mothering

That Shockproof Shit Dectector

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My teenage daughter got her first job on a payroll today. While she’s worked in our sugaring business from toddlerhood on, and babysat the neighbors’ little ones, this job marks her first foray into direct-deposit, need-your-social-security number employment. She’s excited; I’m proud of her, as always; but there’s also this tinge, for my very first time as a mother, that now she’s really heading into adulthood. Oh, I can’t help but think, now you’re among us, on this side.

She’s savvy and courageous in ways I never was as a teenager, and has what Hemingway described as “a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” She has no intention of becoming a writer, but that characteristic, I’m sure, will serve her well.

Fortunately, life is slow. Telling me her news, in her yet-childishly careless way, she dropped ripe tomatoes on the kitchen floor, dashing my salsa dinner plans, and laughed hysterically.

While I’m thumbing through my marked-up Hemingway books, here’s more writerly advice:

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.

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Ah…. Water

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Now deep in the muggy green of summer, the woods are splendid with fern, but the garden is parched, thirsty for rain. Fearful of my well, I’m reluctant to water, and what’s the point of watering if it’s not done well and thoroughly? What’s the point of anything, if not done deeply and truly?

Now is the time for lakes, preferably spring-sourced, cool and clear, all the way to the sandy bottom. The children’s irritability washes away with swimming. As the evening cools, I step out on the bedroom balcony to admire the night sky. The constellations appear like tiny minnows in a lake, poised just for a moment, suspended in the firmament.

So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try to drag us back into the water, pulling down our improvements wile they’re at it… You know the story of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove, olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must have been the most comforting of all to ancient humans.

– Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like A Professor

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Greensboro, Vermont

Summertime Chaos

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Every June, I have the same vision that summer signifies a smoother sailing, a leveling out of our family life. Every July, I realize how mistaken is that cliche. By July, the garden is both flourishing and struggling. The house, emptied out on sunny days, fills up again on during these all-day rains, and a shifting clutter of books, clothes, pens, gum wrappers – and just about everything else – invades every room. Somehow, the windows are all smeared disgracefully.

Chaos is part of our life, I remind myself, not a temporary phase of life-with-children, but an integral physical force in the universe. Most of all, it’s not personal to me. Nonetheless, the creative force in me rises up. Possibly someday I’ll have that inner peace where I accept the crumbles of mud on the kitchen floor. Until then, chaos and I will keep dancing our waltz. This afternoon, I think we’re evenly partnered.

That’s how I see us… against the backdrop of Nature, life, the universe, which shows so little fairness in the distribution of reward and punishment and hurts some so much more than others, but hurts us all in some way and makes us angry, sad and weary, and sometimes surprised and overjoyed by evidence of an intelligence beyond our own that’s guiding us along our way, requiring consciousness of us and rewarding perseverance with happiness and malingering with suffering, and sometimes rendering the jewel into mud, taking consciousness away from those no less deserving than ourselves….

– David Payne, Barefoot to Avalon

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garlic, West Woodbury, Vermont

 

Childhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, these two 11-year-old girls have been weaving their lives together, spinning stories, jumping on the trampoline, creating bracelets from colored rubber bands, hatching a plan with their fathers to go paddle-boarding tomorrow – these two girls who have known each other since before their own memories began to hold shape. Long past the age of teething and cloth diapers and still not yet at the age of first love and heartbreak, they’re at an age of real appreciation for each other, an easy comfort with their bodies and laughter.

In the adult world that seems to be spinning into madness, I’m struck again by the brevity of childhood – and its singular importance. Soak it up, I think, looking up from my desk as the girls wander in. Eat watermelon, filch peonies from an empty vacation house’s garden, lie on the grass and giggle. Soak up the season of childhood. 

Let it linger, children.

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars….

(the adults) soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Escape at Bedtime”

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primroses, July, Vermont

 

Thorny Land

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenage daughter fears snakes. Walking in the arroyo yesterday, this Vermont girl quizzes her grandmother about the possibility of encountering a rattlesnake. Never seen one, she’s assured. Moments later, a rattler slithers near her feet, and she screams.

She glares back at me, as if I’ve magically created what she considers a devilish creature. Between us lie spiny cholla cactus, red sand, thumbnail-sized wildflowers I don’t recognize at all. We are no longer in the lush land of the Green Mountains.

Searchingly, she peers into a cluster of tumbleweed and then back at me.

Gone, I say. She waits a moment longer and then offers, You can go first now.

The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.

– Georgia O’Keeffe

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Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Wild Blue Yonder

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Early in her third-grade year, my daughter came home chatty about Magic E’s might, the incredibly tasty Italian salad dressing at lunch, and that her teacher jumped out of airplanes. What, she wondered, would that be like? She had never considered this a human possibility. In a poem, she wrote,  I want to fly.

At 2:30 a.m. on a rainy night, I woke the girls and drove that familiar way to Burlington I’ve traversed so often, passing through small towns where houses were dark save for a single outside light beside the front door. A store clerk leaned against the door of Morrisville’s Cumberland Farms, smoking a cigarette, the empty parking lot illuminated. That day, we flew from Vermont’s wooded green, high over the upper midwest’s great lakes, and the enormous plains of the country’s middle. At the end of our journey, the pilot tipped the wings, and we began what always seemed to me a long and gradual descent over the northern New Mexican desert, the red and black-lava mesa land slowly rubbing into focus – pinion trees, houses, the wash of dry arroyos, the blue Sandia Mountains rising mysteriously in this open landscape.

My child pressed her face against the small window. Of everything in that day, what she loved most was lift-off, that graceful moment when the boundary between earth and sky is crossed, and, Icarus-like, she entered the realm of birds.

“Flying at Night”

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

– Ted Kooser
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Photo by Molly S.