Laughter, Light

December 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Standing in mud and slush in the dark last night, we watched women spinning cords with knots of flames. Their faces concealed in the darkness, I listened to the women talking and laughing, each of their laughs remarkably distinct.

Later that night, walking down Montpelier’s State Street, with hardly anyone around, we admired the mighty Christmas tree at the State House. On the capital’s shiny dome, Ceres — goddess of agriculture, grain, and motherly love for children — reigned.

Vermont — realm of wild blackberries, chittering sparrows, lush forests, and the deep, dark winter. There’s no denying this state holds its portion of troubles, but also the willingness to lift fire, spin it around in the darkness, and laugh.

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter….

— Pablo Neruda

Vocab Lesson

October 30, 2018November 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I’m reading The New York Times on the couch when I look over at my middle school daughter on the couch who’s reading. She’s in her athletic pants, her hair carefully up in a bun like her friends, her face still tawny from a summer mostly outside. When she’s finished with her chapter, she tosses the library book on the couch, and I ask if she knows what the word anti-Semitic means.

She doesn’t.

The word is so terrible, I’m not sure what to say. In our house, we sometimes joke about language. This week, the girls have been tossing voluminous around playfully, like a half-deflated, helium-filled balloon.

I glance into the dining room I’ve spent all weekend painting a color described as lemon custard, my motivation simply love of color and warmth.

And then I look back at my daughter who’s waiting, patiently, on the couch.

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly… Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Stockpiling

October 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the garden withers for the winter, I collect seeds — tithonia, marigold, coneflower — pulling the dry seeds with their tufted ends with my fingers, secreting them in my coat pockets.

My daughter takes a handsaw to the mammoth sunflower stalks fencing the garden, their heavy heads picked nearly clean of seeds from marauding birds. From a scant palmful of seeds, what pleasure these beauties have given us this summer. Now, the birds and the scavenging squirrels feast, too.

A friend stops by with a bare peony root, cushioned in paper, transported in a Negra Modela box. I’m out that evening. When I return, my daughter carefully unwraps the root — not merely a stick but a complicated branching — and then lifts another smaller root. Good luck, she says. They may not grow.

Or, they might.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

— Galway Kinnell

Juncos flock the double glass doors in our kitchen, tantalizing our cat.

Hopeful Strings

October 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the night, the cold moves in. The evening before, returning after work in Vermont’s “big city” of Burlington, the frogs chirped, and the air, drenched with a heavy rain, was suffused with the hummus-y scent of soil and leaves beginning to turn and rot.

This morning, the crescent moon shimmers.

Against the noise of the news these past few weeks, as I’m feeding the cats, I think of Leslie Schwartz, in Los Angeles County Jail, tenderly nourishing tiny sprouts from apple seeds, the slenderest of life, nonetheless growing within concrete.

So I fell in love with the apple sprouts the way one might a newborn.

— Leslie Schwartz, The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life, One Book at a Time

Running Away

April 17, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

James Joyce’s “The Dead” is one of my favorite short stories, with that remarkable line about falling snow general all over Ireland. In my corner of Vermont, these days, the sentiment generally is enough with the snow for this year. April: season of rain, of snow and ice and, somewhere, beneath all that, struggling green.

I stopped in at the Woodbury school, leaning against the foyer wall while a man who grew up on a farm in the area told me the red-winged blackbirds reminded him of childhood. When he snuck away from farm chores, he headed down to the creek where those dark birds with their signature crimson mark sang.

Ridiculously visually inclined, I rely too heavily on my vision: really, as all my photos attest, the landscape here is yet the monochrome of winter. I’m wrong about this, of course, although I won’t point to any sign of spring at my friend’s request. Too cruel, she says, when sleet falls.

And yet — dumping coffee grounds around blueberry plants, fingering their branches and imagining small, perfect white blossoms, I then close my eyes and listen to the birdsong all around, their rising, sweet melodies.

I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil…

— Louise Glück

Woodbury, Vermont

Hardwick, VT, Sign of Spring #5

April 1, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hope: the odd collection of dyed eggs, the resurrection, glimmers of green clovers in yet-brown fields, birdsong.

Cold and warm rains, wiggling earthworms, rivulets of melting snow, winter bud on lilacs.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

— Emily Dickinson

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

hope