This Annual Fête

May 25, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

When I was just out of graduate school, I taught middle school kids for two years in a program where another tutor rubbed me wrong. She was forty and supremely confident; she and her husband had made what was likely a ton of money on Wall Street and now lived in Vermont. She laughed that they had spent $100K renovating a bathroom — more than I later paid for a house and 100 acres.

At the Memorial Day Parade, I met her family, with their two little boys. I was childless then, and longing for a baby. She had a dog on a leash. One son had contracted E. coli. The deal was, she said, I told him we would get a dog if he didn’t die. So, we got a dog.

Part of me wishes I could ruefully look back at my younger, snarlier self (who cares how much someone spends on a bathroom, anyway?) with humor and lightness. But really, the crotchety side of me is immediately recognizable — if anything, ground deeper, more articulate, wiser for the wear.

Kid Project

January 20, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Deciding she wants to improve her cursive handwriting, my daughter writes a careful sentence in her notebook and hands it to me. I’m sitting beside her on the couch, reading Volkswagen Blues. In my clumsy cursive, I pen an answer to her sentence and hand the notebook to her.

As we fill a page back and forth, a curious thing happens. My handwriting, never stellar anyway, unwinds into a nearly illegible scrawl while hers, tidy and careful, improves.

One little moment of her childhood, of my motherhood.

At five this morning, my teenager and I shovel out her car — so many inches of fine, perfect snow. When she leaves, I keep shoveling by the light of the living room window. Today, snow will fall all day, and maybe we’ll remember it as the day we baked blueberry pound cake and the trampoline frame disappeared in the snow.

Or not.

But for a few moments, sweating from shoveling, my hat pushed back, I stand listening to my breath and the far-off sound of a snowplow, in those millions of snowflakes, twirling their way to earth.

He wanted to know what kind of people had decided, in the early 1840s, to give up everything and travel across most of a continent simply because they had heard that the land was good and life was better on the shores of the Pacific. What sort of people had had the courage to do that?

“Ordinary people.”

— Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues

Pre-storm photo, January 2019

Simple Saturday

December 30, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I make an error knitting a hat — I skip the beginning half of a cable round. Compensate for the error and hope it’s not apparent? Or unravel (again) and start over?

Thus, the allure of craft — the potential to make something beautiful by getting it exactly right.

Not so, parenting.

On a post-Christmas slushy and raw day, the 13-year-old girls find me holed up in a corner of Montpelier’s Capital Grounds. It’s a day unfit for for their skiing plans, impossible to sled or ice skate. I close my laptop and suggest we walk. Even the sidewalks are sketchy with ice.

Too icy in Hubbard Park’s woods, we walk through the steep-streeted neighborhoods behind the capital, stop to admire six grazing deer, and muse about the houses we pass. What would it be like to live here? the girls wonder, contemplating their adult lives. Where will we go?

On the drive home through the dusk and a blowing snow that surrounds my little car in Calais, the girls both sit in the backseat as they did when they were little, eating cold dumplings and playing songs they think will shock me. Instead, I’m mesmerized.

At a gas station in Hardwick, I fill the tank in my shirt sleeves. In the backseat, the girls unroll the window and tease me, telling me to put on a coat, and suddenly I start dancing, lifting my arms over my head in a silly, made-up song about December and joy. A bitter wind blows along the highway. I leap a little higher, in our few moments of merriment, before I reach for my coat, too.

The winter wind
flings pebbles
at the temple bell

— Buson

Reprieve

December 15, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, I’m in the snowy garden assessing the remaining kale. As I lift the limp leaves, crusty snow crumbles fall into my boots and around my sockless feet.

Walking back to the house, my daughter’s outside in a t-shirt, feeding her chickens leftover popcorn.

Kale, garlic, onion, fennel-sweet sausage for a savory soup. Mid-December. Take heart.

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

— Louise Glück

IMG_4187 2.jpg

Milkweed Season

October 17, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Walking through a field on my way to the post office, I find tasseled milkweed seeds, strewn across the trampled grass.

When she was a toddler in a hand-me-down stroller, my now 13-year-old loved to pick apart milkweed pods and let the seeds drift from her tiny fingers.

I doubt she’d remember those windy autumn days, this child who was always so quiet. But I’d like to think, deep inside her, those hours worked their magic, as she watched those seeds rise into the breeze and disappear.

….Two days ago I walked
the empty woods, bent over,
crunching through oak leaves,
asking myself questions
without answers. From somewhere
a froth of seeds drifted by touched
with gold in the last light
of a lost day, going with
the wind as they always did.

— Philip Levine, “Milkweed”

Childhood

August 20, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We drove to Maine and back on a Sunday, my older daughter sleeping in the passenger seat, stunned-looking from the night shift. We traveled with another driver and, true to my experience in Maine, pulled over a few times to consult whether we’d gotten lost or not.

At the end of our journey was an airy summer house on a blue puzzle-piece lake, and my 13-year-old, looking even taller, walking under the shady oaks to us.

A narrow wooden-slat bridge led from the shore to boulders in the water. The wind blowing over the rocky crest and the stunted pines growing from stone reminded me of climbing above tree line — one of our cherished summer activities — surrounded by terrific swimming. On the shore, the scent of sunlight on the sandy soil and the fallen pine needles reminded me of camping in the high desert mountains, so many long weeks of tent-living when I was a girl.

This usually quiet child chattered all the way home, about kayaking around the lake with her friend, the four pizzas they made for dinner one night, visiting a yarn store she knew I would love; about the snails her friend’s father gathered and she didn’t eat; about the fish he smoked that was delicious.

Then we were home again, to her cats and her chicken chores and her own bed.

I once described this child’s great strength as pragmatism. Like any parent, the jury’s still out on what she’ll cherish from her own childhood — in a terrible illustration of the best-laid plans heading south, her father has disappeared — yet she’s sunny and even-keeled, happy to be with these people, happy to have this summertime adventure.