female

Snow, Yarn, Patterns.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Snow notwithstanding, the temperature is solidly spring for January. My neighbors and I stand at the end of our dead-end road, talking about the escalating price of food and raising kids, the random things that three tired parents share. It’s not cabin fever, not a chafing against the cold, not the dreariness of winter gone on too long. It takes me a little while to figure out what it is, and then I realize it’s nothing more than simple camaraderie.

So here’s the thing about knitting — I resisted knitting for so long because I considered knitting old-lady-ish, an occupation for those who had nothing better to do. Oh, how those sentiments smote me now. Sure, men knit, but knitting is generally the terrain of women. At work the other day, a stranger asked me about a fair isle sweater I had knit. Without thinking, I pulled off my sweater, flipped it inside out, and laid it on my desk. The two of us talked tension, seaming, yarn. Cables. The pleasures of putting your hands to wool.

“No two people knit alike, look alike, think alike; why should their projects be alike? Your sweater should be like your own favorite original recipes — like nobody else’s on earth. 
And a good thing too.” 

— Elizabeth Zimmermann

Quiver of Arrow-Words

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My daughter’s friend offered a solidarity sentence about her friend at lunch today: The friend was irate. There had been a squabble about seating, and the allegedly irate child sat with her back toward another. While I’m not a fan of children hurling ire at one another, I admired the girl’s satisfied ten-year-old pleasure in using this mighty word. I pictured this girl with a bow held tight between her hands, arrow strung tight and ready to fly.

What is it a girl might need in her quiver of arrow-words? A child will need tumble and sungold-tomatoes, milk, and mirth. A woman needs moxie, wariness, appetite,
wonder, sorrow, and mirth.

No history books used in public school informed us (girls) about racial imperialism… No one mentioned mass murders of Native Americans as genocide, or the rape of Native American and African women as terrorism. No one discussed slavery as a foundation for the growth of capitalism. No one described the forced breeding of white wives to increase the white population as sexist oppression.

Ain’t I a Woman, bell hooks

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Wild Strawberries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I received a book of poems in the mail today, and the little girls asked me to read one to them.  Sure, I said, glancing through.  But these are not children’s poems; these poems are smeared with blistering rage, with grief and bloody childbirth.  Feminist poetry?  Or women’s writing?  In what way or what domain is that limited to the female gender?

This evening, the children and I – two girls and a boy all ten and under – walked down the neighbors’ field, a great long stretch of it, the children running ahead of me.  At the bottom, the children knelt and picked wild strawberries, the largest the size of my thumbnail.  Crimson and sharply sweet.  I lay back in a fold of the earth under the blue sky swirled with curled bits of cloud.  All around us, Indian paintbrush was knotted in buds, so I watched the children through waving green stems topped with bits of gold.  My daughter gathered a whole handful of this tiny fruit and offered me the largest.  Mama, try.

Biting a minuscule seed between my teeth, I thought of those poems, my secret stash of nighttime reading.  More than anything else, bearing and raising my children has shaped my life, and so, perhaps, those poems, with their raw grit and embrace of the female body, are women’s writing.  Perhaps the limitation is my fixation, when, instead, the word should be possibility.

female

there is an amazon in us.
she is the secret we do not
have to learn.
the strength that opens us
beyond ourselves.
birth is our birthright.
we smile our mysterious smile.

– Lucille Clifton

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