#familylife

After School Snacks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My 14-year-old meets me at the coffee shop in town on her way home from school. I close up my laptop and clear the table of my papers. She sits in the window drinking hot chocolate and talks and talks.

She’s making a phone call that afternoon with a stranger for a program reference, and I see she’s been thinking about that phone call all day. She’s not someone who likes talking on the phone. And to someone she doesn’t know?

In a complete non sequitur, she lifts the gingerbread cookie she’s eating and says that’s exactly the kind of cookie she wants to bake.

Looking at her, I marvel at how she’s all teen — both worrying and taking pleasure in that worrying — in a this is my thing, my life, what I’m doing kind of way.

Her grandparents have a sent her a small box with a card. When she lifts the lid, the box opens into a pop-up Christmas tree, and she laughs and laughs.

A group of teenagers come in the door, stomping snow from their boots. The barista says, Here’s the future.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

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December Sparkles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When I was really little — probably three or so — I vaguely remember my family parked outside of town, watching the Fourth of July fireworks. My mother said the sprawl of lights in the darkness was Santa Fe. That’s how little I was — I didn’t even realize that magic was city lights. We lived on a dirt road then, out of town, and my guess is I hadn’t seen much of those bright city lights.

Oddly enough, I remembered that as I was taking out the compost the other night, just around 5 o’clock. The sun had sunk, leaving not even a smear of pale pink.

In the darkness, later, the dishes washed, my daughter and I walked around town, our jackets unzipped.

Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.

― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

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Cat Joy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I returned from a school board meeting last night, so tired I might actually have been sleepwalking, the kids had taken the trusty yardstick, swept out the toy mice from under the couch, and the cats were ecstatic. Our house was reveling in utter joy.

I write this, because I admire those cats so much, epitomizing the be here now bliss of existence. But, bless them, these are cats.

After Vicki wrote in about the fires in Australia, my older daughter and I kept reading and reading about these fires. Our globe is literally in flames. Like just about everyone else on the planet, I’m lacking an answer, a real solution. I know just how privileged I am to live in what often seems like the Shire of Vermont, this particularly sweet spot.

When I was a young woman in the 1980s and 90s, the sentiment I was given was pretty much an all for yourself one. But for my kids, that’s not even an option. I didn’t think adults were particularly bright when I was young, but they were just adults, neither more nor less. Now, listening to my daughters and their friends, I know they’re thinking what a mess you’ve left us.

If only there was a yardstick solution to this…

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.

― Meghan Daum

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Teen Talk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

4 degrees this morning when my older daughter leaves for work. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. Freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw — classic New England weather. We’re now into the final descent into darkness. Evenings, we hang out — homework and reading — and often just talking. No one’s heading out for an evening run, a last long walk before nightfall, because these days nightfall is in the afternoon.

My older daughter reads aloud about what it’s like to live in the Arctic Circle.

My 14-year-old and I spend a day driving around in Burlington, doing errands and a little Christmas shopping and I buy her a toasted cheese and ham sandwich she loves. For the first time, I notice she’s watching the college students. Waiting in line for that sandwich, we’re surrounded by a very tall men’s athletic team. They’re buying enormous containers of juice and talking about what that night might turn into, and a friend of theirs who has taken a job as a horticulturist at a well-known college. What’s the difference, they muse, between horticulturist and agriculturist?

Only much later, talking with her older sister that night, do I realize how intently this quiet teen has taken in that talk, how she’s imagining the multiple possibilities for her young adult life, not so very far off.

At a stoplight, she asked me what it’s like to be a college student. I thought back to my six years in school — four as an undergraduate, two in graduate school. What’s six years in a life? A lot, or not so much. She waited for my answer. Finally, I said, It’s like nothing else.

Likewise, a year from now she’ll be driving me around, with her learner’s permit. About parenting? From toddler to teen? It’s like nothing else.

There are many times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you’d be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.

― Ayelet Waldman

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The Mind of Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Poet Wallace Stevens wrote: One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.

In northern Vermont — thus far — the winter has been cold and dark and ice, scant on snow. When the sun is out, we lift our faces, as if our bare cheeks can gather the light like June’s strawberries in our hands.

The mind of winter is the Vermonter’s mind, for sure, for sure — slipping away in the swimming and gardening season, returning in late fall.

Each of us in my house is sunk into work and school in ways that seem particularly pleasant — at this time. Keep the house warm, the cats and kids fed, and walk under the stars at night.

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Barr Hill, Greensboro, Vermont

And So Begins… December

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Sun in Vermont’s December? Sunday morning, we discovered perfect snowflakes scattered over the icy ground.

This final month of the year always seems more shut in, filled with post-holiday and pre-holiday and holiday, with snow piling (although more ice than snow here yet), with a warm house and knitting and those sleeping cats. What’s homier than curls of sleeping cats?

It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.

― Dylan Thomas

 

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Note the washed-pale blue: save for sunrise and sunset, that’s about it for color.