adolescent girls

Cold Snap!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Our neighbors borrow my teenager’s hair dryer to thaw their pipes. It’s 14º below zero, and they’re confident their situation is minor. Gossip winds around town of whose pipes have frozen. This morning, I woke in the dark with a cat purring beside my shoulder. My daughter, 19, gets up with me in this predawn and says she doesn’t know what she should do with her life.

Aim to do something you’ll be proud of, I suggest.

Deeper than 20º below is when the bitter cold really sets in. The lowest I’ve seen the thermometer is 40º below, in farm fields along the Lamoille River. A ghostly mist ambled around, as if we were in an otherworldly dream.

This is the season of library books, board games, knitting — one year ebbing into the next.

Although there is the road,
The child walks
In the snow.

— Murakami Kijo

IMG_0654.jpg

Main Street, Hardwick, Vermont

Hardwick Postcard #4: Jumble of Stuff

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

December’s New England sings monochromatic variations of gray, white, and conifer dark green – except for us, who live here.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, this Hardwick storefront window of used things perpetually enchants my girls. Years ago, I raided a treasure trove on the back shelves, of used anthropology books.

Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.

– Margaret Mead

Here’s an essay of mine recently picked up that begins, When my daughter was 17, she smashed her fist through her dad’s car window in a fit of anger….

IMG_0563

Hardwick, Vermont

Giggles, Girls, Growing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After a week of just too much, I sat knitting in the back row at the Galaxy Bookshop last night, surrounded by some adults I knew, and some I didn’t, listening to the four poets read in a round robin. The poetry and the poets all flowed into each other – stanzas about Garage Sale DayZ and an expectant father slid into a particularly exquisite love poem by Sean Prentiss.

Afterward, I spoke with his wife and admired how their baby girl smiles with her whole tiny, joyful body. In the warm June evening, scented with the town’s profuse lilacs, I lay on the grass under a sugar maple at the elementary school, waiting for my sixth grader at her first dance.

June’s blooming beauty – Siberian iris, deep purple lupine – and the children are happy. Beneath my palms, I could feel the earth herself, free from winter’s grip, breathing.

Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever….
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever;
the wide dry field of geese…
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

– Ruth Stone, from “Train Ride”

Youth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m reading Daniel Raeburn’s Vessels – his harrowing memoir about his first daughter, stillborn. Like the best of memoirs, this is not about a single, isolated event in the couple’s life: it is about their marriage in the wider sea of family and friends.

His wife, a potter, told him early in their relationship:

There are three tests for a pot, she said. First, when you throw it, it has to feel right in your hand. Then, after you fire it, it has to come out looking like something you’d want to keep. Then comes the third test: You have to live with it. You have to use it. This is the real test.

–– Daniel Raeburn, Vessels

Today, seventeen years into parenting, I’m home with a house full of teenage girls. Doesn’t that single sentence contain an infinity? Ten girls with their own long legs, ten hairstyles, ten unique pasts, ten pairs of eyes open to their budding womanly futures.

Like clay, our lives are slipping, hardening, crumbling, ever changing. Use it. Embrace it.

FullSizeRender