re just so darn enthusiastic, just so darn happy to be testing out the world.

Last night at our house, the six young teens, buoyed by a balmy early summer evening, slept outside. Why not? Under the stars, I could see my breath.

On the same day, the neighbors’ celebrated their four-year-old’s birthday. In the afternoon, he began riding a bicycle with training wheels. When my teens eat and eat, when I’m mired down in the complexities of living with teens, I remind myself that those sweet sippy cup days have now passed me by.

Tired, the girls struggled in bedraggled in the morning, hungry for waffles.

I emerge
from the museum
at dusk —
the blue Nile
floods over.

— Fumi Saitō

Dirty Knees

June 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Mid-morning in sultry yesterday, I’m beneath the deck nailing a chicken fence on one end to keep my daughter’s chickens from venturing toward the neighbors. I’m thinking of my folded-up laptop on the table on the deck above my head and of the woman I just interviewed, how I want to write just 500 words before I’m at the middle school again, picking up my daughter. At the same time, I’m thinking of a house insurance bill.

Her golden chicken appears beside me and clucks softly, as if asking a question. Then I just stop for a moment and ask the chicken, hey, what’s up? I remember when my father, decades ago, put on his oldest clothes and crawled in the narrow space beneath our house, cleaning up the droppings from our beloved cat.

I hammer that fence together — maybe it’ll hold for a day or a year — toss the chicken a crust leftover from my daughter’s breakfast as she rushed to school, and then I write those 500 words.

Black gloves
I threw into a field
rise up again —
yellow flowers blooming
from their fingers.

— Fumi Saitō in A Long Rainy Season

Moonrise: a Great Gift

May 31, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter, up late, says, I’m going out to look at the moonrise.

One long skinny band of cloud bends across the nightsky, luminescent with moonlight. The moon rises amber.

My daughter runs into the house for her sister. The three of us walk over the dewy grass. The world is in complete, beautiful repose, with the just-past-full moon silently rising, peepers gently murmuring, the cats in an open window watching, their little heads bent together, and all around us the fragrance of lilacs.

All winter, I’ve wondered about these lilacs — and here they bloom, better than I ever could have imagined.

The night beauty is so expansively calm it’s the best birthday present I could have desired for this turning-13 girl — an enchanting embrace from the universe cupping our home.

And then we go in to sleep.

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring

—Bashō

Before the Birth

May 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

13 years and a day ago, I walked down to our sugarhouse and closed the double front doors. Rain had fallen every day in that May, but that morning promised to be sunny.

After prolonged medical discussions, I had agreed to a caesarian for this second child. That morning, I leaned against the rough boards of our sugarhouse, with my enormous belly, looking at the wild red trilliums.

My six-year-old was eating breakfast with her father in the kitchen. I knew we would leave soon, that my two friends would be meeting us. But I kept leaning against the door, in one of those moments where time drifts away. I was so ready to meet this little child, to know who this new person in the world might be — and far above all — to know this baby was born well and whole.

I didn’t know then the natural sweetness of this child. I didn’t know, either, that her easygoing temperament would evolve as she grew into a wordless strength, that by the time this child was ten, her family would had shrunk to just a few of us. But I did know what an incredible piece of good fortune I had to be a mother to a second child. If anything, I know this more deeply now.

When she was born, this tiny girl could lie in my left arm, her head in my elbow, her miniature toes in my palm. She would lie there, blinking her little eyes, as though wondering, What now?

….may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back…

— Lucille Clifton

Fleeting World

May 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, in the dark, I walked behind the barn and closed the chickens’ little door to keep out marauders. The golden hen was on the step inside the door, her little head tucked down into her feathers. I sunk my fingers into her soft feathers and spoke to her. In the window just above her head, the moonlight reflected back in my eyes. In this sweet May night, redolent with lilacs and cut grass, it seemed impossible that anything adverse would happen to these little creatures. In a nicer world, I would have left the door open so the birds might sleep under the sky.

I locked the door against the fox.

In the chilly night, I stood with my daughter admiring the moon, in her final week of being age 12.

But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—

— Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest

Walls of Blossoms

May 26, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

One of the pieces of work I picked up this spring involved the famous CDC-Kaiser Permanente study about Adverse Childhood Experiences — fascinating, but not an uplifting read. This study, not surprisingly, recorded that one way to break the cycle of childhood maltreatment is through positive relationships and experiences — perhaps tending flowers.

Where I live now, previous owners planted walls of lilacs between our house and the town. The walls have gateless openings where we walk (or run) through, and the lilacs are different varieties and colors. These early spring/beginning summer mornings, when the dew is heavy on the grass sprinkled with white and purple violets, the air is fragrant. Mystery upon mystery: who planted these flowers and how can they smell so beautiful?

On the Memorial Day weekend, here’s a bouquet of flowers and mystery.