Sometime In Autumn

October 20, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, the younger daughter and I noticed the phlox, now fully blackened with frost, has withered enough to let light beneath our deck. The two of us (barefoot in October!) looked down through the slats. What might lie under there?

No school for a few days. While the laundry flaps free from the clothesline, the girls bake a chocolate cake for a visitor tonight, and I spread my work over the dining room table.

Every day, less and less leaves on the trees, but the sunlight’s still holding strong.

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on…

– Jane Hirschfield

East Hardwick, Vermont

Myriad Memories – and Now

September 18, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Hiking down the Zealand trail with my brother in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, he suggests taking a spur to “somewhere with a really good view.” My 12-year-old is more game than I expect, and we hike along an easy wooded path, in a valley where he and I surmise a railroad must have been laid for logging, many many decades ago. It takes longer than we imagined, because, well, hiking always takes longer.

Suddenly, the woods drop away, and the view is way more than terrific. It’s unbelievable. High above, sheer granite cliffs end in autumn-yellow woods. We step out on enormous granite boulders and gaze up and down the valley, flanked on either side by steep mountains. In the distance at one end, we see the Zealand Falls hut; to the other side, the valley funnels down to silhouettes of blue mountain ranges.

We spread out on the rock. It’s just the three of us and a dog and the sunlight and the leftover blue cheese and chips from lunch. My daughter’s brought beer for my brother, and she’s proud that it’s still cold. In the mountain valley, with foliage turning scarlet in flashes against a muted sea of gold, the place reminds me of Frijoles Canyon in New Mexico, of Washington’s Mt. Baker territory where I lived as a grad student, of so many hikes I’ve taken with my daughters. All the best memories of my hiking life are folded into this one wide valley.

My daughter wanders off with the dog. My brother and I talk about hikes we took together as kids, laughing about how we never packed enough water. A raven calls, and then another answers. We stay there for a good long while, in no great rush about anything, talking, surrounded by all that landscape, all those layers of mysterious life in the forest and the river below, those lines of receding mountain ridges leading to the sea.

The autumn evening.
The buses are in line,
One goes out.

– Nakamura Teijo

Hot Goods

September 9, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One fine Friday afternoon, walking to my daughter’s soccer game, my friends pulled me into their woodworking shop and asked me to take… a sign from an old telephone booth.

Really? I mean, really?

Your girls will love it, they insisted. I asked, since they were giving away things, could I take a quart of motor oil instead. They said I could have their parrot, and if I really didn’t want the parrot, how did I feel about kittens?

So I took the sign, carrying what was doubtlessly stolen goods from intercity Boston decades ago, and went back to the high school.

My daughter said, You’re kidding me? Her friend remarked it wasn’t particularly attractive. These comments made me point out that, years ago, this stuff was well-made, and the sign was darn heavy. As an additional plus, it doesn’t talk back to me, unlike a parrot.

….a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way….

– David Foster Wallace

(I don’t make up all this stuff.)

Growing

August 24, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Some friends have a baby who won’t sleep through a night. A gorgeous, round-cheeked laughing beauty of a baby.

I’ve restrained myself from laughing, from outright teasing: I’ve never heard of a baby who keeps her parents up at night. My first baby, at nine months, woke up every hour for what seemed years, although it may have been only a week or two, or possibly months. I first noted then that this parenting thing might never plateau out and remain static.

My 12-year-old daughter made a new friend yesterday. When I picked her up after work, she was losing mightily and happily at Monopoly, while the girls hatched plans for a sleepover. Later, the three of us biked slightly out of town, abandoning our bikes and walking through the dusk rapidly rising, the girls laughing on swings my daughters used as very little girls. The friend was wearing my daughter’s sweatshirt, and my eyes kept snagging on the turquoise. Truth is, my daughter’s grown so much this past year, I look twice at her often, before I slow down and recognize her as mine.

Stories teach us in ways we can remember… Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman’s true capacities in pregnancy and birth.

– Ina May Gaskin

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Summer Sustenance

August 22, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Swimming in the lake last night until the children were shivering and laughing, the rosy sunset spilling over the still water, I imagined myself like the black bears around us, storing not calories but summer’s barefoot warmth, the ease of lying on the sand, the way you might swim with your eyes at the lake’s surface, all that water stretching from shore to shore, filled with the teeming mysteries of animal, vegetable and mica-flecked rocky life.

An acquaintance once gave me a piece of advice: if I wanted to change my life, do one or two changes well, and see how that spins things around. In those toddler-raising days, I chose two things: I baked our family’s bread and learned to knit. O, once upon the time as a very young woman, I teased and mocked the domestic, little knowing its ancient power and life-carrying grace. Once upon a time, too, I brushed off August swimming as frivolity, back in those days when I chopped my life into pieces, ranked weeding the garden above sand between the girls’ toes, misunderstanding how that lake nourishes our human hunger.

…Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

– Robert Frost, “October”

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Heart in the Hand

August 19, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my husband and I bought our first house, I intended to live there forever, unpack my two cast iron skillets, have a couple of kids, dig a vast garden, and stay. Then there’s that Robert Burns’ line John Steinbeck retooled, and maybe I should have reflected that line might encompass the lives of women, too…. The best laid schemes of mice and men…. and so on.

Luckily, what I perceived as plans awry has evened out – at least for now. Intrepidly exploring the terrain of where we’re living, I realize, again, just how corporal our lives are, how the angle of light through the kitchen window – whether wide open or filtered through mist – shapes the kernels of our days. Walking through the dusky forest with three girls last night, the muddy path surrounded by August’s copious greenery was all alive, alive: pencil-thin snakes, slugs, a darting rabbit, Cooper Brook running over its pebbles, shallow and clean. As we entered a field of goldenrod and chicory, crickets sang wildly, lusty in the heat of summer.

Simultaneously, I’m re-entering the landscape of the heart through my own daughter stepping into her young adulthood. What a bodily world is love. Those well-made schemes? Perhaps that’s what makes our lives so fascinating – our clever designs, and the universe’s unfolding and rearranging of our blueprints.