photography

A Few Minutes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my brother was learning how to ride a bike, he started at the neighbors’ cement step, leapt up on the banana seat that was too high for him, wavered across our scraggly lawn until he banged into the side of our house, and fell over. He hadn’t yet mastered turning, and so he repeated those steps – the vaulting ascent, the uneven pedaling, the thunk and crash – until he swerved left, up a slight hill, and kept going.

Washing dishes the other night, listening to the the increasingly grim NPR news, someone kept smashing the side of my house. My daughter was doing a handstand, kicking her heels against the clapboard – working as she said.

I thought of Dr. Spock’s Play is the work of babies – equally applicable to 12-year-olds. Laughing, my daughter demonstrated her ability to tuck her heels around her ears. She suggested I try that neat trick, but instead I lay on the grass and gazed at the clouds silently shifting over the sky’s expanse we can see behind our house. Shot through with sunset’s pink, the evening stretched around us, the cooling air nipping just the slightest on my cheeks and bare toes.

She lay on the grass beside me and said, There’s a snail just above us. See it?

I did.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
    casually.
– Issa

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Dinner Prep

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just before the twin towers were destroyed in New York City, we moved into a new kitchen we had built on one side of our house. Our old kitchen had a single window. The new kitchen was its own ell, with three walls of windows, the true gem of that house.

I remember washing Red Russian kale leaves in a white enamel sink we had scavenged from somewhere, mesmerized by the sunlight over my hands, and how the kale spines flashed silvery like minnows under the water. I was listening to NPR and staring at my garden’s kale as if I had never seen it before.

Soil in that garden later became contaminated with clubfoot, and I ceased planting brassica. Transplanted healthy plants miserably withered and died within a few weeks, and none of my remedies worked. Now, miles away in this new garden patch, snipping my first kale leaves, I thought of that afternoon so many years ago, with my toddler daughter tricycling around the kitchen, surrounded by sunlight streaming over freshly stained pine, the only adult in the house listening to the radio, wondering what would happen.

The thief left it behind:
the moon
at my window.

– Ryokan

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August Fragrance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My car stunk of shit when I arrived in Vermont’s capital city Friday afternoon, the debris from an enormous manure spreader I’d passed on a dirt road in Calais jammed in the undercarriage. Add to that, the fat stalk of garlic I’d nabbed from the school’s garden. I’d tugged it out to see how near (or late) to picking it was, and the pearly head, beneath the crumbling dirt I’d thumbed off, smelled so fragrantly delicious I decided to bring it home for dinner. Manure, garlic, and someone’s running shoes left in the backseat.

This past month, fierce thunderstorms have deluged us, and our piece of Vermont fluctuates between sodden and freshly-dried, smelling of wild blackberry vines and the pine bark mulch I gleaned from the town garage. Yesterday afternoon, my weeding interrupted, I read Adam Gopnik’s line in his article about Buddhism in The New Yorker – “…the things we cherish inevitably change and rot…” – which is likely the entire, unvarnished sum of human suffering.

The kids complained about the co-mixture of odors in the car – naturally. And, inevitably, I laughed off those complaints. Even with this early morning rain, I think we’ll swim today.

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Myriad Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These summer days, I often work at home, awake and drinking coffee while the girls slumber, and the sun rises and slowly steams off the dew from our croquet patch, the garden, and the town’s rusted metal fence and cemetery beyond.

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I walked into the sultry town for another of my meetings at the town library. Some rouge patron had plugged up the basement plumbing, so I shopvacc’ed the cement floor while librarian lifted boxes from the spreading flood. Then we sat outside in the sunlight, nodding to patrons, while she answered my questions about the little library I manage. One patron returned three books, including the novel I’ve written. I restrained myself from quizzing, What did you think?

At home again, in the late afternoon, my daughter picked handfuls of cucumbers from our small garden. While we talked, I made a savory dinner the girls love – peppers, onions, herbs, sausage, tomatoes, rolled into bread dough, coarse-salted and rubbed with olive oil. While the bread baked, we worked in the garden, the half moon rising through crimson clouds over the peak of our house. She was chattery and happy. I love the evenings best, she said.

Poem (As the Cat)

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

– Williams Carlos Williams

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Repeating Patterns

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few years ago, my daughter bent all the paper clips in our house into necklaces, a project involving pliers and colored beads, with incredibly cool results. One necklace still hangs from the windowsill in my room, crooked over the sill.

At the time, I was running a business out of our house that involved frequent and complicated mailings. One morning, I fumed around the house, muttering about the lack of paper clips, before I realized all those boxes of small metal pieces had been transformed into kid art.

There’s one pattern in my life: my intent adult life knocked up against the busyness of childhood.

In the end that day, I mailed out those so important papers sans paper clips, and here I am, years later, having forgotten what was on those papers while the necklace still hangs over my desk.

In the penetrating damp
I sleep under the bamboos….
One by one the stars go out.
Only the fireflies are left.
Birds cry over the water.
War breeds its consequences.
It is useless to worry,
Wakeful while the long night goes.

– Tu Fu, from “A Restless Night in Camp,” in David Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape
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Watering Down Deep

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was a kid in the backseat of our green Jeep while my parents drove back to New Hampshire from our trips to Toledo and then often west of the Mississippi, Vermont was the final stretch on a very long journey home, and my mother claimed it was always raining in Vermont. It sure can rain in Vermont.

This morning, mist waters broccoli starts I planted yesterday, spinach and lettuce sowed for fall consumption. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by Vermont, with its infinitely promising green depths – what’s in all those woods? We stopped at a sugarhouse, and I was lifted up to peer into an enormous pan steaming with boiling maple sap, where we tasted hot syrup from tiny paper cups.

Later, as a young adult, I lived for years not far from that very stretch of highway, Route 9, all tangles and bends, some of which the department of transportation straightened out since then, some which will always reflect the jagged steepness of those mountains. I later possessed a giant sap pan myself, and served countless cups of hot syrup to children.

What does a kid remember from a childhood, anyway? While my parents were fighting exhaustion and worn-out windshield wipers, bending the atlas, their younger daughter was in the backseat, sowing the seeds of her adulthood.

In retrospect: could have been worse. What’s going on in my backseat, while I’m reading the map?

Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggles for what – your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins.

Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier