Pastimes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I wake before dawn thinking of shuffleboard and listen to the rain pattering.

It’s Wednesday, and my high school daughter is home today. With high school in session two days a week, she’s patched together a strange schedule. Yesterday, she walked to school around ten (skipping the idiocy of study hall in the gym), had algebra and driver’s ed, and spent the afternoon playing soccer.

I lie in the dark, grateful beyond grateful for soccer.

When her father and I divorced, I kept thinking, my god, we need to do better for this girl. So it goes with school this year. Really? I keep thinking. Is this the best I can do?

I remind myself, again, that I’m part of the problem. At 15, she’s stepped into a kind of college schedule, coming and going, utterly responsible for her own work, burrowed on the couch with her school-issued Chrome book, determined.

The truth is, the best has long since slipped out of vision. Hence, perhaps, the appeal of a shipboard game, hours of leisurely chat, surrounded by the glittering sea.

I’m not about to get that shuffleboard option. I rise and feed the hungry cats, brew coffee and open my laptop.

Rain falls steadily — a welcome sound. The chaos of the world is clamoring loudly. Meanwhile, my daughter leans into her work. I brew more coffee. Day by day — the only way to parent.

Crushed Leaves

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A colleague tells me her brother contracted Covid in January. A professional chef, he opened an oven and wondered what was wrong with the meatloaf — it had no smell. He survived after an intense illness.

So this week, I know I’m alive as Vermont autumn is all scent. The after school kids ask me to step into their fort. I lean over the wall built of leaf and vine and breathe in, and I’m eight-years-old again, with my siblings and the neighbor kids, building houses of fallen leaves.

Wood smoke and skunk and the soil I’ve turned over in the garden.

As the daylight shrinks noticeably and we turn more and more indoors, inevitably I look for sources of strength — geese flying low over our back porch, their wings rushing, the rising cream-colored moon, our neighbors’ laughing boys — and my youngest daughter on the cusp of young adulthood, sharing bits of her world in snippets, puzzling over this great big world.

Oh, good gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth,

      This autumn morning!

— Robert Browning

Calais, Vermont

Friday Poem

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

I picked up two chairs in a free pile along a backroad yesterday.

No! my daughters said.

In the evening, playing Yahtzee, our cat Acer begins to gnaw on the chair’s loose strands, which makes the girls laugh hysterically.

Something for everyone in the free pile. That’s where we are in the pandemic world.

I pull out the gray hairs,

And under my pillow,

There is a cricket.

— Basho

Butterflies and Crickets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On a balmy afternoon, I’m on Nature Conservancy Property in Greensboro, Vermont — Barr Hill — the first place my daughters hiked. Nearby lies the glassy blue gem of Lake Caspian.

On my short drive there, I’d been listening to the governor’s twice weekly press conference. By now, like so many people in the state, I’m familiar with Scott’s voice, his cabinet members, and the press. Scott allows the press to ask question after question; these sessions have an interesting kind of intimacy, a we’re going to get through this kind of attitude.

On my way along Barr Hill, I pass rusting old farm equipment in fields where cows are grazing. Here, the past is both near and hidden.

In a field, I paused and admired the view of the mountains and the line of lake. The sky these days is slightly overcast with smoke from the west coast wildfires. Around me, butterflies flew over the blooming goldenrod, and crickets leaped in the dusty path around my feet.

I had such a sense of living in an historic time — the Covid pandemic — and yet I just soaked up that all that sunlight, those tiny flickering wings.

Small Victories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Like so many places, I’ve limited occupancy in my one room library, and, for the most part, that’s worked. This afternoon, just before the after school program started for the first time in months, the adults stood around in our usual pow-wow and returned to the same theme: we’ll make do.

We did.

One boy leaned in the open door, begging to come in. I told him to wait, wait, that I’d come for him when the space emptied out a little.

When it did, I stepped out on the grass and spied him across the playground. When I gestured for him and called his name, he came running.

Messed-up world notwithstanding, what utter joy to see this sprinting boy.

In honor of RBG, her words:

Earlier, I spoke of great changes I have seen in women’s occupations. Yet one must acknowledge the still bleak part of the picture. Most people in poverty in the United States and the world over are women and children, women’s earnings here and abroad trail the earnings of men with comparable education and experience, our workplaces do not adequately accommodate the demands of childbearing and child rearing, and we have yet to devise effective ways to ward off sexual harassment at work and domestic violence in our homes. I am optimistic, however, that movement toward enlistment of the talent of all who compose “We, the people,” will continue.

— Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Photo by Molly S.

Season Change

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter and her friend were been hired for the afternoon to harvest pumpkins.

That afternoon, picking up the girls at the farm, I stood talking for awhile with the couple, whom I’ve known since my oldest daughter was a toddler. They showed me the sunflowers they had managed to save from the frost by covering. The flowers, I could see, were not long for living.

Bundled in sweaters and sweatshirts, we stood talking in the late afternoon sunlight. The couple was appreciative of my daughter and her friend — how the girls’ hard work boosted the boys’ output. I laughed, watching the girls walk towards me, out of the field, holding gloves in their hands, talking with each other.

I remembered those long-ago summer and fall days, when I had worn this child on my back while I sold maple syrup and homemade ice cream. Her little fingers reached over my shoulder, looking for snacks.

The couple’s son drove up on a tractor, a father now himself. As I drove back to our warm house, baking lasagne and apple crisp, I kept thinking of how that couple would give my youngest a tiny pumpkin every year at the farmers’ market. She would carry that orange squash in her two hands, like treasure.