adventure

The contours of your heart…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments
Not February, a long time ago, at our house…

Prying an aluminum safety-seal off a bottle, I remember drinking a tiny plastic bottle of cherry-red juice as a girl when a soft piece of aluminum was the top: once you peeled it back, you were committed to drinking the whole thing. In our sugar-free house, we rarely drank sweet things. This was somewhere in that vast expanse of the Midwest, land of a long-ago sea. In our parents’ green Jeep, we hurtled along I-80, two kids in the back and another up front in the middle between my parents. The Jeep had no radio. In a fit of enthusiasm, my mother had bought a transistor radio that she insisted would work. My dad insisted it would not, despite my mother unrollling the window and jamming the antenna into the wind. (The radio did not, although she did play music at a campground picnic table. We insisted she turn it off: too suburban, mom…)

In the floor of the Jeep’s backseat compartment was a hole where a screw must have fallen out and disappeared. In these pre-seatbelt years, we sometimes lay on the hot floor and stared down through the hole at the interstate whizzing beneath the wheels. A steady blow of hot air blew upwards.

Midwinter now in Vermont, that eternal season of accumulating snow and intermittent dazzling sunlight. My parents, bickering or laughing in their front seat domain where the three of us kids were clearly only intermittent visitors, were enmeshed in their crazy lives, scooping us along in their journey. As for us kids, the void of that quarter-sized hole in our family car and the pleasure of those unexpected sweet drinks, the promise, perhaps, of a swim in a campground pool later that evening, defined those summer days.

Now, decades beyond that cherry drink, I see my own rugged journey spanning decades, my daughters always along and still along, as we’ve come together and parted and reunited with so many people over these years…. In the end, perhaps, what remains with a child might simply be that special drink, not the mighty panorama of ancient geology or the American landscape of truck stops and diesel fumes and KOAs, not even my parents’ own struggles to figure out their lives — where are we going? what are we doing? — that, in my parenting turn, I’m hammering out, too.

From the inimitable essayist Leslie Jamison: “Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires.”

In the cracks around kindness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 28 Comments

Thaw, on this New Year’s Day, hovering near freezing, my neighbor’s yard under her great pines exposed to soggy grass, the fields on the hillside across the village bare as late April.

I pull on my coat and boots and stand on my porch. The tree branches are festooned with droplets. Cold will press in again this week.

Wednesday morning, holiday, my scrawled list penciled on a post-it on my kitchen table, waiting. I perch on the covered sand bucket and sip the coffee, my hands wrapped around the mug. My memory wanders back to the Maine coast where we spread my mother’s ashes last June. My mother loved domestic spaces. She would have been enchanted by the colored lights my kids strung over my barn, along the porch roof over my head. Likewise, in my house, she would have admired our tree with the red star topper, the room illuminated with tiny lights. Nearly housebound with cancer recovery, my household has been blessed with gifts of candles, savory meals, foil-wrapped chocolates, fragrant rose oil from Bulgaria. All this, too, would have intrigued my mother.

My mother loved the wild, too, for much of her life quick to pack up the car and head for the open road.

In Maine, we parked near the shore. The sweetness of rugosa roses buoyed along the breeze’s brine. In the curving, layered landscape of rock and the rhythmic crashing pound of the ocean like the planet’s beating heat, we returned her remains to the immense wild, the mysterious territory where she had, after all, emerged from.

A crossing over.

This second memory, too. Later that summer, visiting my old father in New Mexico, my young woman daughter and her friend fried eggs and buttered toast for breakfast. In their strappy sundresses, they sat at the round oak table, sipping coffee. The friend had never visited New Mexico; her eyes gleamed. My father gave them his credit card and told them to eat lunch in downtown Santa Fe, in the courtyard which had been a family compound, 200 years and more ago. Later, the girls returned with leftover enchiladas and stories of flowering trumpet vines and singing birds. We must go into the beautiful mountains.

Yesterday, this daughter walked me around the high school, the beginnings of my strength returning. In the hidden back, a path leads into the woods. She held my hand, admonished, “Not yet.”

On this misty, rainy New Year’s morning, a prayer to cultivate patience and mercy for these interwoven journeys…

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Roadside View.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In these tail-end days of January, I’m alone midafternoon when I stop by the edge of the road. We’ve endured a cold for days that’s not so much bitter but a raw damp that my brother says reminds him of the ocean. The kind of weather for wearing wool sweaters all day, that make you wrap your hands around cups of coffee. So many years ago, I lived for a winter in an apartment on a brick Main Street building in Brattleboro. The building was heated by radiators, clanging and spewing steam all over that large building, in a heating design where I was mere witness, the grateful recipient.

This dreary afternoon, I follow three-toed turkey tracks down a driveway. In the snowy field, the large birds set up a clanging holler when they spy me, ruffling feathers and jostling. It’s just me, I’d like to tell them, a small woman who’s forgotten her mittens and hat. I stand for a bit. Down the hillside, the frozen lake spreads immensely around the spits and coves of the shoreline: breathtakingly awesome.

After a bit, the turkeys seem to care little about my dull presence, gleaning through the thin granular snow.