family life

Poetry, Philosophy, Piles of Snow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Snow falls all night.

In the darkness, I lie awake thinking about a line from Karl Marx; “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances.” The line figures predominantly in the book I’m writing — the initial draft nearly finished. More than that, the line is one of the main questions of my life.

In our dark house, the cat and I stand at the back glass door, watching the snow drift down in the cone of the porch light. Upstairs, one daughter reads, the other sleeps. For a little while, the cat and I read on the couch. Just before I turn off the light and head back upstairs, I glance at the pile of index cards penned neatly in my younger daughter’s hand. For school, she has to choose a poem, memorize it, and recite it aloud. I lift the top card and read, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood….

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Simple Saturday

/ 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

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Ocean Waters at 80 Degrees?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night, I drove home in my fossil-fuel burning Toyota, thinking about the library program I’d just attend where a meteorologist kept returning to our “weird weather.”

Standing in the back of the Woodbury Town Hall, a righteous old building whose front door swung in the frosty night, I drank hot tea, shivering a little. He had data – reams of it – and reading one particular chart, I noted the sharp curves right around the year 2050. I couldn’t help but think, We’re seriously fucked. What kind of world might my daughters inhabit when they’re 40, wandering through their lost-in-Dante’s-miserable-woods? What kind of world will your daughters and sons, your grandsons and granddaughters inherit?

I’d like to write that the stars overhead, when I walked into my house, reassured me, but – their distant beauty notwithstanding – the firmament did not. Today, again, pondering the unclear future, I reminded myself that where I’ve always failed is when I narrow my vision to fear, to repugnance, to outright hatred. Here’s all these contradictions, like driving my car to an info session on carbon emissions. Isn’t this the way of the human realm?

Like a muscle, deepen imagination.

Beyond the low iron fence (of the graveyard), cows graze…
All that brute flesh wandering close to graves –
how calm it is –
like two hands about to touch.

– Howard Nelson

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Domesticity at our house…

Little Bits

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A child gave me a tiny quartz pebble.

Thinking the pebble must have caused some injury to the child’s bare foot, I asked why I had been given the small thing.

The child said one sentence: I found it, and apparently believed that was enough, as she walked away.

I’ve put the pebble on my library desk, along with pipe cleaner creations, a crocheted pumpkin, broken pens – springs, bodies, screw-on caps – the children intend to repair.

Our upstate April
is cold and gray.
Nevertheless

yesterday I found
up in our old
woods on the littered

ground dogtooth violets
standing around
and blooming

wisely….

Hayden Carruth, from “Springtime, 1998”

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Stranger’s Gift

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A friend stops by the library on my shift and offers hand-me-downs from her coworker I’ve never met. I lift pastel cotton t-shirts, a linen skirt, an embroidered sleeveless blouse: summer things that whisper to me of sunnier days, bare feet on grass, a season not too far off in Vermont’s snowy April but requiring memory and imagination.

At the paper bag bottom are two handmade sweaters. A knitter myself, I lift the blue one and immediately see this is a pattern I would have loved to knit, in this well-spun wool. The knitter was ordered, with evenly placed buttons and mirror sleeve caps, and practical, too: one cuff has a pattern slip I might have made and not redone.

While my friend keeps talking, I ease my arms into the sweater, and, although I’m so small I’m nearly in the land of the Oompla Loompas, the cardigan fits me perfectly, all the way down to the right length of sleeves, as if this unknown creator was my doppelgänger.

The second, white sweater I merely admire with my fingertips and leave for someone else, whose name I’ll never know.

Don’t touch my plumtree!
Said my friend and saying so…
Broke the branch for me.

– Bashō

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Photo by Gabriela

 

A Whale’s Heartbeat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these subzero nights, I’ve abandoned my room of windows on the top floor and started sleeping in my daughter’s lower bunk bed, in her room cozily located over the wood stove. Upstairs, my older daughter’s room is just across the hall from mine, and we generally talk before sleeping. My younger daughter is pleased with her turn at companionship. Plus, she doesn’t complain when I read late at night with the lights on.

Last night, before falling asleep, she told me a whale’s heart beats about 10 times per minute, while the tiny shrew’s heart can pulse away at a 1,000 jumps per minute.

I reached up and snapped off the light. In darkness, we imagined how voluminous might be a whale’s heart, hot blood churning through its chambers. She told me about a trip she’d taken a few years before with her father, to Provincetown, where she and her sister walked through the ribs of whale skeleton. In the warm dark room, we lay imagining what it would be like to live in the belly of a whale, and late in the night when I woke to feed the fire, I was still dreaming of that dark, living interior.

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing–more’s the pity.

– Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

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