poetry

Driving Lessons

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the evening, as the dusk moves in, we play hearts on the back porch, my feet wet from watering the garden. It’s dry, with no rain in the forecast but thunderstorms possibly moving in this weekend.

After dinner and dishes, before I water, the 15-year-old drives, and I sit in the passenger seat. She’s largely on her own these days while I’m at work. In the high school parking lot, I get out of the car and watch her park and back up and park again, over and over. At last, she stops and leans out the window. She’s taken an extra key and put it on her first key ring, beside our house door.

She grins at me, full of exuberance and joy. “Want a ride?” she asks, then pulls up beside me, leans over, and opens the door. “Let’s take the long way home.”

The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill.

— Eihei Dōgen

IMG_7956

Day by Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In library land — as if the masks aren’t enough — I keep reminding myself that the world isn’t the same. I’m not supposed to say, hey, kick off your shoes and relax. Lie down and read if you want.

In my library, an older woman comes in wearing a mask, looking for a locally written book that apparently no one can find. Maybe she has a copy. Maybe someone else in town has a copy. Do I? I don’t, but I manage to find one copy in a library in southern Vermont. That library, of course, appears to be closed.

A young couple arrives next, excited to print out a copy of their nursery license.

The afternoon passes in fits and starts. While I tackle the backlog of details, I listen to The Daily podcast about George Floyd’s funeral. A friend wanders in and leans against my desk, listening, too. By the end, we’re both weeping. I close my laptop and ask how her life is going. What’s happening? We stand apart, talking.

Shortly before I lock up for the night and head home, a woman and her daughter appear. The daughter shyly tells me, I’m in second grade now.

Goodness! I say.

She’s lost a front tooth.

We move outside, into the breeze and sunlight. I listen to her mother who’s working and in school. While I marvel at how she’s kept what appears to me an impossible life tougher, I keep looking at her little girl, holding a stack of library books. Step by step, I think.

I’ve seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.

— Rev. Al Sharpton

IMG_3285

Driving

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 15-year-old, with her brand-new learner’s permit, has formally switched places in my car, from passenger seat to driver’s seat. The world, suddenly, is different for her, with the kind of freedom a rural kid gains with the keys to a car. The horizon is no longer a barrier but a temptation — move on, explore.

One year, I think, of us driving and talking — of everything from what to cook for dinner, to why I married her father, to the Black Plague. One year.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be…

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath…

— Langston Hughes

IMG_7894

Early June

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

June is the time to remember why it’s good to live in Vermont. These little bits — fresh greens from the garden, twilights hazy with lilac blossoms, a breeze through the open windows at night, swimming in water so cold your elbows hurt.

Happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

— Jane Kenyon
IMG_7885

15

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Fifteen years ago, I walked in the garden in the early morning, on the day I birthed my second daughter.

Those were the years when “peak oil” was the looming fear. Now, the country is burning up, broken in so many ways, with a madman ensconced in the White House.

Last night, while the grownups sat around the campfire talking about COVID and rioting, I watched my daughter and her friends walk through the cemetery, so happy to be together but spread out — “distance, please,” I called — wandering through the lilac-scented evening — these lovely, witty girls — talking and talking, as they jostled, each finding their place.

Here’s a few lines from Anne Sexton’s anti-Vietnam War poem, a love letter to her daughter, “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman.”

What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.

IMG_7839

Sun and Sunday

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A Sunday of skipping the news, opening the house windows, hanging out the laundry. A brilliantly sunny day — when I put my shovel into the garden, pull weeds, and empty buckets of manure.

All afternoon, we’re in the sunlight, the grass around the garden emerald. On the other side of my garden fence, families walk in the cemetery — teens with parents, little kids running ahead, and dogs on leashes. The neighbors’ three-year-old chases last fall’s dead leaves, blowing in the merest breeze.

The girls make garlic knots for dinner, and we eat them with carrot sticks, talking, talking.

I know there’s a lesson here — about slowing down, staying home, putting your hands in the earth — a lesson that would have been much harder had the day sleeted. Sleet, too, is possible in Vermont’s May. Mostly, though, I’m grateful for the day’s rejuvenation, this bright spot to carry us along.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

— Ted Kooser

IMG_7728.jpg