#familylife

A $5 Rainbow-Bright Kickball

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My cheerful kids returned yesterday with a bright pink blow-up beach ball they found on a back road. The older daughter, driving, had pulled over, so the 12-year-old and her friend ran back along the ice-rutted road for the garish pink ball. At home, they mended the gash with silver duct tape.

Vermont’s March palette lies heavy on variations of white — the pureness of fresh snow, the near-gray of thawed ice refrozen with dirt particles — dark green pine, the black of gravel roads where the town crew has strewn sand, the crimson patches on redwing blackbirds.

Full of spring energy with the lengthy daylight after dinner, the girls and I walked around the neighborhood. The younger splashed through a puddle and noted she stepped over the moon’s reflection. I bought the girls a $5 kickball, striped in rainbow colors. Deep into twilight, so cold we kept blowing on our bare hands, the girls and I played four-square, that brilliantly-colored ball bouncing through the thickening dusk.

And then the girls took the ball inside and played in her bedroom, confusing the cats.

Here’s the artwork from the newest issue of Taproot, with an essay I wrote about our house. The artist’s creation is a remarkable likeness, both in architecture and emotion, although the blossom season hasn’t yet returned…..

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Our Lives, Seen and Unseen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few minutes early to collect the 12-year-old and her friend from track practice, the 19-year-old and I take a walk around a neighborhood circle near the high school, passing a house I considered buying but didn’t.

Full of excitement about her morning, my daughter talks on and on, her happiness as visible as red-breasted robins in a bare-branched maple tree. We pause for a moment before the three-story house, with large original windows on the first and second floors, bordered at the top by ornate stained glass. The owner confessed the windows leaked air profusely but couldn’t bear to replace them. The house is no longer for sale; my daughter and I speculate the family still lives there.

We walk by another house flanked by five sugar maples, the trees young enough to live for many more decades.

Robins, both visible and hidden, sing.

My daughter and I pass these houses and these possible lives our family might have taken but didn’t. Then we’re back at the high school, still in the cold and clear March sunlight, beside a maple filled with robins fluttering their wings, chorusing in the beginning of spring.

I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

— Galway Kinnell

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Cold Spring

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A lover I had for a very brief time complained I wasn’t good at accepting gifts. Pride, he noted. About that, he was right.

And yet a life without pride in yourself and your actions? Lack pride and you become a muddied doormat. So here’s the theme that surfaces over and over in all our lives — where to find the sweet spot of balance.

Hard things have a way of bending you, and that bending can go either way, I tell my daughters. In this long cold spring, that sentiment runs deeply.

cherry blossom petals
blown by the spring breeze against
the undried wall

— Masaoka Shiki

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Young Woman Traveling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rising in the middle of the night is synonymous for me with journeying: catch a plane to visit a family member in need or set off on a long road trip, like our exquisitely beautiful drive out of Prince Edward Island last summer as the dawn gradually rose, and my 12-year-old and I listened to Canadian radio while the two others slept curled on each other in the backseat.

Once upon a time that miles-long bridge would have terrified me: last summer it hardly seemed long enough, suspended over all that ocean.

Now my older daughter, starting her womanhood journey, rises in the dark and returns long after dark, fascinated by her classes and job, brimming with an enthusiasm she lacked all through adolescence. When she leaves, I open my laptop for my day’s work, but I wonder, Where will her life lead?

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.

— Gloria Steinem

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Way Past the Ides of March

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I read The Long Winter to my six-year-old when I was pregnant with my second daughter, lying down at 4 in the afternoon, too tired for anything else but reading. She was entranced — although not enamored. Twist hay into fuel? Grim.

Like so many kids, I loved those books, with the childhood stories of vanity cakes and rag dolls, the excitement of Christmas ponies and a family who lived in a dugout. I’m reading Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires — the adult story around the Wilder family revealed as loss, loss, loss…. How glad I am for our warm house, the morning sunlight in our kitchen with the cats sleeping at my feet. We’re on the far side of winter today.

15 degrees today, with brilliant sunlight: I flung open the doors and windows, whooshing out the winter air in our house, throwing blankets over the porch railings and leaning over the snowbanks, listening to robins.

Here’s illustrator Garth Williams:

(Laura Ingalls Wilder) was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.

— Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser

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Monday Morning, Still Dark

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My older daughter cut her literary teeth reading Mercy Watson chapter books to her younger sister — silly stories about a pig who loved stacks of hot buttered toast. We were homeschooling then, and that winter, the girls spread on the rug before the wood stove. Read, the little one begged. One more chapter! 

Monday mornings in March didn’t mean all that much when we were homeschooling. Sap held every bit of meaning for us in those days. Now the older daughter hurries off before dawn to clinicals, full of excitement.

Fed, the cats sprawl on the sleeping younger sister. Fittingly, the striped feline who loves this child best also miraculously appears at the scent of toasting bread, hungry for melting butter.

Another year is gone;
and I still wear
straw hat and straw sandal.

— Bashō

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