parenting

Back Again

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a rosy dawn yesterday, we left Prince Edward Island, the sleeping kids sprawled in our little Toyota, sun-browned and a little too red on one daughter’s shoulders, myself driving and drinking coffee from my thermos, listening to CBC.

As I listened to the Island Morning’s interview with Henry Hank Gallant who walked across Canada in 1967, I thought how different the tenor of this place feels compared to my own country, even relatively liberal-minded Vermont. Much later, deep in Maine’s interior, listening now to Maine Public Radio, Trump’s voice whined over the airwaves about a great trade agreement, and all three of my young passengers who were playing Blackjack on a folded-over atlas howled. We are not Trump aficionados.

But Trump’s word great gave me a thread of the difference between these two nations: America, so fiercely militaristic and competitive, and its civil life – while doubtlessly filled with decent people – underpinned with suspicion and distrust.

We were glad to sail over the Connecticut River and return to our little Vermont village, to stop at the grocery store and have the teenage cashier whose hair was now dyed iridescent green rather than the cherry red from two weeks ago ask, How was your trip?

Dripping humidity here, the kind my mother abhorred when I was a child. July – the growing month in Vermont. My older daughter laced up her shoes and disappeared into the mist for a run.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

– Martin Luther King

FullSizeRender

Nearly perfect strawberries I bought from an old man with just a few teeth along a roadside in Maine.

Growing Girls

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not that many years ago, the enormous trunk of my old Volvo held a stash of gritty plastic buckets and shovels all summer, tucked to one side, opposite spare oil quarts and a yellow jug of coolant: well-used childhood possessions.

This beach trip our family is entirely without sand toys, although we’ve been to numerous beaches, and even created castles with our hands and this fine red sand, with smooth stones and dried seaweed. I am likely the only one in our family who remembers those sand toys.

Here’s what we do now: on a chilly morning yesterday, the older daughter filled out a college math assessment on-line. At a particularly knotty problem, she looked at me. My own adolescence of function and cosecant reared up before me. I could feel myself teetering on a edge, before I said simply, Call your uncle if you want help with that one…. There’s only so much I can do, and cosecant no longer falls into my skills.

Which blended in perfectly with Jeffrey Lent’s beautiful new novel, Before We Sleep, about a daughter growing up – and much, much more.

There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense.

– Jeffrey Lent

IMG_1818.JPG

Photo by James Dailey

Searching by Starlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Three summers ago, we returned from a three days long Amtrak ride – Lamy, New Mexico to Albany, New York, and then a three-hour drive home – and I ran into the garden through the car headlights, before coming into the house. The hydrangea had spread magnificently; the tomatoes lay tucked in their leaves, heavy, ripe.

We had been gone for most of the summer, nearly six weeks, first to stay with my sister who was not well that summer, and then on the only trip I’ve taken with both my daughters to the southwest, where I was born. Under intense pressure that summer, by our return of the four of us, it was clear our marriage was fissured.

Nearly three years later, I was in the garden by starlight last night, the fireflies flickering so high in the surrounding treetops they merged with the constellations. Even in the dark, my feet know this path intimately.

After midnight, I finished Alice Hendan-Zuckermayer’s book, about the willing and unwilling moves of her family, driven by economics, which I know so well, and by a world at war, which I have been so fortunately spared. Why read anyway? You might as well ask why think? why desire? why LIVE? In my midnight garden, with the bursts of dandelions already going to seed, it was me and Alice. She ended her book with these lines from Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…. a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get and a time lose, a time to keep…

FullSizeRender.jpg

Confluence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the next week, my older daughter will graduate from high school. My younger ends her elementary grades in the beloved red schoolhouse. I will sell one house and buy another; my daughters and I will move seven miles or so from one county to another, all our earthly belongings packed up in cardboard boxes and transported by friends and relatives. I will shut the door one final time on a house my former husband and I built, and metaphorically step away from that marriage. Friends from long ago are coming to visit. My daughters and I will come to know how and when sunlight enters our new house, what the water tastes like, where on the horizon the moon rises.

My daughters good-naturedly roll their eyes when I talk about houses being alive, but our house now will pass into hands better able to care for its keen needs. In the sky over our new house, graceful and eternally patient turkey vultures spread their wings in spirals of air currents. All life is change; we’re in the spin of confluence this week – and likely the next – but then I intend to have a good long summer, listening to the birdsong, swimming in Vermont’s cold lakes, and studying those vultures, our new neighbors.

Sometimes when we lose, we gain, and when we gain, we lose. Our fears and joys are bound up inextricably, pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure. Our efforts to untangle and isolate human experience can leave us confused and depressed. Happiness means choosing to be productive and optimistic, recognizing despair for the ancient parasite that it is and outsmarting it.

– Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains

FullSizeRender.jpg

Unexpected Gold

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

A naturalist did a program at my small library last night, appearing with a red-tailed hawk, a rabbit, a wood turtle, a frog, a snake, and a curved-beak raven. As the room was packed, I stood by the door, watching when he offered to let my daughters touch that gorgeous snake. Wincing – but polite – both declined.

The library is one of those essential places in our society, where everyone is welcome to drink a cup of hot tea in an evening after it has rained – hard, all day – browse the books, listen. Simply come out of our rural Vermont homes and realize the rest of the town is sodden with spring rain, too.

Closing up, I stepped outside, and the clouds had cleared. The sky was pink at the horizon, and an enormous rainbow bent over the library, the small building constructed with volunteer labor, years before I arrived at the scene. My daughter remarked about a pot of gold somewhere, maybe down by the school’s garden. The air was swept clean, already warming, promising sunnier skies. Robins sang.

My daughters walked across the field, oohing and ahhing, my older daughter with her camera, while along the path an older man moved step by step, making his steady way under those clearing skies, going from here to there.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

– James Baldwin

FullSizeRender

 

Fleeting Beauty

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m still burning wood into June, in this long damp spring. Usually, my daughter’s birthday at the end of May marks the beginning of the swimming season, and many birthday parties have ended with an adult or two walking the little girls across the road in Elmore to the lake.

This year, while the children disappeared in the greenery, laughing, four adults stood around a fire, talking about everything from SBACs to dementia, while the damp wore into us. With an exhale, we could see the clouds of our breath.

Earlier that day, I had taken some children to a theater opening, and watched a magician blow bubble creations: a spinning carousel, a caterpillar, rainbow-hued bubbles-within-a-bubble. He told a story of keeping a bubble in a sealed glass container, checking it every morning as it changed hue, absorbing the air molecule by molecule, until one day it popped and disappeared.

Edging nearer the fire yesterday, I thought of this magician, waking up each morning, curious about the evolving state of his bubble, improbably spun from the simplicity of liquid and air, radiantly beautiful. The boy beside me had murmured, That is the coolest thing.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things — everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

– Jane Hirshfield

IMG_1024