freedom

Girl on a Bicycle.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Walking to mail a package, I hear pebbles grinding under bike tires and step back to let a girl on a bicycle pass by. She’s about ten or so, and she shakes her head and slows. I step back on the grass and tell her to go ahead. She swoops around me, wordlessly, then cuts out from the sidewalk to the road.

We’re along a busy road, but for this moment, there’s no traffic. She heads down the center of the road, crossing back and forth over those the double yellow lines. She doesn’t wear a helmet on her dark curls, and she’s riding a beat up old bicycle. She pedals quickly down the hill, the wind lifting her hair.

In a world so burdened by fear, encumbered by care, this girl flies down the pavement, heads into the parking lot of a storage facility, and disappears.

No Liberty for Chickens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On this Independence Day…. I’m reminded that my daughters’ ancestors on the little wooden Mayflower pledged their lives together (well, the men did) in a Civil Body Politic for the general good of the Colony. 399 years later, our neighbor stands on our back porch, clipping our chickens’ wings. History’s great swoop, and our daily fretting. Which, perhaps, is all I can say, as we head into another election season.

We must hang together.

— John Hancock

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Symphony of Our Small World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In high school, hidden in the upstairs of my parents’ barn, I read Russian literature — The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace — I read about life behind the Iron Curtain, Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn.

Late last night, the cats and I read M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, a book filled with hunger, fear, and love.

These summery, hot days continue to unfold, a world apart from coal-less winters in Russia. Our days are busy, jammed with my multiple work endeavors, with a daughter in middle school, and soccer practices and games, with her babysitting and my older daughter’s tender young adult life — can I build a tiny house? will I fall in love? — with pickling green beans and putting up salsa and somehow painting the upstairs floors while listening to Rumblestrip podcasts, and swimming at the end of the day as often as possible.

This life, messy with creativity and doubt, with love and grief, is lucky beyond belief. Thank goodness, I remember this at times.

Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh (Symphony) he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.

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Vermont Libraries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, on my way to a state library conference, I exited I-89 and took a short-cut, trading an urban confluence along the Connecticut River for a winding dirt road.

Library conference? Ho-hum, you’d think. Instead, Vermont’s department of libraries is staffed with witty and super-smart people, full of insight and generosity. The second-in-command I ate lunch with offered to attend my trustee meeting.

Vermont has its large libraries, but the room yesterday was filled with many “library directors” like myself – primarily female – heading up tiny often one-room libraries, doing everything from chatting with kids about graphic novels and puppies to submitting data and vacuuming the carpet.

Zeal is a word I rarely use, but, quirky as librarians often are, they embody the best of democratic principals, ruggedly determined to preserve not only individual liberty and privacy but also the freedom to think, read, write, create.

Couple this with a reading last night of two writers at my library, packed full with appreciative townspeople. Antidote is the word I held in mind last night.

Two inches of fresh snow this morning. Temperatures in the seventies predicted next week…..

I wondered what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the scorn of the South….

Now, how could I find out about this Mencken? There was a huge library near the riverfront, but I knew that Negroes were not allowed to patronize its shelves any more than they were the parks and playgrounds of the city. I had gone into the library several times to get books for the white men on the job. Which of them would now help me to get books? And how could I read them without causing concern to the white men with whom I worked? I had so far been successful in hiding my thoughts and feelings from them, but I knew that I would create hostility if I went about the business of reading in a clumsy way.

Richard Wright, from Black Boy, 1944

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