Art? Why?

August 28, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, while the 12-year-old girls swam in Greensboro’s perfectly clear Lake Caspian, I read on the beach, just me and a few gulls, a pair of kayakers pushing off. An older woman wandered down and waded into the water and said only kids could swim in that water, and then left, too. The girls had swam out and were experimenting with laughing underwater.

Later, we went to Bread and Puppet’s outdoor theater, sprawled in the hot sun. Coming home, the girls swam again, while I eavesdropped on a pleasant conversation between our former pediatrician, his wife, and friends.

I kept thinking, What does art matter, anyway?, all this barefoot and Blundstone-shod performance in the field? What does poetry, fiction, song, mean, anyway? The more I thought, I wondered if my question was wrong, if the answer lay in who was listening, like myself listening to those 12-year-old girls. Maybe art is like that a cappella hymn, voices raised in harmony and confidence, to the variated audience, the shape of the earth, the enormous pine trees, and all that sky, blue and shifting with clouds, over field and forest, highways and water, on and on, and on.

Maybe my question, like a koan, holds the answer.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

– Leonardo da Vinci

Postcards from Charlottesville

August 26, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughter and her friend dug into boxes of records and gleaned out The Beatles, set up the stereo and record player in our barn, and cranked up The White Album. They hung up the hammock, strung lights around the walls, and then – needing a disco ball – smashed a mirror and hot-glued shards on a soccer ball.

While I wander around the edges, moving from chore to chore – nothing egregiously awful, but edgy and dissatisfied, preoccupied with I’m thinking – the girls are in the barn, creatively busy, smiling, wanting only a break to go swimming and eat ice cream sundaes.

Later, in the dark, I go for a walk in the adjoining cemetery, familiar enough with these paths that I can walk both by the scant light and my memory. The crescent moon rises in the black sky, over the mountain ridge and our house, where I see the girls’ string of Christmas lights shining. I pause, noting the moon’s hue. Tinged amber? Faintly orange?

Then I wise up and just stand there, shivering a little in my sweater, admiring this slice of moon, autumn creeping near.

… I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence. With every cry she has tutored me, in what is plain and hard: that my affection, my silly entertainments, my doting hours, the particular self I tried to bring to my care of her, have been as superfluous as my fury and despair. All that is required is for me to be there….

– Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

My sister, Tanya Stanciu, who lives in Charlottesville sent these photos.

Growing

August 24, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Some friends have a baby who won’t sleep through a night. A gorgeous, round-cheeked laughing beauty of a baby.

I’ve restrained myself from laughing, from outright teasing: I’ve never heard of a baby who keeps her parents up at night. My first baby, at nine months, woke up every hour for what seemed years, although it may have been only a week or two, or possibly months. I first noted then that this parenting thing might never plateau out and remain static.

My 12-year-old daughter made a new friend yesterday. When I picked her up after work, she was losing mightily and happily at Monopoly, while the girls hatched plans for a sleepover. Later, the three of us biked slightly out of town, abandoning our bikes and walking through the dusk rapidly rising, the girls laughing on swings my daughters used as very little girls. The friend was wearing my daughter’s sweatshirt, and my eyes kept snagging on the turquoise. Truth is, my daughter’s grown so much this past year, I look twice at her often, before I slow down and recognize her as mine.

Stories teach us in ways we can remember… Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman’s true capacities in pregnancy and birth.

– Ina May Gaskin

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Summer Sustenance

August 22, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Swimming in the lake last night until the children were shivering and laughing, the rosy sunset spilling over the still water, I imagined myself like the black bears around us, storing not calories but summer’s barefoot warmth, the ease of lying on the sand, the way you might swim with your eyes at the lake’s surface, all that water stretching from shore to shore, filled with the teeming mysteries of animal, vegetable and mica-flecked rocky life.

An acquaintance once gave me a piece of advice: if I wanted to change my life, do one or two changes well, and see how that spins things around. In those toddler-raising days, I chose two things: I baked our family’s bread and learned to knit. O, once upon the time as a very young woman, I teased and mocked the domestic, little knowing its ancient power and life-carrying grace. Once upon a time, too, I brushed off August swimming as frivolity, back in those days when I chopped my life into pieces, ranked weeding the garden above sand between the girls’ toes, misunderstanding how that lake nourishes our human hunger.

…Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

– Robert Frost, “October”

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Sunday Evening

August 20, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Every year at at this point in the summer – just about at the end – I have an almost insatiable desire to lie down and take a nap. Between work, kids home from school, and trying to cram in as much warm weather happiness as possible (like an evening swim), the days arc all the way through dusk, and the nights, so long in winter, are still brief.

I’m not complaining; black winter nights will press in soon enough, and we’re still in the rowdy cricket circus.

Today, visiting High Mowing Seeds, my daughter and I walked through fields of all-sized sunflowers, happy marigolds, delicately fragrant sweet peas in shades from pale pink to nearly black. This is Vermont’s summer apex: parents worn out, surrounded by unsurpassable beauty.

You got to understand: here
Winter stays six months a year—
Mean, mean winters and too long.
Ninety days is what we get, just

Ninety days of frost free weather….

From David Budbill’s “Summer Blues”

Heart in the Hand

August 19, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my husband and I bought our first house, I intended to live there forever, unpack my two cast iron skillets, have a couple of kids, dig a vast garden, and stay. Then there’s that Robert Burns’ line John Steinbeck retooled, and maybe I should have reflected that line might encompass the lives of women, too…. The best laid schemes of mice and men…. and so on.

Luckily, what I perceived as plans awry has evened out – at least for now. Intrepidly exploring the terrain of where we’re living, I realize, again, just how corporal our lives are, how the angle of light through the kitchen window – whether wide open or filtered through mist – shapes the kernels of our days. Walking through the dusky forest with three girls last night, the muddy path surrounded by August’s copious greenery was all alive, alive: pencil-thin snakes, slugs, a darting rabbit, Cooper Brook running over its pebbles, shallow and clean. As we entered a field of goldenrod and chicory, crickets sang wildly, lusty in the heat of summer.

Simultaneously, I’m re-entering the landscape of the heart through my own daughter stepping into her young adulthood. What a bodily world is love. Those well-made schemes? Perhaps that’s what makes our lives so fascinating – our clever designs, and the universe’s unfolding and rearranging of our blueprints.