poetry

Childhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, these two 11-year-old girls have been weaving their lives together, spinning stories, jumping on the trampoline, creating bracelets from colored rubber bands, hatching a plan with their fathers to go paddle-boarding tomorrow – these two girls who have known each other since before their own memories began to hold shape. Long past the age of teething and cloth diapers and still not yet at the age of first love and heartbreak, they’re at an age of real appreciation for each other, an easy comfort with their bodies and laughter.

In the adult world that seems to be spinning into madness, I’m struck again by the brevity of childhood – and its singular importance. Soak it up, I think, looking up from my desk as the girls wander in. Eat watermelon, filch peonies from an empty vacation house’s garden, lie on the grass and giggle. Soak up the season of childhood. 

Let it linger, children.

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars….

(the adults) soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”

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primroses, July, Vermont

 

Our Garden of Early Delights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season’s
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

The Making of Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

If you write about Vermont, you’ll write about rain. There’s a myriad ways to know rain: lying in bed on a summer evening with the windows open, relishing the needed watering of thirsty garden greens, or the unwelcome tear of November ice in your eyes.

In knitting, my hands know how to create using wool (or linen or hemp) and needles. I can read a pattern, measure and gauge, but the bulk of that knowledge is through the experience of my hands and eyes. My fingers know if the tension is right, or whether to rip apart and begin again.

My daughter draws beautifully; something I cannot do at all. When I ask her, how do you do that? she says she doesn’t know. But yet, clearly, on some level, she does know. She just hasn’t yet articulated it. Writing, too, is that fascinating mixture of craft and raw, direct experience. Rain is a handful of soil so sodden it runs between your fingers, or lies heavily over fields and lakes, so dense and unending it might as well be a territory unto itself. Like Janisse Ray’s lovely line: Sometimes all day, days, rain falls.

But once I held
a kingfisher
in my hands,
I touched its blue power.
That may be the only time
I ever do.

From Janisse Ray’s “Kingfisher”

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Girls Under the Influence of Moonlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The moonlight shone mightily last night. My daughter and her friend made a bed beside the large living room window and lay watching firefires through the screen. They were hot, satiated after a day of soccer and lake swimming, roasting marshmallows outside over a fire.

In the evening, a breeze flipped the leaves upside down, a sure sign of a rainstorm coming in. Reading The Little Red Chairs upstairs with the windows and balcony door open wide, the frogs and owls sang. I listened for the little girls to quiet, but they kept whispering, and I heard them laughing as they played cards by flashlight. Later, they ran up the stairs, enormously excited as the teenage sister had snagged a mouse in the live trap, and could they, please, they begged, hands folded beneath their chins, drive the mouse down the road to find a new house in a field?

We were at that point in the night where I wasn’t sure whether anyone would sleep at all, but the night was so magically alive, just brilliant with moonbeams, and the little girls were so excited at this mouse adventure, that the older sister of course took them along, too. Why not?

Later, when the thunderstorm broke, I walked around the house with the lightning flashing, the girls curled motionlessly in sleep, and I quietly closed the windows over their pillows. In the morning, sleepy-eyed, wrapped in the blankets against the cool after-storm temperature, they didn’t recall a drop of that midnight storm.

…The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies….
– Amy Lowell, “The Garden By Moonlight”

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Child’s Footprint

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Stuck in traffic yesterday, overdressed in the afternoon’s high temps as I’d left the house in the dewy cool of morning, I was lost, looking for a meet-up place with my kids. Surrounded by big box stores jam-packed with plastic stuff, that territory is one of my least favorite of Vermont roadsides.

Years ago, I delivered a 5-gallon bucket of our maple syrup every month to a bakery in that area, and afterwards, I let my daughter, who was two, run in the weedy field behind a strip mall, flanked at the far end by condominiums. By chance, I passed that still-undeveloped field and pulled over.

All day, a  white tree fluff had floated around my office windows, a drifting June version of snow. At that field, the white gossamer yet drifted through the air, random bits, here and there. Not that many years ago, this expanse was farm field, with the mountains rising like a blue dream to the east and the Winooski River flowing nearby.

The day was quite hot, and I thought of my own garden’s tomatoes and melons, thirsty on their vine, and I knew I wouldn’t return to water barefoot until twilight.

I had turned back towards the asphalt and the intersections of noisy traffic, when I saw a small footprint in the cracked earth. Crouching, I rubbed my fingers through its chalky dust, wondering what child had run through this field when it was muddy. How I wished that child had found some hidden treasures, secrets just for her.

It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

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Butterfly Visitors

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Finally bursting into growth this year, our lilac bush is covered with swallowtail butterflies. All around us, the pollinators steadily work: hummingbird, bee, wasp. The butterflies are uniquely magical, though, wholly silent, almost tame enough to touch my hand near the fragrant blossoms. Then, like a shimmering cloud of colored papers, they lift off one-by-one and disappear, upward, into the apple tree’s canopy.

My daughter’s favorite scene in My Neighbor Totoro is when little Mei lies sleeping on the Totoro in the forest, while butterflies flicker and rise. In that same spirit, the book I’m writing holds spring azures near its end, these exquisitely beautiful creatures who appear mistakenly fragile, yet are graced with flight and fertility, mightily powerful.

….Come often to us (butterflies), fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days, when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

– William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”

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Woodbury, Vermont