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Art and Gambling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My older daughter attended an art institute this summer that emphasized art for art’s sake. That’s a particular phrase that’s always rankled me, likely much to my discredit, as my daughter pointed out that art for art’s sake reigns fairly prominently in our unfinished abode. She was wholly annoyed by that proposition, too. When I asked why, she said, When I grow up, I want a salary. Clearer thinking, perhaps, than I’ve ever achieved. She doesn’t want what honestly amounts to the gambling I do with our lives.

Nonetheless, she loved this art institute. She loved the whole-hearted infusion of art, of walking across a college campus and meeting fiction writers who read thirty-second stories, of poetry slams, of improve and theater. That Government Night was run by a political filmmaker.

What if our culture truly was infused with art? If poets were valued more than CEOs? Is that so improbable? So foolish? Or too revolutionary?

But I, without a penny to my name, I still say that when it comes down to it, money is one kind of currency and painting is another.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Is of Value

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, in a driving rainstorm that almost instantaneously altered to sunny skies, I took the girls with me to a staff meeting in Burlington. They read for a while, then headed down to the lake’s waterfront, and by the time I arrived, they had both decided Burlington was THE place to live.

On the way home, we stopped in at Big Box Store Land. With all our recent house guests, our towels have been revealed in all their deplorable condition. While I wandered around a mammoth store looking for towels in what had been advertised as a bath store, but had a sizable luggage department, too, the girls scoped out the premises.

They were truly amazed: hair clips could be bought in a plentiful pack and three dozen hairbrushes were on display. One daughter murmured, I’ve never seen so much shampoo in one place.

Such marvels! We left with towels and hair clips. Back at our house, in the cool and rain-fresh evening, we walked around the garden, the little girl noting the singing crickets, while the wood thrush trilled her inimitable melody. As summer winds down, the birdsongs gradually diminish.

The world of plastic baubles thoroughly admired, the girls and I sat on the couch and read.

(Donald Hall) is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer–the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns–those fleas–he turns to the work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one.

– Dani Shapiro

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New Hampshire White Mountains by Molly S.

Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, visiting an elementary school with my daughter, I asked the teacher about the school’s philosophy. He told me every child has been brought into the world for some particular, unknown destiny, and so the whole child needs to be educated to fulfill that destiny.

Destiny and children? When my first daughter was a baby, even then I believed a rich inner life was invaluable. I’m not the kind of mother who bought stocks or purchased a life insurance policy.

Today, I drove through New Hampshire. In the backseat, my younger child worked mightily at her inner life by reading Harry Potter. My nephew, at 11, leaned forward between the front seats, and we passed the time by talking about being present. We are here, he said, and even when we’re up there, ahead, we’re still here. If you think about it, we’re always only here. Only my father enjoys this trend of conversation, so we talked about him, too.

In the mirror, I looked at my daughter with her sun-streaked hair, her tiny blue earrings, so immersed in this book, the first book she’s carried all day, the first I’ve seen her enraptured in pages, deep in the world of imagination.

That’s something, my nephew said, this always hereness. I like it.

A summer river being crossed
how pleasing
with sandals in my hands!

– Buson

Bee on elecampane by Molly S.

Bee pursing its destiny on elecampane by Molly S.

Eyes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My dear daughters sometimes  look at the books I’m reading and moan, How can you read that? My Struggle? Come on, mom…..

I read on, I read on. In this cool and rainy Vermont July, my nephew and daughter picked wild raspberries this evening, while the clouds darkened ominously and the wind stirred up, and I bolstered my fence against the woodchuck. As a child, summer days wound out into a sheer infinity, but now it seems perhaps tomorrow the children will be back at school and I’ll be stepping into my boots to carry in another armload of wood. Tomorrow seems tucked into today, the years interlaced like a pair of folded hands.

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

–– Galway Kinnell

Yasuhiro

Yasuhiro

A Small Handful of Soil

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Last fall, I dug potatoes in the school’s garden with the kids on one of those crystalline autumn days rampart with sun and the darkening emerald of summer’s end. One boy reached down and scooped up a handful of soil. With his finger, he stirred through, unearthing a centipede, glacial pebbles, a shard of white quartz. Around us lay the garden opened up for harvest, the stalks torn free from the rows of potatoes, the tomato and cucumber beds emptied of their frost-killed vines. In this sizable sprawl of black earth, this child stared intently into a single handful of dirt.

Today, weeding, I thought of this child again. With what joy he would see what lay in this garden. When I finished what I could do, I stood back and looked over my small measure of order, the vegetable rows surrounded by tiny tiaras of crown vetch. I thought again of this child-sized handful of soil, the dirt now masked under July layers of stalk and vine and straw and leaf. And yet, it’s the soil we always return to, the mother of our sustenance, the ever-changing constant.

But cultivation’s hold is always tenuous. The sense of order and safety it imparts will change if you turn your back on it: the brush grows in, the night comes on, old fears crowd you. It’s a skittering truth….

– Jane Brox

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Where Once Was a Bitter Fence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Midsummer now, and I’ve complained ad infinitum about the wild raspberries around the garden, but the garden’s gem this year is the raspberries, delectable and sun-ripe. My daughters are frequently around the edges of the garden, bent to the picking task with bowls in hands. Raspberries have formed the tastier bulk of many meals around here.

Where I had seen a barrier and an aggravation has become nourishment. I’m hardly about to let prickery vines overrun the property, but they’re gaining the upper hand, and the girls and I appear none-the-worse.

Early this morning, I pulled over on the roadside at a pasture where cows were grazing and wild turkeys ambled. I walked a little along the road, frogs cheeping, a hawk circling upward and away. Then I realized before me was an enormous sprawl of scotch thistle – hard and thorny – a veritable roadside fence of weed.

Many clouds rise up
clouds appear to form a fence
holding this couple;
They form layers of a fence
Oh, the layers of that fence.

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