Friday Morning

February 9, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

February: the kids fluctuate between ecstasy with the plentiful snow, or downright surliness. The double doors onto our back porch are jammed with winter boots, melting snow, ski boots and more ski boots, ice skates.

We’re in the long haul of this season, which leads into the More Winter and Yet More Winter seasons, before the many varieties of mud season and spring.

Here’s the thing, though: in February the light pours back. At zero degrees this morning, when I dropped my daughter at school this morning, her principal grabbed her skis from the back of my car, and he remarked on the day’s beauty. My daughter, worried about a Spanish presentation this morning and anxious to ski in the afternoon, lifted her face in the cold air, the sun streaming over the long brick building. She nodded.

From William Clark’s 1804-1806 journal: “Great joy in camp. We are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octian which we have been so long anxious to see….” The estimated distance the explorers had traveled from St.Louis to the ocean was 4,100 miles.

From Sacajawea by Howard P. Howard.

Random February Late Afternoon

February 7, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

With the number of snow days this year, I imagine my daughter will be picking handfuls of peas from my garden when she walks to school in June. The lilac blossoms will hang limply by then, past their sweet prime, fading. No sense mentioning this to her, now.

Ice skating at the end of the day, just before the beautiful February twilight began folding around us, the girls’ former bus driver appears from the snowmobile trail where he and his dog had been walking.

He stops to talk to us as I lace up my skates, and points out a nearby house where he grew up. I ask what it was like. He’s in his sixties, and I know he’s traveled, worked in Costa Rice, and returned to Hardwick again.

It was all kids. There were six kids in my family. Everyone had at least four kids. Sometimes a lot more. He stares at the house. Irish Catholic.

I wait. On a night of freezing rain a few years back, he came to the town’s bookstore when I read my from my new novel. Later, picking up my kids at the bottom of our driveway, he told me a particular character reminded him of his father, long dead.

He tells me where the ice skating rink was in those years, stares at the house a little longer, then wishes us a good skate and disappears.

No one else is around. The ice is perfect. Before we leave, we prop the three folding metal chairs and two chairs high in bank, so they won’t get lost in more snow.

Mount Fuji in winter
The sun and stars are big-hearted
and strict.

— Lida Dakotsu

Disparate Pieces

February 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The December my younger daughter was two, snow fell every day. To see out the kitchen windows, my 8-year-old and I stood on the chairs to peer over the mounds of snow that had slid off the roof.

This year, we’ve had a long dry span with little snow. My brother, a brewery owner in New Hampshire, calls and complains, Bad for business. For all those years we depended on maple sugaring for our livelihood, I worried about temperature and precipitation, fretting over one forecast versus another, keen-eyed on a degree or two of temperature change.

In the dark, I lie awake, imagining snow accumulating on our roof, over our lilies and lupines, their dark roots buried silently. The cats nudge me, and in our quiet house, the daughters sleeping, I pour these purring creatures a bowl of milk. At the window, I see across the cemetery a single patch of glowing white light, as if someone left an enormous floodlight on all night. Otherwise, the town is mostly dark, with a few small porch lights here and there, the glowing amber lights of the high school on the hill muted through the falling snow.

That patch is different from the usual spread of lights I see. What’s up, I wonder? What is someone looking for in that falling snow?

(The Province Land Dunes in Provincetown, RI, resembles….) New Mexico, where recently a man who had once been and will probably be again the governor of Nambé Pueblo told me that he had found seashells in the dirt where he is irrigating, a thousand miles from the ocean.

Cynthia Zarin, An Enlarged Heart, 2013

Turning 19 or 20? Whatever

February 3, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Birthing a baby through Caesarian may not be the low-light, mystical ideal, but it suffices. My daughter turns 19 today, although she’s decided she wants to be 20, so we’re going with 20 this year, with plans to do 20 again next year.

After a prolonged labor, a surgeon very quickly delivered her. In the dreamlike world of the OR, where the adults rustled in gowns and masks, the surgeon held up this tiny baby in his hands for me to see. In that room filled with sterile white light, the baby was vernix-greasy, pink and wet, intently alive. Unwittingly or not, in that crowded room she looked directly at me. Suffused with joy and drugs, I had the keenest sense of familiarity: I knew this baby.

A few years later, when my father was laughing so hard he took off his glasses, I realized the shape of her eyes mirror his.

…the world… was not enough for (my mother) without me in it,
not the moon, the stars, Orion
cartwheeling easily across the dark, not the
earth, the sea, none of it was
enough for her, without me.

— Sharon Olds, “The Planned Child”

Four Maples

February 2, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A friend from my high school years (which, my daughters remind me, were literally in the last century) sends me an email, and I email back from my car, in a gray parking lot beside even grayer Lake Champlain. I remember canoeing from Burton Island to the mainland on a bright, balmy morning last July, and then waiting on a high point on the mainland, watching the ferry traveling across the lake with my 12-year-old daughter and her friend. When the ferry docked, I ran down to meet them, the girls glowing and happy with their adventure.

This friend writes about taking his kids swimming, and I wonder, pond or lake, river or pool? It’s been so long since I’ve seen him I would pass him by on the street, and not recognize him.

Finished, I fold up my laptop. I nod goodbye to this polluted and yet gorgeously beautiful lake and head towards a building where I’ll be blind to the lake all day, but I think for just one more moment of that town where I grew up. Along the square of lawn that my sister and brother and I wore down through endless kickball games stood four giant sugar maples, so tall their lowest branches were high above our heads. I wonder if there’s any chance those maples are still there, haven for songbirds, their leaves lifting up and ruffling over in approaching summer storms.

Once there was a tree….
and she loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come
and he would gather her leaves
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest…

— Shel Silverstein

Where we are now

Birth

January 31, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A young father I know recently described his wife’s incredibly long labor which ended in a caesarean as simply, The baby wouldn’t come. The baby did come, though. The father spoke to me with his tiny son cradled in one arm on his lap.

This time of year, approaching my oldest daughter’s birthday, I always remember the days leading up to her arrival encased in winter’s icy silence. There had been back and forth with a midwife whom we trusted and shouldn’t have, but at the heart of everything was the baby concealed in the warm, wet womb, nearly ready to enter this world. How much I wanted to see her, face-to-face.

That child is a young woman now, full of laughter and silliness — and struggles to determine who she is, where her life will lead. I always think back to the night of her life as a long rowing across stormy seas in a wooden craft, heaving on the waves’ tempest, fiercely determined to reach solid shore with my child.

Her hands are on the oars now, too.