writing

Dad and Father’s Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

When I was a kid, in moments of stress or elevated high jinks, my dad’s sense of humor rose. He was prone to things like putting grapes up his nose while my mother wasn’t looking to make us kids laugh. This was the camping trip to the Grand Canyon, when the clutch went on our old Jeep, and my dad was fixing it whatever he might have had at hand — a pliers and a fishing hook , maybe two rocks rubbed together in prayer, for all I know.

That same trip, someone was on the lam who had once also been a Navy Seal. We hiked into the canyon, passing sharp shooters at the rim. Don’t look, my mother said. Sometimes I wonder, Whatever happened to him? Did he have kids?

My parents never hesitated to get out our atlas, the essential road tripping gear. Looking at the map with my youngest recently, I chanced on Medicine Bow, Wyoming. We camped beside a man who lived in his canvas tent. While we were hiking, a lightening storm blew up, and my father hustled us down. As a kid, our sometimes peripatetic life was status quo, all kinds of living mixed in. I could list a 100 things without stopping that my dad taught us, all darn useful — like read Plato and follow water when you’re lost in the wilderness — but the one I keep returning to these days, now that I’m along in my life, is his utter persistence. A parent now myself, I think of him in the Grand Canyon with three young kids and a skeptical wife, with hardly any money and a broken-down Jeep. He patched it together. We kept on with that journey, thousands of miles, all those nights in the desert under the stars. At the wheel, he drove that Jeep for many more years.

Old cheese, new peonies.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

The girls come find me where I’m swimming, the water brackish, strewn with pollen. A blackbird keeps me company. The girls have snagged out-of-date cheese that’s perfectly fine and a tomato that’s sweetly ripe. At home, I dice last year’s garlic. I insist the girls admire the Bartzilla peony that’s blooming now, two blossoms and more fat buds of blossoms. The Bartzilla was a gift a number of autumns ago. My youngest planted the hairy root with me, skeptical. Now, for these few days, this peony’s a marvel.

All day, I’ve been thinking of this Mary Oliver poem. Well worth a share.

Peonies by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises, 
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open —
pools of lace, 
white and pink —
and all day the black ants climb over them, 

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls, 
craving the sweet sap, 
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities —
and all day
under the shifty wind, 
as in a dance to the great wedding, 

the flowers bend their bright bodies, 
and tip their fragrance to the air, 
and rise, 
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness 
gladly and lightly, 
and there it is again — 
beauty the brave, the exemplary, 

blazing open. 
Do you love this world? 
Do you cherish your humble and silky life? 
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? 

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, 
and softly, 
and exclaiming of their dearness, 
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, 

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, 
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

Bone Marrow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The co-op cashier confides to me as she rings up my tomato and a loaf of bread that she loves this weather — brilliant sun interspersed with downpours. “Must be the Irish in me.”

The past few weeks have been a kind of July bonus: great growth in early June. My apple trees brushed out. I’ve placed an old desk and weathered chair on my covered porch. Recently, carrying out my laptop, I saw the desk sprinkled with gold pollen as if magic had swept through in the night. What luck, I thought, sat down and sneezed, worked.

I am of the wary bent, not to crow, don’t reveal a royal flush, a full house, for god’s sake don’t invite in bad fortune. At the little farmstand around Woodbury Lake, I park and walk behind the dilapidated barn towards the greenhouses, in search of a few more flowers for my garden, to fatten out the echinacea the groundhogs ate last year. In the tiny house, a dog barks. The farmer steps out and calls to me, my former library patron. He sings, “I’m saying it! I’m loving this.”

His words, not mine. Mine are this: in this northern realm, take in the sun and the green, store these gems in your marrow.

Don’t confuse hunger with greed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At breakfast, I mention to my daughter that June 6, today, is D-Day. I’ll write what perhaps she would not want me to write: that she’s standing at the counter making avocado toast and drinking yesterday’s cold coffee. She pours sriracha over the cut avocado. She’s 19, and, lord, a sheer miracle of youth, this gorgeous young woman.

I say, The soldiers were your age. Younger.

We stand staring at each other in our small kitchen of June sunlight. On our table lies a pile of unopened mail, our tabby cat Acer grooming his whiskers, car keys and lip balm, a hunting knife that could extract a man’s heart.

In the evening, I’m at the local arts center to see Nora Jacobson‘s documentary about poet Ruth Stone. The evening is still light when I drive home. I take the long way and pull over beside a field to admire the ragged robin, its pink spreading where the dandelions have gone to seed and green. In my Subaru, it’s me and that box of my mother’s ashes. I once knew a woman who kept her stepfather’s ashes for three years in a Datsun. Impossible, I thought. Now, I think, Sure, possible.

A day of such historical might, such profound sorrow. Yet, our own domestic dramas, the kitchen table stories: how real and meaningful these are, too. As a woman, as a writer, I’ve been thinking for weeks about Ruth Stone’s admonition: “Don’t confuse hunger with greed;/And don’t wait until you are dead.” In my garden, I grab a branch of lilac – the goregous white double blossoms, withering with rot – and breathe in the sweet fragrance.

There is only the wearing away,

The changing of means.

From Ruth Stone’s “Speculation”

Pay it forward: a debt.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the local coffeeshop, a stranger kicks up a conversation, and we bat around our mutual appreciation for this early summer – the blossoms profuse. He buys his order and adds my coffee, too. Pay it forward, he says, and vanishes into the morning.

I take my coffee to the courtyard down the street, empty at this time of day. Ahead of me, after this bench work stint, the day sprawls. I move from eddy to eddy.

In the late morning, a friend I haven’t seen in a few years calls. I’m now in a dim basement room. As we talk, our conversation dips into the past. I feel as if I’m lifting silty strands of stories, stringing them through my hands, searching for clues to tie pieces together.

All day long, I ponder our conversation, how the actions of one person ripple through friends and acquaintances, shift through strangers’ lives, how I’ve always been interested in this since I was a teenager, holed up in my parents’ hammock, reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Later in the day, still stuck on this, I stack firewood, listening to news about the Trump trial. In the hot June sunlight, the freshly cut wood is redolent with sap. An earthworm wriggles. The neighbor boys bike into my driveway, circle around through the grass, ever curious about whatever mundane thing I’m doing. Overhead, those turkey vultures circle their late afternoon sweep, ever hungry. Little snapshot of my terrain.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story.

— John Steinbeck

Playing cards, considering remains.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

In the darkness, I slide the barn door shut. The world is redolent with cut grass, the wet earth where I watered grape vines. Embers flicker in the fire pit; low laughter moves through the night. June, oh loveliest June, endless varieties of leaf and blossom.

On a hike, we meet a stranger from Maine, and we swap stories about climate change and marriage. He sees my brother’s dog has no water, and shares what he’s carried for his dog. The afternoon gleams with storybook colors of emerald, cobalt, gold. We drive to the lake, to the general store, to a brewery where we sit outside. My brother drinks beer. My daughter and I sip lemon sodas from stemmed glasses, so sweetly yellow I imagine my hand cups sunlight.

I have my mother’s ashes in my possession. Our conversation bends back again and again to her ashes and her life, and the very different relationship that each of us had with her. Lacking a religious framework, I’m treading in open water. My mother, in fact, might have been fiercely opposed to the chain of circumstances that landed me keeper of her remains, or not. I am her second daughter, her match in stubbornness.

All day long, this tender beginning to June, we do the things we love to do. We drink coffee and eat buttered toast, play cards. The sunlight crosses over my house. The day is both chilly and hot. The days spin on, rich with the illusion that there is no finality. Mercy, I think, shutting the barn door to keep the raccoons from the recycling. Another day, the nightsongs of frogs serenading.