Sacred Space

August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Although living with kids is as joyous and often as outright fun as I could imagine, like anyone else, I need at least small slivers of sacredness. Briefly today, I walked out to one of my favorite places, a little beyond my daughter’s elementary school. Like any resounding place, I’ve come here in all kinds of weather–radiant sun, sleet and mist and even the deepest of cold. I’ve come lightly with happiness; I walked that short distance so burdened with misery my heart seemed stone. But always, even a few moments yield me a tenor of stillness we human creatures crave.

For many years, I had a picture I’d torn from The New Yorker on the wall near my desk. It’s a photo taken of a miserable-looking Marina Oswald shortly after her husband shot JFK. Behind her, in this black-and-white photo, is a clothesline hung with diapers. Among doubtless many other things, in those terrible days Marina Oswald was washing diapers, because her baby needed the diapers.

As a female writer in a heavily patriarchical society, I know it’s particularly keen for women to continue doing what needs to be done to keep house and home and family together, but not to fall into the trap that a broom for the soiled kitchen floor is the same as paintbrush. This evening, making pickles, brine stung the cuts in my palms from a fierce weeding in the garden. Washing the salt off, I thought how a little running water can ease bitterness.

For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.

––– Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

American Pastime

August 16, 2015August 16, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

At the end of last school year, my ten-year-old daughter had been given a ticket to a ballgame in Burlington, so we went yesterday. She had never been to a game before, and she loved the foot-long hot dog, the stadium lights, the mascot: the whole thing. We had front row seats, and settled into the length of that leisurely game. My older daughter asked what was up with baseball and the “American pastime thing,” and we spoofed on that, enjoying the evening.

Night came in, and I kept thinking it would rain. Dark clouds bulked up, a gorgeous bruise behind the nearby airport’s jets. Neither team scored until later in the game, and as the home team–the Lake Monsters–appeared on the losing end, the crowd began filtering out. At the bottom of the ninth inning, with two outs, I told the girls the home team could win if the batter hit a home run.

That’s not going to happen, my older girl said.

The last ball–hit with a crack–seemed to hover far above the stadium, like a gull steadily winging its way out to sea, before it was swallowed up in the night. My younger daughter went wild. I hadn’t realized how much she had wanted Lake Monsters to win. As we walked along the shadowy street to our car, I saw her smiling face moving in and out of the street and window lights, laughing.

All the way home, driving in the late night, I thought of that ball, lit stark white by the immense stadium lights, heading out and away from us, into some child’s hand, perhaps, tomorrow. How American is that, to track statistics and averages, argue this player’s merits over that one’s, and yet to believe in the beauty and happenstance where luck meets skill, and to admire that stroke.

The day she was given the game ticket, my daughter turned it over and over in her hand, not yet sure what it meant. This morning, she left for a few days to visit her grandparents, that ticket now morphed into a green and blue baseball she was given last night. From ticket to baseball, there’s that white, high-flying ball, the sweet story of surprise success she couldn’t wait to tell her grandfather.

Fanaticism?No.Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do…

–– Marianne Moore

What Is

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After dinner, the teenage girls headed out directly for the croquet course. The younger daughter is chief of the course, arranging those well-bent wickets in a pattern that defies the standard croquet set-up. Our tiny lawn is bounded by trees on two sides, a driveway on the third, and an apple tree so overgrown its branches nearly barricade access beneath its boughs. This child delights in courses to maximize the obstacles: balls traverse impossibly steep hummocks or get lost in the jewelweed.

Folding laundry from the clothesline on the upstairs balcony, I listened to the girls laugh. I remembered a few years ago, I struggled with a problem that loomed insurmountably. I railed; I outright whined. Then, one mid-morning, it occurred to me this was my challenge, and whether I chose that difficulty or not was irrelevant. None of us get to choose our fiercest demons: no one would chose a devastating disease, a malformed body, a pregnancy gone awry, a horrific car accident.

My chore finished tonight, I leaned on the railing and closed my eyes. The crickets sang their odd castanet-like music, rattling towards the end of the summer. Mid-August already: robins no longer trill in the maple tree. The thrush is voiceless. In the cool evening, the girls laughed and called to each other, their well-used mallets thwack-thwacking against the wooden balls, moving them in the course they chose, over the crooked lawn they did not. The stars, one, two, three, rubbed brightly out of the dusk.

My mother loves butter more than I do,

more than anyone. She pulls chunks off

the stick and eats it plain, explaining

cream spun around into butter!…

–– Elizabeth Alexander, “Butter”

Those Necessary Tire Wrench Skills

August 13, 2015August 13, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The kids and I ended up outside a gas station today in Orleans, Vermont, loitering under a No Loitering sign. We’d changed a flat tire on my sister’s car and needed air for the (also flattish) replacement. Earlier, we’d absorbed history, in a stunning old four-story schoolhouse in Brownington, where the kids admired rooms chockfull of nifty antiques and gadgets, and I kept wandering around somewhat idiotically marveling to the guide, This building is so incredibly well-built, as if she’d never noticed that before.

My older daughter, newly sixteen-and-a-half, took charge of the tire change, then drove the car home through yet more rain and sun, commanding her cousins to stop horsing around in the backseat. When I left again, she baked and frosted a cake for her aunt’s birthday, oversaw the younger kids decorating the house, worked on her summer homework Salinger essay, and emailed me photos.

No doubt, the Brownington students in the 1800s must have been capable farm kids, but as a mother, it’s darn satisfying to see your leggy 21st century daughter tackle a tire wrench, a kitchen aide and camera with equal gusto.

While the kids were eating false maple donuts under the No Loitering sign, and my sister and I drank a thermos of coffee, we laughed at our planned day all jumbled up. It’s all in the journey, I said, thinking how trite that phase sounded to me just a few years back, so phony as Holden Caulfield would have kvetched. That doesn’t mean sometimes I’m not unbearably crabby along the way, but surely wielding a tire wrench, capably and well, sweetens your slice of cake.

…My wife is at her work,
There behind yellow windows. Supper
Will be soon. I crunch the icy snow
And tilt my head to study the last

Silvery light of the western sky
In the pine boughs. I smile. Then
I smile again, just because I can.
I am not an old man. Not yet.

–– Hayden Carruth, from “Twilight Comes”

Old Stone House
Brownington, Vermont
Photo by Molly S.

Blossoms v. Trash

August 12, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Many years ago, when we took my younger daughter to the ocean for the first time, she had one question. She was barely three, and such a little girl her older sister often carried her. Driving to Maine, we described how long the beach would be. She asked, Will there be sand for everyone?

We assured her there would be plenty of sand.

Again, traveling across Vermont, I realize just how much of this state there is, how much forest, stream, mountain, sky; we are wealthy beyond imagining. Walking along an unfamiliar street in Burlington today, by the cement’s side sprouted a cluster of wild golden flowers, a blossom I had never seen, tiny beauties the size of my smallest fingernail. Later, driving home with VPR, I counseled myself to tally up my blessings. So many people in the world battle over scant resources, and here I am, finding flowers instead of cigarette butts.

The morning glories
bloom, securing the gate
in the old fence

— Basho

August 9, 1945

August 10, 2015August 10, 2015 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

At a particular juncture this year, although I increasingly make my living from words, I became, quite simply, fed up with talking. I wanted action. Action infused with intentionality, with great thought and empathy, but action.

This summer, with my nephews’ extended visit, I determined to alter – in at least one small degree – the course of our lives by action, to swing the pendulum one minor stroke toward happiness. A raw truth of myself is that the outer dark of despair, of pain’s gnashing teeth, the fiercely cold howling winds of evil, hover perpetually just an arm’s length from my own outstretched fingertips, those turkey vultures I keep writing about silently soaring. There’s not a bit of schizophrenia in this worldview, not one jagged bit of insanity, not one curl of my toes over the edge into any abyss; our world is not a two-dimensional plane where grief can merely be rubbed away for the wishing.

The children are tucked into their beds, sleeping the slumber of children who have played and swam and biked together, all day. Bickered and made up and told each other stories, their faces scrubbed clean, their hair scented with lake water and wood fire smoke, at ease.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

— Ecclesiastes 3:2

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

photography