parenting

Long Nights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With the time change, darkness drifts in early, aided by rain. Like an old friend, the long nights are familiar.

When I return from work, just after five, my 12-year-old is not jumping on the trampoline, watching for me. Instead, she’s rearranging her room. She’s hit middle school heartache, where her friend has turned to a cliche and boy watching. My daughter hands me pictures of herself and her friend, asking for them to disappear. In one photo, the girls’ cheeks are sprinkled with red chalk.

May’s forsythia is a long way off. My daughter dyes paper circles for flower petals. For now, that color will need to suffice.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth….

From Naomi Shahib Nye’s “Before You Know Kindness”

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In Between Seasons

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

And then suddenly it’s November, and the foliage is flattening to gray, the tamaracks beginning to burn their golden torch flames. Like a memory, the bones of trees appear again – oh, branches have been under your leaves all summer. In an odd way, it’s an incredibly graceful time of year.

Maples often shed from the top down, so the tiptoe branches are stritching against the sky, while the lower limbs are yet golden, barely rust-speckled.

I thought of these trees, half in one season, half in another, when my daughter was loonily recovering from a tooth extraction. I couldn’t resist asking, when she was cloudy and laughing, Are you grown up?

Just recently, she insisted that, since she’s no longer a minor, she’s an adult.

But yesterday, cloudy with anesthesia, she revealed that she’s not wholly, entirely, all grown up.

One foot in, with her long legs stretching, she’s far more in the adult world than the lingering tatters of her childhood, but yet….

O, The Maple Loveliness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On a cheesecloth foray for the 12-year-old and her friend (a must have for making mummy luminaries), the kids and I stand in a parking lot, and I point out a maple tree across Route 15. More or less, the foliage is finished around us now, but this mature maple had gold at the crown sprinkled down to green at its lower branches.

We were in one of the uglier areas of town, swampy, with a gas station/liquor store, a depressing Dollar Store, some rundown houses and trailers. The tree, however, was so exquisite that my daughter’s friend remarked it appeared to be pruned. We laughed at that  thought – as if a ladder could scale this great beauty, as if human hands might shape this natural perfection.

Across the cemetery is another lovely maple; down Spring Street are the silver maple gems…. and on and on…. And if you’re in Montpelier, admire the maples on the library’s lawn.

Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabel
Made Maple first take notice of her name.
She asked her father and he told her, “Maple—
Maple is right.”…

From Robert Frost’s “Maple”

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No Fear

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’ve heard authors read work from mesmerizing poetry to an essay about a colonics session – but the Argentinian cartoonist I just met likely ranks at the very top. Incredibly famous outside the verdant realm of Vermont, the cartoonist sat on the floor with the kids and told stories and made the little ones laugh, and assured them they could all draw, too.

Even after the adults tried to close the hour, he kept on answering the kids’ questions, saying, This is an important question. This is good.

At the very end, a boy asked how he could become a cartoonist. The cartoonist said, Like this. Tell your parents you will need a book without these things – and here the cartoonist drew four parallel lines on a piece of paper – those are not helpful. You will need a black marker. And then you are on your way.

Great rule of thumb: when in doubt, get rid of the lines.

In my opinion, childhood is one of the most intriguing phases in life… For instance, when they (kids) draw, they do it with such freedom…! We adults can’t ever experience that level of freedom again, simply because we are scared of looking ridiculous or failing or making mistakes. When they draw, my kids have no fear. And that’s the hardest trick for an artist.

– Liniers

 

Elementary School Literature

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On my wedding invitations, I printed a line from Robert Frost, and a guest, mistaking Carl Sandburg for crusty Frost, gave us a collection of Sandburg’s poems.

I woke this frosty morning thinking of a poem we read aloud in my fifth grade class, in the basement of a three-story brick building later converted to senior housing. Although I grew up in wooded New Hampshire, far from any harbor or city, the poem’s perfect for kids – short and muscled, primed to pounce, cat-like.

Here’s the past again materializing: I’ve long since forgotten that teacher’s name, or even anyone else in the class. Yet I distinctly recall sitting there as a quiet kid wearing orange tights, in a warm classroom where the basement windows opened to the back driveway, loving this poem.

Hard frost last night. Wearing winter coats, the 12-year-old and I walked last evening, the stars overhead, passing no one.

“Fog”
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
– Carl Sandburg

Round and Round

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Autumn is my Proust’s cup of tea, recollecting for me all those childhood afternoons I walked home from elementary school, scuffing through knee-piles of fallen leaves, as they crumbled and broke, releasing their rich humusy scent.

Each morning, my 12-year-old hoists her backpack and walks across the dewy lawn, leaping over the chain link and heading down the cemetery hill. Sometimes she looks back over her shoulder to see if I’m watching; sometimes she disappears into her day without a look back, unconsciously and imaginatively creating her own teacup of memories.

While the landscape shines postcard-pretty, behind our back porch the  box elders shake loose their leaves, and up-close we’re beginning to see what was hidden under the summer’s greenery. My 12-year-old fantasizes about a zip line from the porch deep into the ravine. Her eyes sparkle as she imagines flying down that ravine, deep into the heart of a place not yet well-known.

this piercing cold—
in the bedroom, I have stepped
on my dead wife’s comb

 

– Ueda

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