Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Icicles as Building Materials

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This afternoon, my 10-year-old daughter studiously collected all the icicles that she could reach from the house’s eaves. She then began her winter project of icicle house-building. The icicles have been slim pickings this year, and not for lack of interest. She cajoled her older sister, who had just returned from running, to stretch up and grab a few more.

Returning from a walk, I stood on the road, listening to my daughters at the house, discussing the different colors of ice. This weather, so pure and cold, reminded me of those long walks I took in those last few weeks before my first daughter was born. Every afternoon, I’d bundle up – me and the unborn baby I carried – and walk in what I remember as an especially sunny and cold winter. More than anything, I was most curious to meet this baby, to see this tiny person’s face: my child!

Our relationship has long since grooved into the varied terrain of mother and daughter relationships, far deeper, far richer, far more full than I ever could have imagined, sprawling beyond any cliched confines.

I have one daughter emerging into young adulthood, the other enmeshed deeply in the middle of her childhood. In the end? Who knows? How will these girls look back upon these years? But I hope they remember the loveliness of these ephemeral ice creations.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

–– Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 

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Mid-February, West Woodbury, Vermont

New Hampshire’s State Lunch (a little known fact)

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Although I’ve lived in Vermont for almost all my adult life, I grew up across the Connecticut River. Growing up in New Hampshire, not only did we meet all the candidates, we met all the sub-candidates, too – anyone who was remotely interested in running for president showed up not only in our small town, but in everyone’s small town. Some students set off a smoke bomb in our high school just before Reagan arrived with his secret service entourage.

The best thing about the New Hampshire primary is that intractable streak of curmudeoniness that runs through the state. Voters in my town expected all candidates to have coffee in Linda’s Diner. You didn’t vote for a no show, and you didn’t take excuses. The second best thing about the New Hampshire primary is that it’s just more fun. It’s happening.

I remember (and this was many years ago) standing on a street in Manchester waiting for Jesse Jackson. Behind us, one newsman complained to another, New Hampshire in January! It’s always freezing, and you have to walk forever to find a pay phone!

The rest of us managed to make do.

In New Hampshire the state lunch is a submarine sandwich with a tub of coleslaw.

– Donald Hall

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This was summer….. 2015

 

 

Another Brick in the Wall….

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Today I visited a high school that reminded me of the high school I attended, and I remembered just how badly I wanted to dismantle that building, brick by brick. I wanted windows. I wanted to lie beneath leafy trees. I wanted to hike up behind the athletic fields and wander into woods I hadn’t explored.

So at 18 when I enrolled in a tiny Vermont college at the end of a paved road, where an old farmhouse housed the administrative offices and classrooms were in a former hay barn, I knew I was in the right place. The first night I slept there, I fell asleep staring through the window at the crystalline stars.

I’ve tried many paths with my own daughters, from private school to homeschooling to public school, and perhaps the one thing I learned is not follow what your own adult peer group is doing – that initial impulses are sometimes dead-on – and that if you’re feeling penned in, look for the egress, or at least a window sash to open.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Butler Yeats

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February garden, Vermont

Youth

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I’m reading Daniel Raeburn’s Vessels – his harrowing memoir about his first daughter, stillborn. Like the best of memoirs, this is not about a single, isolated event in the couple’s life: it is about their marriage in the wider sea of family and friends.

His wife, a potter, told him early in their relationship:

There are three tests for a pot, she said. First, when you throw it, it has to feel right in your hand. Then, after you fire it, it has to come out looking like something you’d want to keep. Then comes the third test: You have to live with it. You have to use it. This is the real test.

–– Daniel Raeburn, Vessels

Today, seventeen years into parenting, I’m home with a house full of teenage girls. Doesn’t that single sentence contain an infinity? Ten girls with their own long legs, ten hairstyles, ten unique pasts, ten pairs of eyes open to their budding womanly futures.

Like clay, our lives are slipping, hardening, crumbling, ever changing. Use it. Embrace it.

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Maple

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This week, I gave away maple leaves, small shapes of pure maple sugar. For so many years, maple was queen in my life. Maple is all taste and scent, literally the life of the tree boiled into steam or crystallized into sweetness. Both my babies, when I carried them back to the house after long afternoons-into-night of boiling had a satiny patina of maple sugar glazed on their cheeks, from condensation descending through the sugarhouse.

For years, maple was livelihood in our house, but also a gift, particularly sugar which is harder and dearer to make. For numerous reasons, this year queen maple has laid her scepter down in my household – and yet, the other day, eating crumbles of this candy, I remembered this world in a grain of amber sugar: the immense fire’s roar, the billows of steam that stretched across the road, the daughters’  play tea sets and how they chalked on the cement floor and rough wood walls – and the satisfaction in drinking good syrup.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Woodbury, Vermont 2013

 

Birth

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An image appears in art, over and over, of a human down a deep narrow well: trapped. What’s at the bottom? What’s at the top?

17 years ago, I had a prolonged labor with my first daughter, where, hours into it, I knew I was descending headfirst down a stone-lined chasm. In all that darkness, I saw only my outstretched hand, reaching down. At the bottom, I knew with a certainty, as clear as I have ever known anything, lay my death.

I never reached the end of that chasm that night. Instead, I met my daughter, born via emergency caesarian. When I saw her tiny, wrinkled body for the first time, held up for me in the surgeon’s bloodied gloves, her eyes were wide open, and I thought with a fierceness I have never relinquished, She’s mine.

These few lines are but a piece of her traverse into this earthly world, and my soulful journey to meeting her is as real as the glinting scalpel in the surgeon’s hand that released her from my body. So, as fiction writer, when I write of rock-lined tunnels or starless nights, I’m not fabricating stories from nothingness. The interior roads we take may be unseen to the eye but are just as vital, just as humming with mysterious life, as a newborn’s eyes.

…(my mother) was
bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea--none of it
was enough, for her, without me.

–– Sharon Olds
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Montpelier, Vermont