mothering

Nick Names

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Driving home with the kids today, we started naming each other, the cousins riffing on the nicknames I have for my daughters. Affectionately, the kids named each member of our family, all after foods.

What’s in a name? More than a word, these names are ways to possess each other, lovingly lay claim. Like a lasso, this language loops over a beloved: Mine. Willingly accepted, the nickname claims: yours.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

– Rebecca Solnit

IMG_1889.JPG

The Ties That Clinch

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A few years ago, when my sister’s kids and my kids started spending more time together every summer – beyond a few days’ visit – we hit a point one summer when all three of younger kids were either mad or crying. We split them up into different cars, and then went hiking. By the end of the day, they were laughing again. And while no one favors kids crying, it was clear the cousins had hit a new level in their relationship. They  had spent enough time together to honestly disagree; simultaneously, they had spent enough time together to cherish each others’ company, and wholeheartedly make-up.

Like all families, we share the same stories exclusive to us. Remember when Yasu dumped ketchup on his head and laughed hysterically? Remember the summer Gigi and Kaz spent hours sorting tic-tacs? Remember the Summer of Gum, when Trident was the New Cool Thing? Remember when Aunt Brett…. well, I won’t incriminate myself.

Stories are too often trivialized as lightness, mere anecdote or amusement. But aren’t the stories of ourselves and our beloveds an integral way of knowing ourselves and our place in the world? Not to mention…. often entirely fun.

IMG_1869

Number 10 Pond, Calais, Vermont

 

Purple Sky

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With a friend, my 11-old-year daughter recently began running – with an interest beyond beloved companionship and the ice cream at the trail’s end. Lacing up her shoes, I see a keenness in her, a love of knowing her body is capable of carrying her a distance.

In last evening’s sultriness, the girls witnessed heat lightening. The sky was purple, my daughter told me excitedly, and the air must have been alive with electricity. I could imagine these two pony-tailed girls running on Morrisville’s rail trail, their eyes wide, determining their route to safety.

These girls have never lived where the sky isn’t omnipresent; inherently, they know to watch the weather. They’ve never lived where the sky is obscured by smog, wires, buildings. Doubtless, they were frightened, but also in awe of nature’s magnificence, power, and certainly her beauty. And that’s one lucky thing.

Purple, my daughter reiterated. Amazing.

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

– Hunter S. Thompson

IMG_1853

 

 

 

One Tiny Town

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The girls worked for a hours today on a creation so consuming they couldn’t remember whose idea it was: a tiny town. This project is the satisfying stuff of summer days, with time and outdoor space sufficient to spread out with cardboard and scissors, markers, tape, and framing nails.

Dr. Spock – whatever his flaws might have been – never put down children’s play. Our Vermont world is up one small town today, and better off for its creation.

Flight requires defiance of gravity and is really, when you think about it, a bold act.

– Elizabeth J. Church, The Atomic Weight of Birds

IMG_1839

July, Woodbury, Vermont

 

Flowers of All Sizes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter picked a piece of a dill flower in the garden today, then noticed her sprig was a miniature version of the whole. Curiously inspecting, she saw the symmetry reflected again in a smaller blossom-within-a-blossom.

For the longest time, my child examined that flower, wondering how tiny flowers could be. Down to molecules? she asked.

Forget those high school chemistry drawings and imagine this: molecules in the shape of flowers.

Maybe a little summer boredom isn’t such a bad thing….

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

– Yosa Buson

IMG_1829

West Woodbury, Vermont

The Body Doesn’t Lie…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. a friend of mine told me in graduate school. She had suffered trauma as a young child, and, as an adult, found her body retained that trauma – silently all those years, as if in a repository.

This afternoon, with no one around but my children and friends, a loon and a handful of low-flying, squawking gulls, we swam in Greensboro’s Lake Caspian after a thunderstorm. The cool water held the dark blue of the stormy sky, reflecting the tempestuous, infinite sky above.

All this evening, while painting my daughter’s room three complementary shades of blue, I listened to NPR pour out a stream of collective body wound: a whole nation writhing in myriad variations of misery.

My teenage daughter asks question after question, and I go back to that afternoon sky, where the water and sky hold together, reflecting their finer hues.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

FullSizeRender.jpg