memoir

Ordinary Contentment.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Standing on the street in Greensboro Village, a pickup truck with a trailer full of hay slowly passes by, creaking through the tight curve. In the sultry sunlight, I wait, a shower of chaff drifting over my face, blinding me for just a moment. As I close my eyes, I see one sunburned arm waving through the open pickup window at me.

June. There’s plenty adversity that happens in this month, I’m sure, but the roses are blooming, the fields freshly shorn and growing again, the fledgling robins already swooping from the nest.

Some lines from the incomparable Jane Kenyon this Friday afternoon:

High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

A Motorcycle is a Vehicle of Change…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On the cusp of the solstice, the evenings are chilly yet, mist pulling around our house.

I pull on a sweater — a wool sweater — as darkness falls and walk through the small stretch of woods into the cemetery. A stranger wearing a t-shirt and drinking a Fanta walks down. He looks at me as warily as I’m probably looking at him and then we exchange a mutual good evening and head each our own way, our mutual bit of our stories nothing but this.

Solstice — I’m hoping for sun and heat, for evening swims to stitch my summer together. I want to swim through pollen scattered on the still pond, glide through the ripples stirred by ducks, to have the mundane details of my life and my swimming companion’s life sewn together, swim by swim.

In the absence of swimming, I’ll sing the praises of those midday walks admiring the lupines and forget-me-nots, reading under the dwarf apple tree that’s long surpassed smallness, the fledgling robins clamoring for worms.

“A motorcycle is a vehicle of change, after all. It puts the wheels beneath a midlife crisis, or a coming-of-age saga, or even just the discovery of something new, something you didn’t realize was there. It provides the means to cross over, to transition, or to revitalize; motorcycles are self-discovery’s favorite vehicle.” 

— Lily Brooks-Dalton, Motorcycles I’ve Loved

Worms for the Body, Philosophy for the Soul.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A little light rain falls as I pull a few weeds from the Sweet William in my garden. I planted these flowers when I moved here, putting my shovel into this terrain, vying for flowers and vegetables versus lawn. At the moment, the flowers flourish. I’m thinking a little about a writers roundtable I participated in the morning before, how I urged writers to remember that cause and effect drive the world we live in. All the pretty and noble thoughts we have about ourselves are only illusions. Character lies in our actions, for good or ill, whether we chose to see this or not.

On this Father’s Day, I remember those conversations my siblings and I had with my father at our kitchen table, so many decades ago. This sense of the world comes from the Aristotle he had us read. It’s a lesson that I’ve been hammering out, over and over and over in my life, through garden (what truer way to learn cause and effect), through writing and childrearing, through work, divorce, friendship.

On my deck, the robins’ nest has open-beaked fledglings, tufted and mewling. All day, the parents fly in and out, worms draping from their beaks, feeding their young, this great Herculean parenting endeavor. My cat Acer lies on a kitchen chair, staring through the glass door, mesmerized. The robins, in their robin way, have taken a chance nesting just above my door. Will this pan out? Will the young survive?

Wendell Berry wrote that “Parenthood is not exact science.” Nor, by any means, is bird or human life. My father gave his three children worms and philosophy. He taught us to love bread for the body, wine for the soul.

Robin Survival?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

This is now the sixth year we’ve lived in this house. I count these years by June 15th, the date I signed for the house, two days before my oldest graduated from high school, the date the sellers took us out to lunch and I stared through the diner window, wondering if buying this house was a good idea.

On this sixth year, a robin family has joined us, building what appears to be a well-made nest, strands of straw hanging from roof rafter. The nest is beneath the porch roof, covered from the weather. The nest is so close to our house that the mother robin flies away whenever we open the back door. My daughters and I wonder, Why not choose a rafter in the barn? A good old-fashioned tree limb?

The robins’ destiny is, of course, neither here nor there. We didn’t make the nest, and whether this family survives is largely beyond my purview. Certainly, my curious housecats will not harm these young ones. Yet I’m curious as my cats, wondering what drove this family to our porch.

June. We are surrounded by a hungry world that eats wee robins. I’m rooting for these young ones, hoping they’ll pull through. Come what may.

18th Birthday.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Here’s the thing: 18 years is a whole lot of parenting. 18 years is hardly a heartbeat.

My youngest was born by caesarian at 8:13 a.m. Leaving the hospital a few days later, corn nubs had emerged through the soil. As we drove by farm fields, I admired the new corn, marveling at its beauty. I had seen corn growing my whole life. And yet….

Perhaps that and yet sums up parenting. As a little girl, my youngest wore a green fairy tutu from her grandmother for about two years straight. These days, we are past the days of tiny teacups and Go, Dog, Go. Our family dynamics are now getting down to the hard questions: what does it mean to be a woman? what shall I do with my life? and how many times does sunscreen really need to be applied on a senior skip day at the beach? The questions go on….

blessing the boats

                                    (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

— Lucille Clifton

‘In sorrow, pretend to be fearless.’

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In Praise of Coldness

“If you wish to move your reader,”
Chekhov said, “you must write more coldly.”

Herakleitos recommended, “A dry soul is best.”

And so at the center of many great works
is found a preserving dispassion,
like the vanishing point of quattrocentro perspective,
or tiny packets of desiccant enclosed
in a box of new shoes or seeds.

But still the vanishing point
is not the painting,
the silica is not the blossoming plant.

Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains.
To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful?—
Scent of rocking distances,
smoke of blue trees out the window,
hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat.

Scent of a knowable journey.

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

— Jane Hirshfield