mothering

Friday Morning

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

February: the kids fluctuate between ecstasy with the plentiful snow, or downright surliness. The double doors onto our back porch are jammed with winter boots, melting snow, ski boots and more ski boots, ice skates.

We’re in the long haul of this season, which leads into the More Winter and Yet More Winter seasons, before the many varieties of mud season and spring.

Here’s the thing, though: in February the light pours back. At zero degrees this morning, when I dropped my daughter at school this morning, her principal grabbed her skis from the back of my car, and he remarked on the day’s beauty. My daughter, worried about a Spanish presentation this morning and anxious to ski in the afternoon, lifted her face in the cold air, the sun streaming over the long brick building. She nodded.

From William Clark’s 1804-1806 journal: “Great joy in camp. We are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octian which we have been so long anxious to see….” The estimated distance the explorers had traveled from St.Louis to the ocean was 4,100 miles.

From Sacajawea by Howard P. Howard.

IMG_1110.jpg

Disparate Pieces

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The December my younger daughter was two, snow fell every day. To see out the kitchen windows, my 8-year-old and I stood on the chairs to peer over the mounds of snow that had slid off the roof.

This year, we’ve had a long dry span with little snow. My brother, a brewery owner in New Hampshire, calls and complains, Bad for business. For all those years we depended on maple sugaring for our livelihood, I worried about  temperature and precipitation, fretting over one forecast versus another, keen-eyed on a degree or two of temperature change.

In the dark, I lie awake, imagining snow accumulating on our roof, over our lilies and lupines, their dark roots buried silently. The cats nudge me, and in our quiet house, the daughters sleeping, I pour these purring creatures a bowl of milk. At the window, I see across the cemetery a single patch of glowing white light, as if someone left an enormous floodlight on all night. Otherwise, the town is mostly dark, with a few small porch lights here and there, the glowing amber lights of the high school on the hill muted through the falling snow.

That patch is different from the usual spread of lights I see. What’s up, I wonder? What is someone looking for in that falling snow?

(The Province Land Dunes in Provincetown, RI, resembles….) New Mexico, where recently a man who had once been and will probably be again the governor of Nambé Pueblo told me that he had found seashells in the dirt where he is irrigating, a thousand miles from the ocean.

Cynthia Zarin, An Enlarged Heart, 2013

IMG_1084.jpg

 

 

Birth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A young father I know recently described his wife’s incredibly long labor which ended in a caesarean as simply, The baby wouldn’t come. The baby did come, though. The father spoke to me with his tiny son cradled in one arm on his lap.

This time of year, approaching my oldest daughter’s birthday, I always remember the days leading up to her arrival encased in winter’s icy silence. There had been back and forth with a midwife whom we trusted and shouldn’t have, but at the heart of everything was the baby concealed in the warm, wet womb, nearly ready to enter this world. How much I wanted to see her, face-to-face.

That child is a young woman now, full of laughter and silliness — and struggles to determine who she is, where her life will lead. I always think back to the night of her life as a long rowing across stormy seas in a wooden craft, heaving on the waves’ tempest, fiercely determined to reach solid shore with my child.

Her hands are on the oars now, too.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.

— Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying

IMG_1056.jpg

Monday Morning Good Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

This morning, I step out on the back porch to say, Goodbye, have a nice day to my 12-year-old as she walks to school. I lift my voice a little and add, Feels like March and spring!

By way of answering, she raises one hand, watching the ice beneath her boot soles.

Okay, she’s headed to 7th grade (myself and all my friends think been there, done that) but I also see, as the new town kid, halfway through the school year, she’s figuring out how to navigate her own way: who to walk with, and what’s the best snacks for the jaunt home.

I, on the other hand, like many mothers I know, step back in the house and breathe for a moment before the week with all its many pieces rushes at me.

Here’s some good things: an interlibrary loan book I know will be in the post office box today. None of us are sick. The cats are curled in a box, sleeping off their breakfast. The kitchen floor is washed, and there’s all this sunlight, as the planet ever so slowly bends toward spring.

Buying leeks
and walking home
under the bare trees.

— Buson

IMG_1023.jpg

Weighty Reading

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A 8-year-old boy appears in my library and asks for a copy of the wrinkle book. He’s looking for Madeline L’Engle. When I place the book in his hands, he holds it, staring at the cover. It’s an old hardback copy, the dust jacket long since disappeared, so the cover is a plain turquoise, the corners worn down.

This book’s too hard for him to read. I know it, and he knows it, too. I ask if his parents ever read to him at night, and he says, No.

I was a little younger than this boy when my father read this book to my sister and me, and even now, I have to think a little about a tesseract: what is this odd, strange wrinkle in time?

This child isn’t shy, but he stands there, holding this book in two hands. Gently, I suggest he take a second book, too, one I know he can read and will likely love, but he takes the L’Engle, too, pushing the books deep into his backpack without a word.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.

— Madeline L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time

IMG_1007

Ladybug Table

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My friend emails she’s left a stack of books in my barn on the ladybug table. The ladybug table! The children’s table my parents bought as young parents, when my sister was a toddler, long ago, when the US military was napalming Vietnam.

My friend remembers this table when her son and my daughter spent innumerable hours shaping playdough on its red-and-black surface, on breaks from tricycling around my kitchen and living room. Yes, we still have the ladybug table, worn hard from child use which might, perhaps, be the point of all this.

From one of those books…..

The cares of others can seem ridiculously small (banjo music!). And yet, maybe the small speaks to something larger. A wood beam, a hand-sewn dress, a carefully brewed coffee — each one a response to life’s uncertainty. An attempt to control what can be controlled, to make one thing as well as possible, and there’s something beautiful in that. The beauty of a slow-braised pork shoulder.

— Elisha Cooper, Falling: a Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back

IMG_0945