#familylife

Flipping the Lesson Inside Out

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As part of my on-going museum fascination, my daughters and I stopped by the Burlington library today to check out a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about human evolution. Pointing to one panel, I (no doubt, tediously) explained to my 11-year-old about the progression of homo sapiens’ brain development depicted by a series of illustrations.

My girl pointed to a nearby rack of magazines with a crazy-haired illustration of our nation’s current commander-in-chief and laughed. We’ve progressed?

Which pretty much ended my history lesson.

We walked down the street for coffee and little cupcakes.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

– Charles Darwin

fullsizerender

Photo by Molly S./Burlington, Vermont

Out!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.

Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.

That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon-beholders.

– Matsuo Bashō

fullsizerender

Hardwick, Vermont

Largesse

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A full-throated sunny thaw yesterday. With laundry hung on the line, the younger daughter and I dropped off outgrown clothes at the Salvation Army where two volunteers pointed out blackbirds in maple branches spread over the back lot.

Wearing shorts and a white t-shirt, my daughter and I ate lunch outside on a bench, watching folks walk by in everything from summer skirts to zipped-up parkas. It’s that kind of season.

Later, my friend and I walked a dirt road into Hardwick, while the girls clambered over the chicken coop and threw snowballs at each other. The dirt roads ran with trickling channels of melting snow and thawing frost, catching glittering gold coins of sunlight.

There’s that old adage about traveling the world over to discover what you were looking for all those miles was in your own backyard. I’m grit-minded enough to acknowledge that yesterday an antique claw foot bathtub emerged upside down in our yard from melted snow. A ripped pair of outgrown jeans that fell from the clothesline last fall and froze beneath a snowbank bled bluely up through ice. The messiness of compost spreads near my garden. But our treasure is infinite, too.

I’m reading Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition now, a fascinating tale written by a Spanish conquistador. Again, the same story of desire and seeking, of gold and suffering. I can speculate how this short narrative will end…..

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise.

– Christopher Columbus

fullsizerender

 

In the Back of the Closet

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

All day long, streams have been running down our mountain; the road muddies and ruts, the crack in the cellar drips water, the doves coo. The urgency of thaw. Our world will freeze hard again, assuage, then clench with cold, pulling and loosening its long unhurried way into spring.

Patches of rain-sodden earth emit the hopeful scent of life releasing and breathing again. Surely, we’ll find coltsfoot in March this year.

Inside, boxing up ripped and myriad-stained coats, I find a leather jacket at the closet’s far back, stiff with disuse. No one lives in this house anymore who would fit into this jacket.

My sister and I, as teenagers, had a favorite phrase from TC Boyle’s The End of the World: “hard, soulless, and free.” A mother of a teenager myself now, I see how that line fits an adolescent, an emerging self needing a slick, fashionable shell to shield a tender heart.

All around us is the hardness of winter’s ice, and now simultaneously suffused with the streams running rapidly towards Lake Champlain, to where the rivers run north, to the distant sea.

I can’t help myself. I lift the cuffs of that jacket as though clenching the hands of the person who once wore that jacket, but that’s all; that’s it. I let the sleeves fall, and I step back out of the closet and shut the door. I’ll pass the jacket to someone else. Not today, but possibly tomorrow. If not tomorrow, surely before the thaw has bled itself out.

All night long, I sleep above the dripping in the cellar, from the cracks in the foundation poorly laid.

There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.

– TC Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

fullsizerender

 

Secret Chute

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

House hunting with my enthusiastic contingent, us adults stood in a dim basement yesterday, so cold we kept swaying from one foot to the other, trying to stay warm. Outside, the children tromped in the snowy yard, warmer in the sunlight than we were in the house.

In the basement, someone discovered a wooden chute, carefully nailed shut from the cement floor to the under boards of the dining room above. Intently curious, my friend pried off a board, and I peered up through the darkness where I saw a gleam of daylight through an ornate floor grate.

What the heck?

It made no sense to any of us, running through our logical possibilities.

In the end, blowing on my hands, I said, But it must have made sense to whoever built it. Look at the labor.

Upstairs, the children were laughing and throwing snowballs at each other, busy in their own meaningful kids’ work.

Whether I buy the house or not, we’ve spent serious time already, running palms over pipes, fingering up loose linoleum, rapping on old plaster, getting to know just a few mysteries of this old house.

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context.

Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic – and How to Get It Back

FullSizeRender.jpg

West Woodbury, Vermont

What the Heck is Figurative Language, Anyway?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On my drive to work, I wind through a spidery maze of dirt roads through Woodbury and Calais before I hit the paved County Road and sail into Montpelier. The drive, while long, is exquisitely lovely, changing from fall’s florescence to this winter’s sparkling white. Just after I hit the main road, I always glance at a red farmhouse to my right where whoever lives there has stacked firewood in a round pile, fanning out from a center. I always look to see if they’ve started to burn that wood yet.

So far, not yet. I’m guessing there’s a stash behind the rambling farmhouse, and those folks haven’t wanted to dig into this craftily-stacked wood.

Yesterday, driving on slushy and messy roads, a crow flew before my windshield right at that house, flying so near I could see its shiny eye, orange drape of tongue, a white chunk of breakfast in its mouth.

I once garnered those things as a sign of something, but yesterday it occurred to me that maybe the crow was merely hungry, flying in a hurry back home to eat.

Sign enough?

Surely.

I kept driving into the accumulating snowfall.

….Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles

but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.

So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.

Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy….

Sherman Alexie, “Crow Testament”

fullsizerender