family

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

IMG_0711

 

Gnomon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was in high school, my father, sister, and I read Joyce’s short story, “The Sisters.” I was thinking of that story again today, in this kind of chilly and drab weather that intimates how I imagine Ireland. The opening paragraph is one of my most favorite in all literature. In the story’s opening lines are three words – paralysis, gnomon, simony – that are keys to understanding the story.

With my daughters today, we were talking about family, and patterns of behavior, and I began to wonder myself, What are the keys to understanding each of us? For one of my daughters, at the age of three, I would have used tricycle and rabbit as her own particular talisman; for my other child, the word sister.

We use language so easily, so freely, that we’re often careless with its power, misunderstanding and underestimating its capability, both for destruction and redemption – or as a key to see into deeper recesses of our inner lives.

THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

– James Joyce

IMG_9725

Photo by Molly S./North Bennington, Vermont

 

Girls, Goodbye 2015, Walking

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Around six this afternoon, in our Vermont dark, I stood on State Street in Montpelier, waiting outside a movie theatre for my teenage daughter and her friend. The downtown was all lit up with lights, and passersby were merry with the holiday. I was standing with my brother-in-law, and we were laughing about a mechanical music from some source we couldn’t determine, oddly mimicking what might have been the songs of angels. While the girls were at the movies, we had been talking in a crowded coffee shop, and I had seen people come and go that I had known, years ago.

My brother-in-law I’ve known since I was sixteen, before I began driving, before I read Plato, before I married and had two daughters and threw myself into my adult life. Here we stood, in this odd, brightly lit place, on the heartbeat of a new year, in a little bit where time might have simply stood still, for just one moment. We spoke about (what else?) our children. As I laughed about how much his older son ate at my house last summer, my daughter and her friend arrived, in their long lovely hair and earrings, smiling and filled with the happiness of seeing a movie and their own friendship. As we said our goodbyes, we said goodbye to 2015, too; in this evening, the whole unknown expanse of 2016 lies before us.

From behind me, I felt arms suddenly around my waist, and there was a little girl in a familiar iridescent blue jacket – dear companion of my younger daughter – this sweet girl hugging me and saying, Happy New Year! before she disappeared down the street, too.

May Light always surround you;
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire.

D. Simone

FullSizeRender

Photo by Molly S./Montpelier, Vermont