motherhood

There is No Such Thing as Atheism.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

One of my favorite parts of our house is the small glassed-in porch at the bottom of the stairs, just large enough for two small loveseats. In this high school graduation weekend, we’ve spent a lot of time hanging out, talking, talking, the weather alternately switching from cold rain to sparkling sun. The cats sequestered themselves on the stairs while my daughter’s dog lingers around her feet. The dog wants to play. The cats cherish their dignity. The humans hover around this heartfelt drama.

Graduation and its platitudes… and yet the moment is such a pivot point, a marker between childhood and what will (god willing) be a very long haul of adulthood. Unplanned, the day spans the present, old friends I haven’t seen in years, and ends with a chess game with my brother at the kitchen table. Graduation isn’t weekend to solve anything, fix out the phone bill or shore up the back deck.

On this graduation weekend… the best commencement speech I’ve ever read is David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” gritty, savvy, and full of heart….

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive….

— David Foster Wallace

Loons, Wiser Than Us.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Back when my girls were in the early sand bucket age, loons were a rare sight on the lake. The grownups would knock off whatever chat we had going when we spied those distinctive birds — spotted backs, red-eyed. I grew up in New Hampshire and never saw a loon as a girl.

But even now, those calls — how eerie, how utterly mesmerizing, how definitively not of the human world. This afternoon, before a planning commission meeting and just as a little light rain begins, I walk over to that beach where we drank so much coffee. There’s two cars in the parking lot, people staring at the lake and the sky that’s bruised with storm. The loons holler across the rippling water. Vacation in Vermont and you might think summer is all sweetness and ice cream — but here’s a slice of cold rain, those two black-necked beauties, and an infinity of sky.

Remember.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Not long after dawn, under circling pigeons, we get on a train to the Rome airport. I’m nearly certain our tickets aren’t valid. My phone’s app shows me a mixed message of a cheery You’re all set! and a stern Seats reservations required! I can’t figure out where the tacky-tacky box to check to shell out for reservations might hide. The train car is nearly empty. My daughter and I sprawl out with our suitcases and backpacks. In a luminous honeyed light, the train winds out of Rome. We pass immense apartment buildings with balconies crammed with tables and chairs, hanging plants, yesterday’s laundry.

A conductor walks by, returns and holds out his hand. He speaks to me in Italian. I answer in the one language I command and point to the cheery sentence on my phone. The train picks up speed.

“Remember,” he tells me and disappears into the next car.

Remembering has always been my strength and my weakness.

As a girl, my family used to take the train from New Hampshire to Boston for the day, excursions crammed with cobblestone streets, swans, pastries, history, the ocean’s salty breeze. On this Italian train, my daughter, 17-on-the-cusp-of-18, presses her suntanned face to the window. Crimson poppies bloom along the tracks. Before we left on this trip, a friend told me the adage about pedestrians in Rome — the quick and the dead. Quick we are this morning, on this train with our baggage of wrinkled clothes, a few gifts, those library books I finished reading. A man stands on a sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, studying the train as we sway along.

The next morning, not smoking a cigarette, I stand beside an apple tree in my yard, studying a woodchuck who’s set up housekeeping in a den, the creature returning my gaze, eyes glossy, inscrutable.

Might.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Two years ago, my youngest and I quarantined for whatever the period was then, five days perhaps. I painted the inside window trim on the front and upstairs glassed-in front porches the loveliest pale blue. My daughter recovered quickly, almost instantaneously; I tested negative, over and over, kept painting and listening to the Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd, hours and hours and hours.

Soon after, I was vaccinated at the high school on a cold April day. It was snowing lightly, as it was today. I knew some of the volunteers who had come out of retirement to aid the state in vaccinating. Afterwards, I sat in the gym as we had been asked to wait. I sat near a man who I had worked with before the pandemic, before I changed jobs, too. We talked about work and kids and how our lives had changed, and we kept talking even after each of us had been told we could leave. I had plenty to do — oh, how there’s always plenty to do — but I lingered. Each one of us had our story that day that seemed filled with such quiet, such orderliness, so much hope.

My daughter was learning to drive that spring. She drove to spring soccer practice, and we sat in the car before one practice, listening to the Chauvin trial verdict. The geese had returned to the open river. While she played, I stood outside the closed town library. The bulletin board was empty of notices of events, as if time had dwindled to nothingness.

Spring: a mighty season. The earth will do what it will.

“Spring Snow”

Rain of remembering;
late snow turning to rain.
Then in the cold house,
alone in bed,
the soft stutter on the roof,
random phrases; your voice,
only your voice. How can
it be that voice that touched
me everywhere?
And what you said,
if only I could hear it again
in its intensity.
Essence distilled
in the moment of waking,
the delicate mold and odors
of the breaking apart of winter,
in the soft snow that comes
between the past and the chill
distillation, the whisper of air
split between the perfume
of melting crystals; the clasp
and letting go.

— Ruth Stone

No one owns the mud, either.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

As the snow melts, the mud comes up. A friend says, But it’s so dirty. I think, Bring on the dirt.

On a sunny afternoon, I disappear early, head out to those secret places where I know the redwing blackbirds sing. There’s nothing I can hold in my hand, nothing I can pocket to bring home and leave on the kitchen table for my daughter, no sign of where I’ve been or what I’ve done, save for the mud that sheds from my boots on the door mat. That, too, is my affair. I sweep it up and empty the dustpan over the back deck.

“Advice from Rock Creek Park”

What will survive us
has already begun
 
Oak galls
Two termites’ curious
self-perpetuating bodies
 
Letting the light through the gaps
 
They lay out their allegiances
under the roots
of an overturned tree
 
Almost always better
to build than to wreck
 
You can build in a wreck
 
Under the roots
of an overturned tree
 
Consider the martin that hefts
herself over traffic cones
 
Consider her shadow
misaligned
over parking-lot cement
Saran Wrap scrap in her beak
 
Nothing lasts
forever not even
the future we want
 
The President has never
owned the rain

— By Stephanie Burt

Buzzards. Robins. Writing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Turkey buzzards have returned. On this first day of spring, these birds fly broad-winged over the river, slow, slow, fixated. Late afternoon, I have a few minutes before I’m expected home again for daughter time, daughter chat. I keep walking and discover robins are singing in a tree behind the train station. A slight thing? No way. I stand there, listening, looking up at the treetops where the branches are still barren, months yet away from leaves. I can’t see them, but it’s robins, definitely.

The Sunlight Press was kind enough to run a short pandemic piece I wrote.

Greet the unknown. Much later that night, you’re reading Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in your bedroom when your daughter runs in, alarmed, and opens your window….