Raw Material

May 10, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter lay on the couch all day yesterday with a bad cold; since she was a little girl, her response to sickness or misery has been quiet, a pulling into herself. Her sister rises up and fights.

Neither good nor bad, each girl arrived in this world with a distinctive personality emerging even as a young child.

When they were younger, I made a failed attempt to conceal what I believed were the harder realities – grave illness or betrayal. The truth, really, was that I didn’t want to hold those things; how little credit I gave to the children, and to resilience itself. Mistakenly, I believed resilience was a well that be tapped dry, rather than, like creativity, a bottomless collective spring.

I alone could never drink it dry.

Our writing is a living portrait of ourselves….. Write for the sheer pleasure we take in doing it, but also for the knowledge that it might just shift this world of ours a little. It is, after all, a beautiful and strange and furious place. Literature reminds us that life is not already written down. There are still infinite possibilities. Make from your confrontation with despair a tiny little margin of beauty. The more you choose to see, the more you will see. In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart. Rage on.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

Not By Light Alone

May 8, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Darn near every moment these May Vermont days, the greenery deepens, fattening mightily, rushing headlong in the chlorophyll world as if making up for winter’s lengthy dormancy.

Walking in the dusky, gently falling rain last night? How could we not love this? All that growth – leaf, blossom, peepers, owls – chorusing around us.

Likely the most unresolvable argument of my life was about darkness, with a person who insisted I not embrace the darkness, not press it near my heart. Every one of my days for nearly the past 19 years has been filled with growing babies and children, teenagers now, with beeswax crayons and playhouses made from sheets, and an endless round of apple slices; at the same time, I’ve also lived through the planting, harvest, and demise of many gardens. Every year, I pass the unknown day of my death and the days of the deaths of everyone I love, and I know, even as the thrust of spring is so mightily powerful and unstoppable, all this will change, too. Our world holds both courage and cowardice, generosity and betrayal.

I’d rather know that, too, than not.

Thanks to State 14 for picking up a blog entry of mine. What a pleasure to be included with their fine writers and photographers.

Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.

Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.

They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.

Colum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer

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Kid Chat

May 4, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The May my younger daughter was born, rain fell every day, from May 1 to May 31. At the beginning of June, cornfields sprouted shoots of green, and the summer turned sweltering. We are yet in the rainy phase. Everyday, my daughter, now nearly 12, claims the apple tree leaves unfold their leaves noticeably wider. Fragrant blossoms and pollination are imminent. This girl changes, too, on the tender cusp of childhood and adolescence, past the why stage of toddlerhood and wondering at the pieces and people in her life.

The other morning, she asked about a church’s billboard sign: Jesus was a low-wage worker. She asked what Jesus did; I answered he was a carpenter, not a low-wage job in our town. Then what does the sign-writer mean? We wonder, who’s telling this story, anyway? The story of Jesus? The story of our town?

Then we were at her tiny school, the handful of graduating sixth graders wild about their trip to Maine, nearly trembling with excitement. On my way to work, I stopped again at that sign, pondering its existential statement. Rain fell lightly, and I sank my fingers into the church lawn’s soil, glad to see grass for the first time this year, long as my fingers.

….art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience; it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

– James Baldwin

Hardwick, Vermont

Rock On…..

April 27, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Anyone who knows my daughters and myself knows our story of moving from this beloved house to another; our path not wholly determined. These days, in the rush and glory of Vermont spring, we are still fully here, reveling in the first sighting of trillium blooms, our familiar dirt road we have walked and biked thousands of times. This spring, surrounded by the upheaval of change and illness, reminds me yet again that the salvation of our world is through children: in the steady joy of trampoline jumping and chocolate-egg-with-sweet-cream-yolk eating.

Yesterday, standing outside the library with another adult, listening to the raucous chorus of Woodbury’s wetland peepers, far down below the school’s garden, concealed in the thick brush, we heard children’s voices. As we listened, into the song of frogs and robins and sparrows wound peals of laughter. On and on…..

Here’s the beginning of a poem one friend wrote, and another sent me today:

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life…

– David Budbill, “The First Spring of Green”

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Bluer Than Blue

April 24, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last evening, as dusk threaded in slowly, the 11-year-old and I played leisurely games of croquet, stepping around the blooming Siberian quills we planted late last fall. They flower in profusion over the lower leach field, whereas the other bulbs, in higher ground, are merely slender green leaves, with no apparent sign of flowering. Fitting?

That mimics a line I read early this morning from Katie Kitamura’s Separation.

Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.

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Working

April 23, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my girls were little, we played Signs of Spring for weeks, enthusiastically spying the first unfolding daffodil bloom, robins’ beaks clamped around strands of nesting material, tiny dresses flapping on clotheslines.

On the evening shift now, my 18-year-old came home last night and said a goose wandered into the nursing home. With another woman, they lured the wild, spitting creature through the open door with bread.

Spring tidings in Greensboro, Vermont?

Laughing, my daughter digs into her salad, a pile of fresh greens piled high with salty feta and kalamata olives, already thinking of other things. She’s sparkling, this young woman.