motherhood

Two autumns…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I leave the garden to do its final hallelujah of the season, the tithonia and sunflowers and cosmos fraying now, the basil still slipping into my cooking pot. September 11, the morning I stood in my sun-filled kitchen watching my toddler tricycle around the table, listening to public radio and wondering what was happening. My youngest was not yet born. Now, 23 years later, my daughters and I text during the debate. My cats are curled at my feet, in their usual, wise cat-disdain way, thinking their feline thoughts, savoring like any smart creature the warmth from the wood stove.

On my evening walk, I meandered the long way home. A half moon hung in the sky, sweet as maple pudding, so near I imagined I could reach out and lay my fingertips on its smooth sheen. Early autumn. So much more to come.

for me going

for you staying—

two autumns

– Buson

A real clusterfuck of thinking…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Hurrying from one thing to another, I detour to my favorite swimming pond, under these overcast skies. A woman and a little girl are swimming. There’s no one else around, and the woman and I chat about the fish nibbling our toes. The girl sits on a floatie shaped like a chocolate ice cream cone and looks skeptically at us, as if her mother and I might be making up everything. Maybe, in truth, our toes are bleeding from fish fangs. The child is taking no chances. She leans back on the floatie and stares up at the sky. Her mother gently pushes her from shore.

I swim out.

My head is jammed with the conversation I just had over Pad Thai, three of us women, about writing and Vermont and friendships, about money, of course, always about money, how money winds into decisions we make. These are old conversations, worked out in new ways. As I drift out in the cold water, I keep thinking about all the material I’ve been reading about rivers and history, about farming and logging hands on the land, 100, 200 years ago, how what made sense then (sense? perhaps even seemed downright innovative, bordering darn smart) has piled up over these generations of rivers, now dredged too deep, the roads and the towns built far too near.

Because my mind works in metaphors, I keep thinking how years pile up mistakes, one after another, a real clusterfuck of thinking. There’s no one else around in the water save for me and the mother and girl. They’re both lying on their backs on the ice cream floatie now, circling around, the mother’s heels trailing in the water. All those summer days I spent at the beach with my daughters, with plastic shovels and buckets, with the sleeves of red cups that I used at the farmers’ market back in the days when I sold homemade root beer floats, $2.75 per cup…. The kids are now all (mostly) grownup, as happens. Maybe those years were nothing more than a light way to pass the days, insubstantial as dreams.

I swim out as far as I can bear in the cold water. When I return, the beach is empty. Clouds have pushed down low, and the sand is clammy. On my short walk back, two bikers ask me for directions. Go west, I advise. That’s the way out of here.

Garden, fence, lilacs, vultures.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Last spring, a late frost ate the lilacs, death-knelled a young apple tree. Not so, this year. All morning, I work on the back porch, the pollen sifting over my keyboard and laptop screen, the scent of lilacs surrounding our house. May is the brand-new season of pea shoots and asparagus, of peony buds and bleeding hearts.

In the late afternoon, my daughter finds me in garden and salvages the fence from bedstraw and witchgrass. Our garden abuts a town cemetery, fenced by metal and lilacs. On this holiday weekend, the cemetery is busy. As we work, talking, we spy folks wandering through, some tending graves, others gathering handfuls of lilacs or wandering about some other business.

I’m at the early summer gardening place of great good cheer: so much is possible this year. My daughter — a grownup now, but a young grownup — works easily and happily. We’ll share dinner soon, feed our two tabbies, and my daughter will disappear with friends and her swimming suit. I’ll walk into the cemetery and, lured by the scent of lilacs, keep on for a bit. The turkey vultures, maybe a few dozen, will circle low over my head. Then eventually I’ll head down to the village, and the birds and I will part ways.

In these early summer days, I think about my mother all the time. I live in a house that she visited only once. I live a life she did not understand at all. And yet, as I scissor bouquets of lilacs to bring to a friend, as I stand barefoot in my garden deciding to sow sunflowers here, plant basil there, I know these are things my mother loved keenly: the lushness of blossoms, the vim to create a garden.

Boots on the Land, the Ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m meeting someone, late afternoon, who’s late, so I wait. The February sun has dropped into the horizon and clouds, and the day’s softening snow is tightening up, freezing again. I’m along one of the glacial lakes, a deep cut in the earth created by the planet’s unstoppable movements. It’s an old, old lake, not a newer pond formed by a human dam construction. Across from where I stand is the beach where I swam last fall, evenings and weekends. The water is shallow for a short stretch and then deepens quickly. My youngest had just gone to college. I would swim out as far as I could, then lie on the shore beneath the shaggy cedars, reading and watching the loons dive and reappear.

February exposes the bones of Vermont, the land’s steepness, the flatness of ice, the pale grace of a white birch in a hemlock forest. That afternoon, the stranger tells me a story of how the land was divided in families, re-divided and swapped, sold. Around this side of the lake, the state highway was built nearly on the water, and from here it’s easy to see the challenges of traffic and how the road hampers runoff from the mountains. It’s a familiar story that plays out in particulars in all but the wildest places.

On my way home, I stop at the town reservoir and walk a short distance over its ice. Walking on ice is always a kind of magic, a temporary thing. I don’t see the two bald eagles who live here: another day, perhaps.

A little chaos…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I call the mechanic back about my car who says it’s all good news, a replaced muffler, and the car looks fine.

Finally. Something repaired in the chain of a dying range, a done-in washing machine, my own washed-out and piss-poor attitude.

In one of the few sunny days I’ve seen recently, I’m standing on my back porch, listening to water dripping. We talk a little about the shitstorm of this decade so far, the election roaring up in nearby New Hampshire. He mentions he doesn’t know my political leanings, and I laugh. I’ve been writing him checks for years now, and I’m certain it’s no surprise who I didn’t vote for. But he bends our conversation a little further, kicking the standard gloom-and-doom away and remarks that we might as salvage some happiness in this life.

On this rainy midwinter day, I convince my youngest to drive north to a library in search of a Claire Dederer book. Here’s a few lines from the last chapter of Monsters.

Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason….

The Putting Back Together.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A coffee drinking companion, winding around at the end of our conversation, posits that our world appears to be unraveling. He notes that grass and dandelions break sidewalks: an act of defiance.

While I’m meticulous about certain things (keep mice out of the house, learn to use a comma), my garden this year obeys no orderly rules. Cosmos and calendula mingle with tomatoes. Amaranth reseeded among the dill and parsley. Forget-me-nots, to my great joy, blossom in random patches. I plant giant coneflower — Rudbeckia maxima — around my house. Have at it. Rage on. Rage.

End of August, the frogs and crickets keep singing. Overhead, a gibbous moon in the night, creamy light through roving clouds. Here’s a thousand action and more…. all alive, multi-faceted, full-throatedly in defiance….