#familylife

Frivolity

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My friend of mine mentioned his young baby had begun crying more. Hey, I casually mentioned, babies change. 

Isn’t Robert Frost’s line the one real piece of family advice – Life goes on – both through sorrow but also embracing sheer curiosity and joy? For a few years, we held Easter egg hunts at our house, usually pulled together at the last moment, in the sleep-deprived somewhere of sugaring season. This year, the younger daughter decided to flip the hunt around and have the grownups search for treasure, instead.

The kids are taking mastery of the terrain.

Spring fever imbues all of us. Children after school at my library yesterday were giddy and light-hearted. Round, mellifluous Lady Moon rose over the peaked roof of our house last night, shining over the diminishing snowbanks and running streams, the leaf-covered garden beds pushing up through the tenacious crust of what snow remains. The girls and I stood on the balcony in the balmy night breeze. Peepers are not long off.

Plenty of damp and drear will fill April Vermont days; it always does. But the mystery and miracle of spring has arrived. Our landscape changes.

How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves.

Rebeca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions FullSizeRender

 

Launching, Laughing (and Learning)

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Stronger than espresso, spring roars into Vermont this Sunday afternoon.

Busy, busy, those singing robins building their nests. Busy me, emptying ash buckets and raising mud-soaked pallets from a wood pile burned to cinders back in January.

But it’s the kids who are most fiercely passionate about their work: it’s the opening of the Trampoline Season, requiring a search under the basement stairs for a missing spring, socks with gripping marks dug from a drawer, a stepladder precariously sunk in a snowbank as a launching pad for jumping.

The kids intend to grow six inches taller this year. They have work to do. And they are out there, doing what needs to be done in the realm of childhood. Finally: spring is on board with their plans.

Here’s a few lines from my late-night reading:

Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks in a row – spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences – even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

– Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

 

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And Then This…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, in the early frosty morning, my daughter and I stood in her elementary school’s muddy parking lot, with no one around, in a brief pause between kids and adults coming and going. Red-wing blackbirds chorussed in the leafless branches of a maple tree. As long as I live, I can’t imagine ever tiring of that melody.

Even with the frost, the morning already smelled of thawing mud. We could sense the earth and its critters shaking off winter’s slumbers.

Like that: the light of April rushing back in. Spring.

….In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
time was endless….
– Louise Glück, “The Silver Lily”
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The Pleasures of Parenting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Standing in line at the DMV this afternoon, I recognized a local poet in the waiting room reading The New York Review of Books. As the line was long, I stood watching the poet and his teenage daughter converse about something in the Review. She wore high heeled red leather boots, laces neatly tied around her ankles.

Still waiting in line while my daughters walked around Montpelier in gently-falling snow, I remembered an article my own father had forwarded me about the name of the Buddha’s son: Rahula, which means fetter.

Like most parents I know, my life is intensely fettered, by some unnecessary things perhaps, but bound also by the everydayness of waiting in line for a license renewal, something on the surface overly simplistic and sometimes downright irritating. Yet when my girls walked across the marble floor of that office building, with snowflakes melting in their eyelashes, laughing at some joke between them they had no need to share to with me, I wouldn’t have traded these fetters for the moon.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

– Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”

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Here In Kid World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter sends me a photo via email with the subject line “Awesomeness.” How cool is that?

Yesterday, home after work, with dinner not yet made, and the house messy with potential buyers expected the next morning, a litany of chores from unwashed breakfast dishes to a fish tank bubbler needing repair, I first opened the box with my laptop battery. A $15 replacement I’ve put off for months.

The heavy lithium battery lay in my hand, and I guiltily wondered what strangers had made this toxic thing.

My daughter held the plastic bubble wrap. “Can I pop this? Please?”

I put her off, wanting to know if I’d ordered the right-sized battery, not paying any attention to my child at all, still thinking of my afternoon with its entanglements of adult problems.

From the plastic, she squeezed a bubble and held it up to the little lights in the house. Look through this, she asked. And then I’m finally smart enough to lay aside my jumbled thoughts and peer through her vision.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

R. L. Stevenson

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Photo by Gabriela

Squishy Season

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

‘Tis the season of mud in Vermont. I once had a neighbor (now relocated back to an enormous city) who hated mud. Her daughter and my daughter were both little then, with rubber boots and pink raincoats decorated with kitties, and the girls adored splashing in March and April puddles, digging with sticks in the ditches along our roadsides, and baking mud cakes in kitchens they built with fallen branches, on carpeted floors of pine needles. Sweet days.

The girls spent many more hours at my house than at hers, shedding their filthy and soaked clothes on our porch and sprawling before the wood stove to warm up, eating popcorn and drinking honeyed tea and giggling. Sweet days.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, “This is and no mistake.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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Burlington, Vermont