Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Sunny Skies

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last year, my daughter played her snare drum in Hardwick, Vermont’s Memorial Day parade; afterwards, a pragmatic child eyeing years of marching band ahead, she traded in the heavy drum for a skinny clarinet.

In one of the best small town rituals, just about everyone I know attends the parade and festival afterwards, on the dandelion-studded field with a sagging-roofed granite shed at one side.

Years now into this town and these people, from the summer days when I had a baby in my belly to now, when some of these once-upon-a-time little kids head into their own travels, what emerges clearer and clearer to me is the muchness of our lives, my own family story linking through the tales of others, each of us with our own unique desires for a patch of earth and a well-built home, the latitude for creativity, the comfort of kin, the nectar of happiness.

In this day commemorating profound sadness, early summer is best begun by vanilla ice cream, a rainbow sheen of soap bubbles.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

– Henry David Thoreau

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First Train Tickets

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My daughter entered nursery school at three-and-a-half, in a sunlit-filled Waldorf school, with a teacher she had known her entire life. Her teacher tied an apron around her back, and she happily sat at a table, with a wide brush and bright yellow paint. She looked up at me and said, probably very nicely, Mommy, you can go now.

I must have looked bereft, because the teacher laughed and told me I could go around the school and look through the window. I considered this. I actually wondered how deep the weeds grew there, if I was tall enough to look in, and if the children might see me.

I ended up sitting in the school’s courtyard that morning.

Yesterday, I was at the Montpelier train station with my daughter just about all grown up now, with her boyfriend and their luggage, and we were laughing and joking, as she sat there eating watermelon. In the companionable train-traveling way, a woman joined in with our conversation. On the open-air platform, listening to red-winged blackbirds, the morning was all green Vermont May and enthusiasm for their trip. Then the great silver train rushed into the station, they got on, and I was alone on the platform, watching the receding back of the train with its two lights, the horn sounding at the next road crossing.

I was quite sure they were still laughing in the swaying train.

In my youth, I took so many trips, packed up an old black VW Rabbit and traveled west, and probably thought little of my parents. But standing on that train station platform before heading off to work, already missing my daughter, I thought of my parents, too.

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

– Mark Twain

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Montpelier Junction, Vermont

 

Living the Dream

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My friend’s mother has a phrase we repeated when we dwelled in the Realm of Raising Toddlers: after happiness comes tears.

After playing with sand, a spat over ownership of a small red shovel – as if the earth’s continued rotation depended on who held that plastic scoop.

Yesterday morning, I passed my friend’s once-upon-a-toddler driving his Toyota with two bicycles strapped on the roof, while my once-upon-a-toddler drove the opposite way in her Toyota, heading to her final days of high school.

We are long past the short, declarative sentences of small children, deeply into the lyricalness of years upon years unfolding. Punctuation is an illusion – toss it out and let the days and nights unspool….. happiness… tears… a stuffed toy rabbit worn down through affection… mason jars of crimson and gold tomatoes with fat emerald handfuls of basil… children lying on sparse grass beneath a maple tree, staring up at breeze-trembling leaves, wondering….

We’ll never mow the grass, hardly ever
rake the leaves. Adopt a goat for the lawnmowing
and squirt her milk into strong tea….
moonlight clothes snap
out on the line, extended
under stars.

– Megan Buchanan, from “Dreamlife” in Clothesline Religion

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Roaming

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My daughter and her friend, walking in a pause of rain yesterday from Memorial Day parade practice to the town library, paused beneath an apple tree along the river. She told me this driving home, before the library was out of sight.

Her friend shook the tree trunk while she stood beneath the white blossoms, looking up.

She said, I was in a snowstorm of petals.

More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California.

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

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Stretching Beyond Kidhood

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At dinner, my nearly-12-year-old daughter laughs with her friend, dirt smeared in patches on her face – under one eye, at her forehead’s crest – possibly where she’s swatted at black flies, or where she’s lain on the earth this summery Sunday, looking at something I’ll never know.

Over their bowls of rice, the girls plot a run and ice cream, our kitchen where the light filters through the apple tree tinged chlorophyll-green, dappled with shadow.

These girls are in the growing-nearly-by-the-moment phase, long legs, budding breasts. And more – their curiosity digging to matters of the heart, parsing apart their actions and their friends’, trying to unraveling the complexities of human relations. In our conversations, we circle around and around, and I can feel swimming beneath the surface of our talk these two girls grabbing those age-old themes of justice, happiness, heartache.

As I’m cleaning through drawers, discarding what I no longer need or want, her friend gathers a chunky handful of assorted keys and knots them together on a piece of wire. She ties them beneath the seat of her bicycle.

I ask what her plans are, and she answers she’s making wind chimes. The keys clink as the girls pedal away, merry.

I wish it would slow…
I want it all
to last, the chimney falling
back to bricks,
the orchard on its way to bud…

Laura Foley, from “The Orchard on Its Way” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

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Elmore, Vermont

Wedding Dress

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As little girls, my sister and I played pretend in a pink polyester dress and musty-smelling man’s dinner jacket and clomped around the house in my mother’s high heeled wedding shoes, with the implicit expectation someday our small feet would fit into those shiny and coveted heels.

For my feet, not so. My grown-up women’s feet are size five, my older daughter’s size eleven.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I believed in a 1950s-framework of a long marriage, two or three children primarily reared by myself as mother, a college education, and a stable and possibly sedate life. It was a vision of life I was doomed to abysmally fail.

While those values lay deeply in my culture, they weren’t particularly in my own childhood home. Unlike every other family in the small New Hampshire town I grew up in, my parents were happiest packing up our old green Jeep and camping all summer on the cheap in national parks west of the Mississippi River. We spent our best hours cooking on a Coleman stove with our kitchen stuff in cardboard boxes, playing Hearts by lantern light and reading used books at the picnic table. “Leave It to Beaver” is a concept I culturally grasp, but I’ve never watched an episode, and I’m willing to bet my siblings haven’t, either.

So when my daughters discovered my wedding dress while cleaning a closet the other day, marveling that its size will never fit either of them, I laughed and told them it was just as well. Each of them can stitch or discover their own attire.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is one that sings.

– Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage”

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On our way to a performance of “Little Women,” we took a detour. Hardwick, Vermont