parenting

More Midsummer, Memories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the crimson-hot July sultriness downtown yesterday, standing on a sidewalk, I flashbacked to what my parents used to call with enthusiasm “being on the road.” For years, we trekked from New Hampshire to humid Ohio to visit the anticipated happiness of cousins, and often far across the Mississippi, spending weeks in nylon tents and cooking canned corn over campfires.

I picked up that thread through much of my adulthood, crossing over from the backseat to the steering wheel. As a kid, of course, meshed in with my siblings, the primary concerns revolved around swimming possibilities and how good a campsite we were going to score.

The landscape from the driver’s seat looks mighty different. Navigation ranks right at the top of my list, something I never would have considered as a kid. Life on the road, I believed, would always get us from here to there. But maybe there’s a real element of truth there, too.

Our road has landed us here, on a dead end street, in a house whose property is bounded by lilacs on two sides. Last night, into dusk, I pulled out the deep weeds along these bushes, listening to the girls laughing about a game they had made up on the trampoline with four deflating soccer balls. We’ve put away the atlas for now, and traded in the scent of fresh asphalt for black soil, damp with early falling dew.

stream in summertime—
this joy of wading across
with sandals in hand

– Buson

 

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Midsummer Marveling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these long July evenings, the children stay up late around the firepit, roasting ridiculously large marshmallows, burning the sugary outsides while the innards remain in their bizarre, uncooked marshmallow state. As the dew descends, I gather swimsuits, a sandal beside the trampoline, a library book.

Early mornings, the light already risen like an energetic lover, I wake and think, It’s still July.

This season, too, will pass. Snow will fall densely, the moon rise over the pristinely ice-shrouded field; our eyes will blink against frost.

All that is exquisitely lovely.

But it’s July now…. and we’re Julying.

…In his torn voice Crow is forever
giving advice. Last week, after fighting
with you, Crow counseled me, said to pick
a cup of raspberries, to lay them in a circle
atop your bowl of cereal.

Todd Davis, from “Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love” in In the Kingdom of the Ditch
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Why I hate FB

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’ve often told my daughters writers are thieves, filching stories that are not theirs and writing tales in ways that may or may not be to their participants’ liking. No secret here, but writers are not known as the most morally exemplary of human lives.

But thievery has many facets.

A thief or thieves stole my daughter’s snow tires from our barn, stacked against the back wall beneath a ladder. The hide-and-seek playing kids noticed the tires’ absence. We’ve endured numerous break-ins at our former house, and so the emotional blow is lesser now, but nonetheless, did the thief know these tires were a gift to my 18-year-old? That I had bought them after considerable deliberation, after forking over a chunk of a month’s income, that I had desired to give this inexperienced driver every advantage possible on Vermont’s snowy roads? That I knew she had to go to school and work, and yet I wanted her, always, to return safely home?

I’m quite sure (or maybe this is now wishful territory) that if the thief knew my long-limbed and beloved daughter, that theft would not have happened.

Here’s why I hate Facebook – here’s why I hate everything contributing to our society’s tendency to pretend it’s all good: while we often act as though we’re images we can manipulate with filters and photoshopping, our actions affect other people, even if we willfully chose not to see that result.

Here’s hoping as a writer I respect the whole dynamic range of stories – good, bad, and in-between. Here’s hoping my own soul isn’t irreparably stained. And here’s hoping those tires make their way to some other young person’s car this winter and roll that driver safely home.

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.

Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

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Child, Tween, Teen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to live where things are consistently dull. My mother used to write me postcards from Santa Fe with ABD: Another Beautiful Day.

This Vermont summer drips messily with humidity one day, envelopes sticking together, the silverware slick with moisture. Today is edged raw, making me think not of watermelons and salad with fresh dill but macaroni and cheese steaming in the oven.

One extreme or the other, not much in between.

Maybe raising kids is the same way. With a houseful of kids and cousins, they’re all long tanned legs and appetite this summer, baby softness long since gone by. Mothering for me began with that extreme – crying or, blessedly, not – and so I began to understand parenting in that way.

Here’s another Summer Goal: reprogram myself to even out, as the children all grow taller (but not yet fiercer) than myself.

The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, from “A Child’s Garden of Verses”

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Two Decades Ago

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I haven’t lived in a town in what to me is a very long time – over twenty years – and in those twenty years, I went from newly married, to raising two daughters, maple sugaring on a scale that become way oversized for two adults, and wrote a book. I did a few other things, too.

Oddly, living in a small town again, I’ve been given a glimpse back into my female self I might not have gotten before. What’s different from when I was twenty is that I’m a mother now, a writer, a woman who knows her way around a garden and what to do with garlic scapes. Useful things.

I have wrinkles and a great tangle of gray, but I’m no longer afraid of the dark. In an odd way, what I once thought would be so difficult – uprooting – has evolved into one of the easier phases of my life. Or maybe it’s just July, and the greenery is mellifluous. Then again, maybe this is one of the easier parts, and the children aren’t bickering now.

You got to understand: here
Winter stays six months a year—
Mean, mean winters and too long.
Ninety days is what we get, just

Ninety days of frost free weather….

From David Budbill’s “Summer Blues”

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The View From Here

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My youngest daughter, aspiring to be an FBI agent, discovers FBI training teaches its recruits not to believe in coincidences. As a writer, I’ve taught myself the same principal. Understood or not, isn’t the world laced through with meaning?

Leaving my house in the dark early this morning, I tipped my head back and admired the firmament, the moon sunk down over the horizon, the innumerable stars one of my earliest memories. Yet each time I see the stars I have that odd swirl of familiarity and the unknown: always magnificent.

Driving through the country dark, the roads empty of any traffic, a coyote sprints before me, so near I spy its shaggy coat, eyes focused ahead, intent on its course.

Here’s a few lines from Roxanne Gay I read last night, in her memoir about super-obesity.

In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer.

– Roxanna Gay, HungerFullSizeRender