#familylife

Far Travels

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Here’s something I never told my daughters: the summer I was 19, the hitchhiking tour of New England my then-boyfriend and I took ended in a convertible ride from Springfield, MA, up I-91 to Brattleboro. The car was an enormous old beauty from the 1950s, and the boyfriend sat up front and talked nonstop with the driver, an ebullient pilot of his darn cool car. I sprawled in the back, the wind wildly noisy, holding my hair out of my face with both hands.

I was 19, in lust but not in love with the boyfriend, and I knew I wouldn’t marry him, as he doubtlessly knew he would never marry me. But we were both at that age of no longer child but not really adult, and we were madly in love with the world, with just the sheer possibility of living.

Every now and then, I think back to my younger self, flying up that interstate in a stranger’s car, my legs stretched out on the red leather seat, with no seatbelt tethering me in, admiring all that sky gradually darkening into a bloody July sunset.

I wear seatbelts now. I never hitchhike. My daughters sleep under a solid roof, in a well-built and deeply insulated house. My older daughter is 18, and I think of this story sometimes when she’s headed off with her friends. I say the same things my parents said intently to me, Drive safely. Keep your eyes open. Come home.

I stand in the doorway, watching her leave. What are you doing? she asks. And when I say, humor me, humor me, she’s gracious enough to do so.

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened…

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Sisters.

 

 

Between

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Standing in our open kitchen doorway this morning, waiting for coffee to brew, I watched a turkey vulture sweep silently over the barn, wings outstretched, so near I saw its feathertips fluttering in the air currents. Hours before, walking in the evening’s mist-soaked gloaming, my 12-year-old daughter counted 40 vultures dropping and ascending over an empty ballfield. Gradually, their drifting and layered circles widened, so we appeared to be in the center of their vortex.

Carrion eaters.

I looked at my daughter, wondering if she was afraid. The vultures – black against a gray sky – dipped especially low, reminding me of Andrew Wyeth’s stunning painting of a single vulture. I had seen it for the first time in a museum’s basement room, beautiful and ominous, imbued with human emotion. But my daughter kept walking beneath these circling birds, face tipped up, curious.

Under our feet, earthworms, grubs, centipedes, work in the soil in my evolving garden, in the forest behind our house, beneath the stream hidden in the thickets of August’s greenery. Between the earth and the sky, human life unspools busily all day, sometimes into the night in our small town. Then, these birds. Silent, skilled. How could she not admire them, as I was again, this early morning?

I light
a small fire in the rain.

– Galway Kinnell, from “Under the Maud Moon”

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Abandoned granite shed. Hardwick, Vermont.

August Fragrance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My car stunk of shit when I arrived in Vermont’s capital city Friday afternoon, the debris from an enormous manure spreader I’d passed on a dirt road in Calais jammed in the undercarriage. Add to that, the fat stalk of garlic I’d nabbed from the school’s garden. I’d tugged it out to see how near (or late) to picking it was, and the pearly head, beneath the crumbling dirt I’d thumbed off, smelled so fragrantly delicious I decided to bring it home for dinner. Manure, garlic, and someone’s running shoes left in the backseat.

This past month, fierce thunderstorms have deluged us, and our piece of Vermont fluctuates between sodden and freshly-dried, smelling of wild blackberry vines and the pine bark mulch I gleaned from the town garage. Yesterday afternoon, my weeding interrupted, I read Adam Gopnik’s line in his article about Buddhism in The New Yorker – “…the things we cherish inevitably change and rot…” – which is likely the entire, unvarnished sum of human suffering.

The kids complained about the co-mixture of odors in the car – naturally. And, inevitably, I laughed off those complaints. Even with this early morning rain, I think we’ll swim today.

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Navigating Sans I-Phone

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before I bought this house in June, I’d spent a number of winter and spring evenings wandering around its exterior. The house was uninhabited then, and I very much wanted to know where the moon rose on this piece of land. Would the moon be concealed by trees or streetlights, or would Lady Moon sail up in her luminescent beauty?

Nearly twenty years ago, I became a sugarmaker about the same time I became a new mother – the work of both often accomplished in the wee night hours. In those years, I began to know Lady Moon in all her phases – round and crescent, gibbous, waxing and lessening. This house I began to love, in part, because of the rising moon view.

Last night, late, the moon was my companion as I read a book I’d found in the library stacks, Juliane Koepcke’s story of surviving a plane crash in the Amazon when she was 17. Her parents, an ornithologist and biologist, had taught her to know and love the jungle – and Koepcke credits both knowledge and love with her ten-day trek out of the jungle and into survival.

In the moonlight, I lay awake thinking of Koepcke, and how her story, in an odd way, mirrors that of the poor woodcutter who gave his children bread. Hansel and Gretel crumbled the bread behind them, in a vain attempt to find their way out of the forest and away from the wicked witch. Metaphorically, there it is again: the jungle or forest all around us. So many times, I’ve wondered what I’m giving my children to find their way home, when my daughters will be lost. I’m too much of a pragmatist to know they won’t be mired in thickets, in their time. (Just not too thorny, please. Just not too darkly.)

Foolishly, I’d never considered love a navigation tool.

I open my eyes, and it’s immediately clear to me what has happened: I was in a plane crash and am now in the middle of the jungle. I will never forget the image I saw when I opened my eyes: the crowns of the jungle giants suffused with golden light, which makes everything glow green in many shades…. This sight will remain burned into my memory for all time, like a painting…. I don’t feel fear, but a boundless feeling abandonment.

– Juliane Kopecke, When I Fell From the Sky 

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Gabriela’s rock garden, created on a summery day

 

 

Myriad Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These summer days, I often work at home, awake and drinking coffee while the girls slumber, and the sun rises and slowly steams off the dew from our croquet patch, the garden, and the town’s rusted metal fence and cemetery beyond.

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I walked into the sultry town for another of my meetings at the town library. Some rouge patron had plugged up the basement plumbing, so I shopvacc’ed the cement floor while librarian lifted boxes from the spreading flood. Then we sat outside in the sunlight, nodding to patrons, while she answered my questions about the little library I manage. One patron returned three books, including the novel I’ve written. I restrained myself from quizzing, What did you think?

At home again, in the late afternoon, my daughter picked handfuls of cucumbers from our small garden. While we talked, I made a savory dinner the girls love – peppers, onions, herbs, sausage, tomatoes, rolled into bread dough, coarse-salted and rubbed with olive oil. While the bread baked, we worked in the garden, the half moon rising through crimson clouds over the peak of our house. She was chattery and happy. I love the evenings best, she said.

Poem (As the Cat)

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

– Williams Carlos Williams

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Crossing Open Water

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My canoeing experience, while somewhat lengthy, has always been confined to summery, pleasurable afternoons, on Vermont’s still lakes and ponds, often with swimming and almost always with kids. Only once, on my honeymoon, did I worry our canoe might flip.

Oddly, I found myself on nearly those same waters in Lake Champlain this weekend, worrying again if I might roll the canoe. While the two cheerful and sunglasses-wearing 12-year-old girls waited for the ferry, I headed out to an island with a canoe loaded low with camping gear, not looking closely at the lake – a very large lake – rough with wind, torn up with the furled wakes of motorboats.

After I spun around, I gave myself a rapid crash course in reading the water washing near the low sides of my canoe, keeping my prow headed into the waves – those long curls might have delighted me swimming near the shore but frightened me with all this water around. The silver ferry passed by with my smiling girls, waving merrily in the sunlight.

On the return leg of the journey, after a few days of bicycling and card playing on an island magical with fiery sumac and twining vines, the water lay invitingly still, just me and the ducks and few gulls cavorting overhead.

It was then, on that crossing, that I remembered the children’s father and I had paddled in a rainstorm to this same stretch of beach, from an island further out, in a canoe we had borrowed from his parents that had no lifejackets. In a different version of my life story, I would have taken the ferry with the girls and he would have rowed the canoe – much stronger than myself and far savvier at reading wind. He would not have gotten stuck on the far side of the island as I did, and struggled against the current to round the rocky edge.

As I rowed, the lake lifted against my old red fiberglass boat, all that deep blue water, stretching far further than I could imagine, filled with darting fish and frond-waving plants, the shale-splintery islands, boats with white sparkling sails, sunlight profuse, with sunken ships and ancient fossils. I had been reading David Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry, filled with narrative and a collection of stunning poems, from Rexroth to Robinson Jeffers, a stonemason apprentice who built his house at Carmel-by-the-Sea, all about motion and change. Kismet reading for sleeping on an island. I imagined how the gulls might see me, a small woman with a braid and a wooden oar with a broken handle, rowing home with a basket of dirty clothes, crumbles of crackers, softening cheese, a coffee pot and an unfinished sweater on knitting needles. I could not have wished to be anywhere else than there.

On the mainland again, I unloaded the canoe and walked along the high bluffs, waiting for the ferry. The wind was picking up then, and the day, the first of August, was bright with promise. The grass could not have been greener. I read the heartbreaking memorial marked for the boys who had died in the Second World War and then leaned against a bent cedar tree, one small woman in a landscape beyond time, myself just one living piece of its infinity.

When I met the ferry, its captain asked if the two girls alone were mine. Yes, indeed, I said and walked onto the rattling gangplank to greet them.

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Ezra Pound, from Cantos in Hinton’s The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscapes

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