love

Sparkles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The phone rings early this morning with news of the third snow day in November. Complex math and prediction skills aren’t needed to guesstimate that school for my 8th grader will drag far into June — sweet, rose-scented June. In late June, we’ll be camping on the shores of Lake Champlain in our annual, always filled with laughter camping trip.

I close the Chris Hedges book I’m reading — the book jammed with history and intimate detail — tug on my boots and go out to shovel. It’s so warm, I don’t need a hat or mittens, don’t even really need a coat. As I shovel, I think of Hedges. How right he is the political ramrods my own private family life, too, that the tangle of economics and autonomy and gender weren’t created within my four walls.

Snow falls very lightly, nearly imperceptibly in the light from my house. A whole day stretches ahead, but it’s beginning here, in this pristine beauty.

America was founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of self-serving fantasy.

― Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour

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Tiny Running Toddler

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A very tall father and his nearly-one-year-old daughter live across the road from my library and often swing by. Yesterday while I’m in for a board meeting, not really open, they swing by, and the little girl runs to me.

Not even 7 days ago, the small curly-headed girl was tentatively taking steps, and here she is now, rushing across our worn carpet, her smile radiant.

When my daughters were babies, I was amazed how quickly their nearly translucent fingernails grew, how rapidly a scrape healed.

Babyhood’s quicksilver, sure, but adolescence mirrors that age. My 13-year-old has changed so mightily in the last six months, in face and body, that when I arrive at soccer games and can’t easily find her — idiotic, that I can’t immediately recognize my own daughter across a field — her sister says, Look for the green cleats.

Really? I think to myself. Identify my girl by her shoes?

When I was a mother of a toddler, I would have found this situation sad, maybe even just awful, but — and this may just be a combination of worn-down single mothering and that my daughter’s busied her life with all kinds of great kid projects and friends — I find her endlessly interesting, like a blossom whose name I don’t know, opening petal by petal. Where are you headed, I wonder. Where are you going?

Because he’s so good, here’s a few more lines from Andre Dubus:

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another.

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Late Night Rambles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughters and I often wonder where our cat Acer sleeps at night. His brother takes turns tucking among our feet, or curling on our faces.

In the middle of the other night, I walked into our upstairs glassed-in porch, looking for a book. On the little couch there, Acer sprawled, wide awake in the moonlight. I bent down and rubbed his velvety pink nose, this little cat who needed his own private room.

Here’s a few lines from the late master, Andre Dubus.

So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers…. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth…. in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan…. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.

— Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels

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This Woman, My Daughter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

From seemingly out of nowhere, my youngest daughter asks me if Jesus really brought dead people back to life. I pause — there’s been no recent death in our family — before I say that might be possible.

What are miracles, anyway?

My daughters are two of the billions of people who have walked the planet. This morning, I woke thinking of my older daughter, 19 now, and the conversation she and I and my friend had last night, over dinner and knitting and the cats who played with the feathery toys my friend brought. My daughter is grown up now. Always headstrong, she’s plowed into passion and passion’s heartbreak.

The cliché for mothers is to mourn the loss of the tender, little years; this young woman and I share a whole remembered world together — just she and I — like the afternoon in her stroller when she was two and I pushed her through a thousand tedious errands in Montpelier, while she held three buttons in the shape of balloons — pink, yellow, blue — in her tiny fist. I had promised to sew those on her favorite dress. Her younger sister wore that same dress, with those same three balloon buttons.

Or the afternoon in a thunderstorm when she was four, wearing her favorite friend’s t-shirt with a frog on the front, she leaned over the porch and pulled out the neck of the t-shirt so a river of water from the roof poured down her face and body. Laughing: full of radiant joy.

Billions and billions. Over and over. There’s nothing simple about any of this. Not childhood, not growing up, not making a woman or a man’s life. And yet, here we are.

…. 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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February 14

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Ten years ago,  a friend drove to my house in a snowstorm, and while we talked and talked, drank tea and knitted, so much snow fell that, when she went out to clear her car, we weren’t entirely sure where the hood of her car lay under all that snow.

With a kind of seriousness, my daughter packs small pink boxes of candy hearts into her backpack for her friends. She gives me a box, too, and, in a Brach’s variation of Proust’s madeleine, I’m in grade school again, mesmerized by these hearts and a little mystified by the valentine exchange and what that might mean. I offer a tiny green heart to my daughter with the words Be mine.

Here’s a love song to Vermont:

To our Mother of Mud Season
(may she come early and be soon gone)
and the happiness of cows and the sadness
of meadows; to snow in April, and cowslips and marsh
rose and bulk-tank days, to serenity
and late-winter languor…..

From Tony Whedon’s “Things to Pray To in Vermont” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

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Woodbury, Vermont

Girls

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A mother I don’t know particularly well commented recently that she feels so old, seeing her daughter head off to college, and I thought, Really? While babies and little ones are darling and endearing, those so-intense early mothering years wore me down. Now, as my oldest blooms into her own young adulthood, I’m able to take a kind of pleasure I couldn’t when she was younger. Maybe it’s just me, learning how to stand back , or I’m beginning to accept her life is her own birthright, that my daughter is the master of her destiny – not me. Maybe, simply, I’m learning to elbow away perpetual fears and take joy.

At a breakfast of crêpes, my younger daughter read aloud the word of the day: oenomel: something combining strength with sweetness.

I laughed. That’s me, I said. Or least what I’m aiming for!

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

– Sharon Olds

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Hardwick, Vermont