photography

Laughter and Rain

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The February my older daughter had just turned one, she and I went to a playgroup in Craftsbury, and only a woman I hadn’t met and her one-year-old son showed up. The tykes fought over a red plastic shovel (my child was the aggressor), and eventually we hid the shovel. While the kids checked out the plastic toys, the woman and I talked, and talked, and talked, and in some ways haven’t really stopped talking since.

Today, in one of these weird slips of time, my friend and I drove around Woodbury, this rural Vermont town, population 902, over dirt roads, up hills and along narrow roads without guardrails beside ponds, looking for one particular thing.

Crisscrossing these roads in the rain, we passed my daughter’s elementary school several times, and I thought of my child at her tidy desk, in the warm red schoolhouse with the rain coming against the windows.

My friend and I met no one else but a pickup truck or two on these back roads. Several times I asked, Should I drive up there? It looks like a bike trail and not a road.

Yes, she insisted, yes — and only once got out so I didn’t back into a ditch.

How long our friendship spins out, stitched through with so many things:  new babies, and gardening, books and more books, a courtroom, jobs, days at the lake, coffee, broken vehicles, farmers markets, deaths, and a whole lot of laughing. I wouldn’t trade the laughing for anything.

Nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

– Georgia O’Keefe

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Use What’s At Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

We are no longer in the gardening season, no longer in the season of growth and warm days, of the earth turning green. October heralds the season of decay, of stillness and quiet, broken not by songbirds but the geese winging their way south. Weeding once, with someone else, he suggested laying the handfuls of weeds over the living ones, as a smothering mulch. Use what’s at hand.

That phrase comes back to me, in this season of pulling up a garden, ending one thing, and entering this other season. It’s a way of looking at the world where one thing morphs into another, where this as plague becomes that as assistance. It’s a way of looking at compost as life, at your weakness as truly your strength.

I thought I knew about all that (loss) when my first wife, Jackie, died of cancer… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in love; I’m not sure I believe in anything. But, looking at these radiant canvasses (of Vermeer)–unreachable yet familiar–reminds me. The rapturous inner life of each woman and the infinitesimally detailed and self-contained life of the street are each imagined as an undiscovered heaven on earth…

–– Michael White, Travels in Vermeer

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Photo by Molly S.

Fall Hiking

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In this yellow autumn, the girls and I hiked down through Sterling Gorge, a short hike above water tumbling through the narrow cut of rocks. At the trail’s bottom, the stream evened out, and sunlight dappled through leaves. The hike down had been chilly and somewhat dark, shadowed by hemlocks, but the spit of gravelly sand along the stream was light-filled. I had woken that morning feeling as though I had fallen down a flight of stairs, the bones in my back and hips mere pieces strung together with the jangling cord of my vertebrae.

I lay on a fallen birch log and watched sunlight flash in shapes over the running stream, thinking how we’re all just bits and pieces of bodies, water, sparkling sunlight, gritty sand, my own bones and flesh and flowing blood, ever moving, shapeshifting, evolving, turning from this to that.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

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Woodbury, Vermont

Sunflowers, My Daughters, Their Stories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I remember when I first heard the phrase “he’s one of the old ones” regarding a small child, as though some souls could harbor more depth, or a greater history, than others. Surely that’s mistaken, that our judgement is clouded by our own misperceptions.

With my own children this evening, I sat at the kitchen table while my older daughter ate a late dinner as she recounted her babysitting saga. She told us about teaching the little children to write their names. Laughing and talking about the various strands of our separate days, I marveled at how my girls look at their own unique worlds, laying all the manifold pieces of their lives – wonderful and mysterious and outrightly sad, too – in ways and patterns I hadn’t considered, not at all cliched but fresh and newly alive, as they create their own female stories.

The Sunflowers
by Mary Oliver

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers….

each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.

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Photo by Molly S.

The Fallow Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After work today, I walked around the farm fields at the bottom of our road, a carpooling place from years ago. I have a photo of my younger daughter when she was three, running with a friend over enormous white-plastic-wrapped bales of hay, in sheer summertime joy. The field’s fallow now, a great swath of black earth opened up, studded with thistles and stones, emptied of visible life. Even the cartwheeling crows have abandoned these fields. The summer’s radiance has been driven over by the denser hues of gray and black, autumn’s burst of foliage nothing but a splash before winter hammers its solid pins in.

I, for one, welcome in the fallow season, craving a chunk of stillness, wishing the frothy madness of the world (from local gossip to national news) to keep at bay for a bit – or at least a weekend.

Walking with my neighbor this afternoon, we speculated that a brown shape in the dirt road ahead of us was a cluster of fallen leaves, but as we approached, the shape lifted with small wings, and then flew nearby: a wood thrush, quietly keeping us company, swooping nearby and then flickering away into the woods, among the falling leaves.

Wild creatures have the confidence
to realise it’s time for rest.
Nature regards man as a jest,
and doubts his mental competence.
All nature knows it’s for the best
to realise its time for rest.

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Kate Brook Road fields/Hardwick, Vermont

— Ivor Hogg

Early Fall Mornings, Before High School

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early mornings, it’s dark now, the rain hammering on the lid of the LP gas tank outside the bedroom window. My older daughter slumps at the kitchen table and complains about the dark, the cold elbowing in, summer now fully escorted out the door.

As gently as I can, I tell her, It’s nothing personal.

I took that nothing personal line from her, the very line I’m turning back as mirror on her. After one angry tirade at me, she said very genuinely, It’s nothing personal, mom. I’m just telling you. Don’t be upset.

And so, with a real feeling of lightness, I said to her, That’s just the way the world is.

And our day went well.

To have to carry your own corn far–
who likes it?
To follow the black bear through the thicket–
who likes it?
To hunt without profit, to return weary without anything–
who likes it?
You have to carry your own corn far.
You have to follow the black bear.
You have to hunt to no profit…

“Song of Speaks-Fluently,” in Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America

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