children

Children & Flies: Biosphere Companions

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A rainy March day yielded existential questions regarding flies in my fifth-grade daughter’s day. At supper, she chatted about catching a fly in the minutes before the first class and another hidden in a friend’s desk all day, allegedly feasting on granola bars.

The Woodbury schoolhouse is 200-years-old, with filled with all kinds of corners and crannies, high ceilings and gorgeous windows: delightful habitat for flies. I asked if she thought the flies might be back tomorrow. She didn’t know. Tomorrow, she guessed, their companions could be wasps or ladybugs. In third grade, the children kept a keen eye on a mouse hole concealed behind the teacher’s desk. It’s not long until the birds begin nesting in the trees around the school, and the snapping turtles emerge from the wetland to bury their eggs in the ball field.

At the end, while I was laughing, my daughter said simply and matter-of-factly, “We are all in the biosphere.”

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

– Issa

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Woodbury, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Trees, Rugged Earth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My brother has a stash of panoramic vista hikes in his terrain. This visit, we hiked up Jockey Cap in nearby Maine, an enormous round igneous rock practically in the town of Fryeburg.

At the top, we saw extensive Lovewell Pond, the substantial White Mountains to the west, and the flats of Maine where the land begins to stretch to the sea. The sole snowy peak, in this end of February, was Mt. Washington. From that height, in this too-warm winter, the earth appeared dull brown, even the blues of the mountains washed out under the brilliantly clear sky. Down below, we saw a conical pile of road maintenance sand, a Dollar General, a series of strip malls, traffic inching along the highways: not the earth in her shining majesty and glory, but hard-worn, patient, enduring.

At the crest, a pine tree no taller than myself grew stubbornly from the rock. My daughter and I knelt near its roots, our bare fingers over the hard curled wood searching for traces of soil. None. And yet this tree ruggedly remains, flourishing, seemingly against all odds.

SEEKING REST

Late night, dark night,
the house hums around me.
… High wind
swirls the stars around me.

Closed and still,
I hear and say the names
that do not stay in place
when night has found me.

Everything is shifting.

– Ellen McCulloch-Lovell

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Fryeburg, Maine

Travel Into Places Familiar and Unfamiliar

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Yesterday, the girls and I left Vermont – currently a giant slew of ice and running water –and drove over the Connecticut River into New Hampshire’s White Mountains, an ancient granite range. At the crest of the Notch, I stepped out in the blowing snow and snapped a photo, the temperature not much above zero. In the backseat, the little girl pressed against her teddy bear. I drove down the steep switchbacks, listening to music, the girls quiet, while the temperature soared and the snow that shrouded the pass lifting and disappearing.

For years, I’ve impressed on my daughters to make a mental map of their world as they go. Memorize road signs; note the position of the sun, rivers, cairns; remember your turns. And yet, more than our perceptions of places falter. A few years ago, with our daughters, my husband and I returned to the mountainside  where we had married. We hiked up this once-familiar area and could not find the field of our wedding. The mountainside, a former ski area, had not been mowed for years, and the field had been reclaimed by scrubby thickets. In the end, we found what we were seeking, completely altered but for the shape of the earth: a flat knoll and a once-upon-a-time drop off now concealed by emerging birch.

These ancient mountains are all of this: familiar to me through swimming and river rock collecting and backpacking into the peaks, and so infinitely mysterious, ever-changing, miraculously beautiful. And, this morning, sunny.

….to see beyond boundaries to the subtle heart of things, dispense with names, with concepts, with expectations and ambitions and differences. Tao and its many manifestations arise from the same source: subtle wonder within mysterious darkness. This is the beginning of all understanding.

Lao Tzu (c.604 – 531 B.C.)

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Franconia Notch, New Hampshire

 

Hearth

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning, the house grew cold as I let the fire in our wood stove dwindle. When it was nearly dead, I pulled apart the stove pipe and stretched my arm deep down its throat to loosen the rattling creosote. With a shovel, I removed the ashes from the stove, then vacuumed the damper vents at the back, so the air will flow again. In the baffles at the top, I reached between the metal and fireproof insulation and pulled out handful after handful of silty, warm brown ashes, silky as kittens. I kept thinking of Megan Mayhew Bergman’s story “Housewifely Arts.”

This evening, after a day of snow and freezing rain and sleet, our hearth is rich with heat again, the children sprawled luxuriously on the rug. One of the interesting aspects of writing is a tendency to turn things upside down and inside out. Our stove is not merely a source of heat, but also consumer of wood and air, creator of ash, its lungs linked to the chimney funneling through our house. I once spent the greater part of an afternoon with a heating specialist who explained the inner workings of a nearby hospital, the channels of electricity and oxygen and water and waste, the circulatory system of an enormous building, generally unseen but vital.

Maybe it’s a day like this, when winter relinquishes its hold reluctantly, hurling ice at our windows in fury, that brings us back to our hearth again, gratefully.

There is no need to explain to our daughter the death of her first dog. Poppy, better than any of us, understands the urge to have what you must have. She can still wring what she wants from the world. It has listened to her cries and delivered. She still trusts the raw pull of desire. One day it will tear her away from us, take her down a dirt road to a place she does not recognize, and there she will make her home. Away from everything she understands, and close to everything she wants.

– Megan Mayhew Bergman, “The Two-Thousand Dollar Sock”

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Winter Garden, Vermont, 2016

 

 

Before Dawn, Children Sleeping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura’s beloved rag doll, Charlotte, is given to a spoiled neighbor’s baby. Charlotte had been a Christmas gift Laura’s mother had made her, and the girl sorely misses her doll. Later, she discovers her beloved doll, discarded and frozen in an iced-over puddle, and fiercely reclaims her. This all takes place in the chapter “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn,” when Laura, her sisters, and mother are without Pa, and in need.

This morning, in my own pre-dawn house, while everyone was yet sleeping, I thought of Charlotte again, and how I’ve returned to that image all through the varied years of my life, looking for treasures to mend in frozen puddles. Sometimes I wonder where my own daughters will be, years from now, all grown up, enmeshed in families of their own. What have I made or given them that they would rescue from sleeting rain and mud? Something dear, I hope. Something beloved.

Darling Charlotte lay in her box under the eaves, smiling with her red yarn mouth and her shoe-button eyes. Laura lifted her carefully and smoothed her wavy black-yarn hair and her skirts. Charlotte had no feet, and her hands were only stitched on the flat ends of her arms, because she was a rag doll. But Laura loved her dearly.

–– Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

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Creative Mountains

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving to Stowe this morning, my ten-year-old daughter pointed at Mt. Mansfield and said with utter joy, I’m going up in those mountains today.

She did. With her companion and the child’s mother, they skied higher than she ever had, returning at the day’s end with cheeks sweaty red, her braids tumbled. On the way home, as she told me about her day, I realized she had made a mental map of her journey, laying winter skiing over her summer hiking.

While she skied, I sat in a sun-filled room with strangers and climbed my own mystical creative mountain, traversing the terrain of novel writing through rock and streams, dusty back roads and the variated sky bent over a village. My villagers (like the people I know) sleep and dream, wake and eat, their hearts filled with desire and lust, with unhappiness and the unrequited past, with daily pleasures, like eating salad and enchiladas with a child and listening to her story.

How I admire this child and her fearless joy, her unalloyed pleasure in sun and snow, in steep mountains, and the wind over her face. As creative adults, shouldn’t we aim for that confidence in hard places, that dusting away of doubt that so frequently plagues us?

More to the heart, perhaps, like a child, we should savor unfettered happiness in our hours.

And then, of course, the novel-writing itself affects the novelist, because novel-writing is a transformative act.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

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Photo by Molly S./Woodbury, Vermont