teenagers

Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my teenage daughter recently spied a rattlesnake, we talked about the antidote to snakebite. Antidote: literally, a dose of a substance that’s given against a poison or illness. Antidote is an aggressive word, a noun rearing up on its hind legs and surging forward, or fiercely worming its belly-slinking way beneath razor-sharp lines of barbed wire.

Or perhaps a rose stem slid into a rifle barrel.

A child’s toothy smile after tears.

Or what I suggested to my daughter this rainy Saturday: pick up a brush, raid the paint cans in the basement, and color your walls anew. Step One on your way to solving the rest of your life.

“Warbler”

This year we have two gorgeous
yellow warblers nesting in the honeysuckle bush.
The other day I stuck my head in the bush.
The nestlings weigh one-twentieth of an ounce,
about the size of a honeybee. We stared at
each other, startled by our existence.
In a month or so, when they reach the size
of bumblebees they’ll fly to Costa Rica without a map.

– Jim Harrison

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Our Garden of Early Delights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A week away from the garden yields cherry sun gold tomatoes nearly ripe – these small globes of sunlight sweetly tangible – peppers stretching their leaves to hold hands, and weeds running riot – a metaphor for the human soul.

As a mother, how much of my work attempts to nourish growth? Banishing the ravenous woodchucks, ripping out pernicious prickers, cautioning, please, do not let your thorns gain the upper hand?

Rain falls down on the newly shorn sheep….
The barn cats are sleeping, birds are force-feeding
three clutches of phoebes, two of robins
and I am shelling the first of the season’s
peas as a merciful summer rain
falls down all morning around me in strings.

– Maxine Kumin, “After the Heat Wave”

 

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

On the Quest

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My teenage daughter hands me her high school summer reading book the other day and asks me to read a paragraph. She’s seventeen, wearing sunglasses and a new swimming suit, lying on the beach, and exasperated with this assignment. Her younger sister and friends swim in the lake, searching, faces down, for the giant rock named Big Yellow.

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

Thomas C. Foster, How To Read Literature Like a Professor

With enormous gusto, I keep reading, and then I begin laughing at the chapter’s end; the writing is that great. Then I point out to her, Look, this is about you: a young adult, beginning the quest of her life.

She takes her sunglasses off and holds them in her hand. I am? she asks. And then she repeats, I am.

I hand her back the school’s book and tell her gently, Literature is about you. 

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Greensboro, Vermont

 

 

Texting as Mosaic

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A lot of my humanly effort goes into writing, or at least trying to improve: can I write more clearly? More eloquently? Can I push deeper, and then even deeper, beneath what I’ve already written and glean yet more?

And then, I meet texting. I have a teenager. I witness this girl text. With considerable patience, she’s shown me the texting ropes. She even texted me when she forgot her lunch, and I most helpfully texted back that no, I wasn’t delivering her lunch in the next ten minutes, and she should mooch off someone else. But I don’t think I texted mooch. It might have appeared as lop or something. Lop off someone else?

Then, last night, I had my first texting “conversation” with my brother. (He would describe my effort as half-assed, sister, I’m quite sure.) In the midst of this electronic bubble back and forth, the house quiet at night with the children sleeping, the wood stove burning and my solitary light burning, we went on and on, although I had spoken on the phone with him the night before, and my late-night work was unfinished. This conversation was like deep sea fishing, pulling up one thing after another from the past. Do you remember this teacher? What was happening in 1987? In these little bits of phrases, I began to see woman in blue and what’s grammar and don’t hate Vermont surface and swim. That day, I had been writing about Chinese poetry and my novel and the seamless stream of language, and before me words appeared, hilarious and poignant and loving, too. Like a broken glass readied for a mosaic. And now I’ll be the mosaic-maker.

… this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away, and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does.

–– Justin Cronin, “My Daughter and God,” in Best American Essays 2015

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Woodbury Elementary School/Woodbury, Vermont