Gathering Kindling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughters and I watch New York Times clips of Dr. Ford, my 13-year-old’s eyes wide, her hand paused over her algebra homework at the kitchen table. My 19-year-old and I talk and talk, and then she replays Kavanaugh’s testimony. The 13-year-old says, in wonder, Someone is lying. She ponders this, then says, Why would someone lie?

Tomato vine by cauliflower plant, I empty the garden, exposing black earth, finishing the final coat of white paint on a few patches of clapboards, eyeing the porch windows and gauging when I’ll plastic those for the winter’s duration.

In the dark this morning, my daughter and I talk briefly in her room, rain beating on the roof. Cold October rain illuminates foliage colors, tugs out the very best. I mention I’m going to paint the dining room a sunflower color this weekend, the window trim Santa Fe blue. Cool beans, she says.

What concerns me even more, though, is the loss of those values the (communal) fire precipitates and reinforces… How will the affirmation by others of one’s own necessity in the world be validated? What will be the opportunities for profound courtesy and for ceremony, of which there is such a dearth in the modern world?

We can lose the communal hearth and survive, but survival without the values of the hearth… seems a brutish prospect, a retreat into intolerance.

From Barry Lopez in Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place

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Tasty Treats

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A very first food my daughters ate — or gummed, more precisely — was applesauce and then bits of skinless apples, tiny juice-beading triangles.

One of my daughters — who, I can’t recall, younger, older, maybe both — named this cut-up fruit appleys. Our house had a diminutive child’s kitchen; now on our front porch, the well-used stove and sink look so small. In that wooden kitchen, the girls worked mightily with a small blue frying pan, a white colander, and a collection of found things — miniature jam jars, colored wooden beads, petite bottles in the shape of maple leaves and hearts I filled with our maple syrup and sold as wedding favors.

Every now and then, tidying up, I’d find a silver measuring cup sourced from my kitchen, with the dried remains of tiny apple triangles.

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones….

— Mary Oliver

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End of September? Apple Pie Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Every year in Vermont there’s speculation about the upcoming foliage season — will it be good…. or lousy? While the season infallibly delights — and often astonishes — we view fall foliage very personally, almost as if the quality of its splendor reflects on ourselves.

More than any other season, autumn reminds me of being a child, of picking apples in the enormous Mapadot Orchard near our house (named after Ma and Pa and Dot, of course), of the distinct, humus-y scent of fallen leaves in the maples we raked from our trees, of how fine it feels to hike in  woods painted like a wildfire — crimson and gold.

Last night, my older daughter decided to bake an apple pie today.

We might live in a society where the traditions of church have dwindled to near naught, but the ritual of apple pie? Still steaming, in our house. That’s something.

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all….
Slow! Slow!
— Robert Frost, October
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Through my window.

Cream Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The other night, my friend and I stand on my back deck, watching the moon rise above the black horizon, a curved sliver at first, then quickly revealing all her radiant round beauty. In the house, my daughters and their friends play a game at the table, eating brownies and laughing. Little white lights sparkle above their heads.

The next night, fever lies me low, and my girls are awake in the wee midnight hours, comforting an oddly crying cat. As I rise out of the fever now, I think of how glad I am to return to our life. Worn out before, as we all get — buried beneath the everyday accrual of putting together work and life and parenting, and the non-everyday weight of am I failing? — I’m simply glad to return to the jumble of our lives, in this somewhat sleep-starved life, keeping the midnight shift, reading in bed or wandering around to the windows to admire the moon. Oh, the autumn moon.

Children grew in their sleep. They were growing now, bones lengthening like bamboo.

— Melanie Finn, The Underneath

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Why I Hate the Corn Maze

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Ever read the late David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again?

Okay, that was about cruise ships. My supposedly fun thing was a corn maze which began as lots of fun, driving along maple-lined dirt roads, past hayfields, laughing with the kids about the mist we kept entering and exiting, apparently in the middle of rural-Vermont-nowhere.

In this amazing corn maze, hard-packed dirt paths wound between immensely high corn. An hour in, actually beginning to wonder if we might not get out, I dredged up what limited survival skills I might possess, and ordered the kids to follow “the rule of right” and only make right-hand turns — as if that was the key out. Even smarter, perhaps, we tagged behind a cheerful grandparent-ish couple who practically ran through the maze and got us out.

So much for fun mothering experiences, these few hours that seemed, honestly, a little too close to the marrow, a little too near my life — wander around and conjure some savvy to get out.

Much later that Sunday evening, picking up stray socks and library books and putting away laundry — getting ready for a working week — I realized I failed that metaphor for life: enjoy the journey. Take note.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

— David Foster Wallace

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Lucky Charm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

By the side of Route 14, my younger daughter leaps, waving at me to stop.  Nearby, her sister’s car is pulled over.

Flat tire.

The older daughter rails about her brand-new tire, likely ruined, and then her younger sister says simply, It’s just a flat tire.

“Flat tire” may become our new mantra — our own, hey, lighten up, change the tire and move on — maybe even a talisman, as if the tiny bit of ill luck might ward off the greater.

September 23 — birthday of the young man we’ve known since he was 1, who’s logged a million miles on his bike and is heading to Europe for even more. Safe travels. Much happiness in your new decade.

 

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