#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Miniature Mandibles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m reading outside with my bare feet on the firepit stones when I feel something like my cat’s tongue on my toe. I’m reading intently, in the few remaining minutes before my daughter returns from soccer practice and my attention will abruptly shift into chat about school and peers and the righteous outrage I suddenly see emerging in this teen. How had I forgotten that one of the most interesting aspects of adolescence is an emerging moral sense of the world? What’s wrong? Who’s right? (And, please, as a parent, could I just remain low and out of the light?)

I’m reading, of all things, Wendell Berry, when I realize a grasshopper is nibbling my toe. It’s the very end of August, the sunflowers are opening, the basil is prolific, the beans have spread into a sculpture in the middle of my garden. I close the book and let the grasshopper gnaw.

We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound.

— Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

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Soccer Mom-ing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter is now six years into soccer — a number that surprises me — as if, for me, each fall is a surprise. You’re playing soccer? How cool is that….

On a hot afternoon, I walk to the high school, in a rush from work, dust from the street blowing into my eyes. On these warm afternoons, there’s always pleasure at the chance to sit on the grass and simply spend an hour, talking with another parent about work and relationships, and the sometimes painful, often laughworthy moments in our parenting lives.

What’s odd is this: standing on the field, I study each player, figuring out which girl is mine. My own daughter. I blame this strange phenomenon on bad eyesight, until another mother confesses the same. The ponytail girls are growing up. I’m unable to recognize this metamorphosis — in my own daughter — but the girls are heading toward young womanhood, body and soul.

The way of the world, my soccer-mom friend says, and offers me some of her seltzer.

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have-as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

— Sharon Olds

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Hardwick, Vermont, August 2019

Fire

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Seriously? my 14-year-old demands. You want me to scrape paint? 

I’m merely suggesting it as a possibility, a fine August afternoon option before school begins next week. She opts to clean her chicken coop instead, which I can’t help but think is a healthier option.

At lunch, she shows me photos of the Amazon rainforest burning, immense swathes. She’s a Vermont teen; these are digital images that can’t possibly contain the heat and wind, the roar and terror of these fires.

Talking, I think of all the ways I’ve provided for this child and failed her, too — an American child who’s benefited from American largesse, and yet she’s a child who hasn’t seen her father in years.

On this breezy August afternoon, the crickets are working away, reminding us that summer’s yet here, but not for long. In her eyes, I see myself reflected. She cuts her grilled cheese sandwich in two and eats silently, filled with the power of adolescence.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year — the days when summer is changing into autumn — the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.

— E. B. White

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Nearly 9th Grade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While the girls swim and jump off the bridge, I read a chapter in a history of Vermont — same old, same old.

We’re in the long, slow, cricket-singing days, just before school starts. The garden is jammed full, the leeks a failure, the nasturtiums a mighty army colonizing beyond their territory.

The days are jammed, too, with all the pieces of work, crammed in with When will we paint the barn? Fix the car’s exhaust. Mark when property taxes are due on the calendar. — All things I consider so important but will have forgotten in weeks, perhaps months.

The girls lean over the bridge in the sunlight, talking quietly, glancing at me and wondering if I’m listening. I am. I’m watching and listening, until I dive in and swim away, with only the lapping water against my ears.

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
— Issa

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Irritable and Not So

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

At the northern end of the reservoir, we kayak north, where the water flows into the Black River, crossing the Canadian border on its meandering way to the Atlantic.

Surrounded by cattails, we stop at a beaver dam, listening to the spilling water. The late afternoon is sticky, the water’s too mucky and weedy for swimming, the girls who have been up early either for soccer practice or work are out-of-sorts, irritable.

What’s on the other side of that beaver dam? I edge near, curious, but there’s no way I’m getting around.

Back on the wide reservoir, we spread out. At the far end, a loon calls, which fails to impress either daughter. The teenager says, I’ve heard that before.

And yet, hungry and tired as both daughters are, neither seems in any rush to leave. Clouds jostle against Buffalo Mountain in the distance, promising rain, but not too quickly. The girls’ paddles lie across their kayaks as we drift.

Later that evening, as I lie on the couch, reading, rain begins to patter down. The older daughter goes out for a run. The younger daughter and I pull on raincoats and cut through the thorny blackberries, silently, our faces wet.

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Buried Treasure

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I look out the upstairs window where I’m working and see my teen and her friend busily digging a hole where young lilacs are growing along the cemetery fence.

They’re planting a half-gallon mason jar — their time capsule — carefully filled with things like a map of our camping trips and lists of their favorite things to eat. I watch them talking, and then they tie a pink scrap of fabric on the chain link fence, as if that marker will weather through the years.

Right there, I think, is childhood in a nutshell: a world that intersects with my grownup days, and yet lives busily — in fun and in seriousness — in their own. I haven’t seen what they stashed in that capsule, but I expect to see what emerges, whenever that may be….

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them — they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

— Rilke

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