Bright Spot

November 27, 2017November 27, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

There’s nothing like a carful of laughing girls to whisk away despair. While the girls skied, I walked down to Big Hosmer Lake and sunk my hand in its cold water, thinking of my older daughter at 12 and how much she loved the rope swing on this lake. With an hour left, I sat in the touring center and sunk into my work.

Bringing in the cold and snow, the rosy-cheeked girls found me, chattering, hungry for the crackers in the car. All the way down the narrow valley from Craftsbury to Hardwick, I watched the remnants of daylight dwindle into pale rose, so glad we were headed to our warm house and leftover posole and the cats who would be mewling for their dinner.

12-year-old girls, laughing about falling on skis, listening to Christmas carols, exuberantly happy. I drove, listening, the girls’ merriment like a cloak around us, keeping night terrors away.

A Few Minutes

September 23, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When my brother was learning how to ride a bike, he started at the neighbors’ cement step, leapt up on the banana seat that was too high for him, wavered across our scraggly lawn until he banged into the side of our house, and fell over. He hadn’t yet mastered turning, and so he repeated those steps – the vaulting ascent, the uneven pedaling, the thunk and crash – until he swerved left, up a slight hill, and kept going.

Washing dishes the other night, listening to the the increasingly grim NPR news, someone kept smashing the side of my house. My daughter was doing a handstand, kicking her heels against the clapboard – working as she said.

I thought of Dr. Spock’s Play is the work of babies – equally applicable to 12-year-olds. Laughing, my daughter demonstrated her ability to tuck her heels around her ears. She suggested I try that neat trick, but instead I lay on the grass and gazed at the clouds silently shifting over the sky’s expanse we can see behind our house. Shot through with sunset’s pink, the evening stretched around us, the cooling air nipping just the slightest on my cheeks and bare toes.

She lay on the grass beside me and said, There’s a snail just above us. See it?

I did.

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

casually.

– Issa

And Even Heavier Lifting….

June 17, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not two white knights, but two women in Subarus showed up at my house last night to move cardboard boxes of books, wrap dishes, pull pictures from walls. My troops arrived, complete with olive bread and cheese, with enthusiasm and laughter, with encouragement for my daughter who is graduating today from high school.

No woman is an island. Could I remember this more frequently? I could not have moved in these handful of days without your help; I’d be moving boxes and beloved pieces of kid-made pottery for weeks, like a solitary ant toiling, moving sand grain by grain. Thank you, again, for reminding me of the steady earth behind my feet.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent…

– John Dunne

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Bluer Than Blue

April 24, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last evening, as dusk threaded in slowly, the 11-year-old and I played leisurely games of croquet, stepping around the blooming Siberian quills we planted late last fall. They flower in profusion over the lower leach field, whereas the other bulbs, in higher ground, are merely slender green leaves, with no apparent sign of flowering. Fitting?

That mimics a line I read early this morning from Katie Kitamura’s Separation.

Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.

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Adversity, the Inner Life, and Childrearing

August 24, 2016 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nowhere in the miasma of contemporary parenting lit have I ever read my dad’s adage from when I was a child: Adversity builds character. Enough, my siblings and I used to moan; we have enough character. In the same vein, in his poetry collection Galvanized, Leland Kinsey writes about growing up on a farm in northern Vermont. While his own boy had a gentler and easier childhood, his son lacked knowing his labor was essential to the family.

Entirely unintentionally, I gave my older daughter that same sense of urgency. Pressed up against the relentlessness of agriculture, this child was in the sugarhouse from infancy, when her rosy baby cheeks shined up with a sugary patina from sap condensation.

Does anyone, ever, have enough character? Not persona, not a two-dimensional image, but a depth and richness of character? When I first became a mother, I knew I wanted my children to have what I called a rich inner life. Doubtlessly, literature and Mozart nourish that inner life, but working any variation of a farm does, too. I’m reminded of this as my daughter heads off to her first college course today, a photography class. At 17, she’s of the age now where she’s beginning to tell her own story, and while I often feel I have little enough to offer this girl as she enters her own womanhood, I’m quite sure at least a rich inner life is a deep well she’ll be able to drawn upon.

The whitewashed walls were smeared with blood
the day the bull rampaged inside the barn
after escaping from its pen.
My father gave my brother and me
each a stout stick to block exits
and hoped we didn’t have to use them….

From Leland Kinsey’s “Surviving Bulls”