home

The Pleasures of Creation.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

An old friend and I walk through the hilly town forest, sharing the tenor of stories that are manna for my soul: which ways our lives have turned and bent, what are the elements that shape us and our families. A little sleet or maybe rain patters down on what remains of the leaves.

On my way home, I stop at the coffee shop and drink espresso in my damp sweater smelling of sheep — a lovely barnyard smell or a repulsive one, depending on the person I suppose. I carry my laptop and my notebook back home to my wood stove and my cats who remind me their needs are few and the most reasonable constant in this house.

By five, it’s dark as the inside of a pocket. Public radio spins in the greater world. In my tiny dining room, I pull a book from shelf and set it on the table, then another and another. In an hour or so, by then listening to This American Life about rats, I’m in the basement searching for the half-full can of Sunshine paint I used in the bathroom last winter.

Three more walls await me. I’m out of paint and decide a lime-lemon will suffice. I’ll need to drive that half-mile to the hardware store, which annoys me as I have brand-new studs on my snow tires, and why waste those on dry pavement?

All this: it’s that old familiar question, that rub between creation and destruction. Espresso and sunshine-yellow paint have never cured the world’s ills, but a slice of pleasure can’t harm.

In my bookshelves, I find a poem I printed out shortly before the pandemic nailed shut Vermont, still utterly relevant today:

Blackbirds
by Julie Cadwallader Staub

I am 52 years old, and have spent
truly the better part
of my life out-of-doors
but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward
I saw a flock of blackbirds
rounding a curve I didn’t know was there
and the sound was simply all those wings,
all those feathers against air, against gravity
and such a beautiful winning:
the whole flock taking a long, wide turn
as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

If we lived only in human society
what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
that is not our own
so when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be.

The Word Domestic, Depths.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Snowglobe snow falls in the late afternoon. November light: clear and sharp. Not much warmth here, not any season for sleeping rough and roofless, but sparkling as if our world has expanded. In an inexplicable way, the light seems washed full of hope.

The summer folks have fled elsewhere, to Florida condos or back to city jobs. The gardeners and landscapers have put away their rakes and trowels. Around the lake where I walk at midday, only the builders persist in their bulky jackets and gloves. There’s so few of us in town that me wandering by is the chance to stop and remark about stick season. At the lake’s pebbled edge, I dip in my fingers. Before long, ice will rim the bank.

Stick season and the wood stove’s warmth make my cats deliriously joyful. Rumaan Alam (such an amazing novelist!) writes in his intro to Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach:

Let’s agree to abandon forever the idea that the depiction of family life is the province of women artists, and therefore insubstantial. Let’s refuse to hear a sneer in the term domestic.

Talking Past Dark.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

A friend comes to visits, heads to my picnic table, and we commence talking. Hours later, a dewy dusk has descended. I’m shivering, my sweater cuffs pulled all the way over my hands. Inside, my cats are grousing for a fire in the wood stove.

I remember my friend’s oldest son sitting on my couch, about an eon ago. The boy was so small his legs didn’t reach the end of the couch. Now, he’s thinking of heading into a PhD program.

I haven’t seen this friend in months, since before I traveled to Europe and decided I was born on a continent that mismatches me. Yet, we start talking as though I was a young mother again, walking along the dirt road with a toddler, my hair unbrushed for days.

It’s a cliche of course, how the world changes and how it remains the same, that one long Heraclitus river — always the stream, never the same.

The foxes didn’t return to den behind my house this year. A few stray lilacs bloomed in late September. The harvest moon sails up in the sky. All our hours of talking and we solve absolutely nothing, not a single problem, except this, perhaps: a fattening of our friendship, this woman who assured me I would survive my divorce, that my life would continue. The sun heads down, and we keep on talking.

Mid-October.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In the night, a wild wind throws rain through my bedroom window. It’s before midnight. At twilight, the maples shimmered with a rosy-golden light, but our world has shifted. The wind’s tempestuous, shaking the storm against my house, driving away that autumn dreaminess.

The cats and I are awake. I lie on the couch, reading Ducks. Our little world has seen a proliferation of cats recently — a gray one the neighbors’ boys named Follower, a glossy black, a white-and-brown tabby, a tortoiseshell. The light on the back porch kicks on when the cats, one by one, appear, sodden, and then race off again. A raccoon sniffs my sandals I’ve left out beneath the overhang. My two cats stare through the window, mesmerized.

All night long, all day long, leaves fall. The butternut tree I planted a five years ago is skinny trunk and branch. Magnificently golden, the neighbors’ maples shed their leaves into a giant carpet. Their little boys rake and burrow. As their top branches reveal their starkness, the height of these trees soars above our houses.

October, and midday the light is tinged with sootiness as the sun bends away from my place on the earth. Whether it’s the pandemic or where I am in life, the old patterns I knew for years have splintered, fractured. To my list I write long before dawn, I add: cover the garden with leaves.

The water wheel spins
holding up the milky way,
and then spills it out.

– Kawasaki Tenkō

Here we are…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Above pretty much sums up where we are now. 23 years into this parenting gig, it’s now me and the teen, and if a housecat has moved into a box on the kitchen table for the winter? Well, so be it. And the other cat refuses to drink water except on the kitchen sink? Well, so be that, too.

As a young mother, I read a literal library of parenting advice and made a trillion mistakes. I take my (diminished) reading time much more seriously these days. I continue to make mistakes. And I’ve decided the cats are fine companions, even on the table.

In so many versions of my previous life, this wouldn’t fly. Now, listening to Biden talk about his proclaimed End of the Pandemic, I wonder, What’s all that about? Who gets to decide what, anyway, and why believe anyone else when your experience doesn’t jive?

Rain comes down in buckets. A friend gives us a bucket of apple drops. I cook bacon in the oven and buy the best loaf of bread I can find for our dinner. Our tomato and basil plants are still churning out their delectables. Sure, winter is in the near offing. Much more than winter, too. Our cat is the happiest creature I’ve ever loved. We offer him drops of milk on our fingertips, licks of butter from a smooth silver knife, tender kisses on his head.

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

— William Carlos Williams

Wildflowers. String.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Five Aprils ago, I was looking for a house for my daughters and me. In a nearby town, on a weekday afternoon, I climbed over a chainlink fence separating an empty house from a town cemetery. The fence spikes ripped the back of my leggings. I was on my way to the library where I was working, and I wore those torn leggings for the remainder of the day. I still have those leggings. I wear them when I paint, and they’re now stained with patches of lemon yellow.

When I walked behind the house, I discovered tiny blue quill — spring flowers I didn’t know. The house was surrounded by those flowers and the promise of profuse lilacs in June.

I bought the house in 2017, although it wasn’t until the pandemic nailed down that the house began to feel truly ours. We are not a rowdy family of nine. We are a family of three and now two housecats.

The thing about spring is — turn around and it’s there, quietly, blooming in some unexpected way.

Look at the silver lining, they say.

But what if, instead,

I pluck it off

and use that tensile strand to bind

myself to those things I do not 

want to lose sight of.

“Notions” by Paula Gordon Lepp