Road Tripping in the Back Seat

July 11, 2021July 11, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Yesterday, standing in a parking lot in the summer sun, waiting for daughter who had gone back to the car for her wallet, I started thinking how many pivotal scenes in my life have taken place in parking lots around the country, and how much just everyday living has taken place in these innocuous roadside places, too.

I remembered my father drinking kefir in a parking lot in Boulder, Colorado, and passing the bottle around to me and my siblings. Kefir was not then a common product in the New Hampshire village where we lived, and my brother and sister and I had never tried it.

With my first pregnancy, I labored in a parking lot.

In my twenties, I wrote about road trips because I took a lot of road trips, and road trips inevitably contain those fascinating moments where you step outside the car in an unknown place and look around, wondering where you are.

Now, in my early fifties, I’m sometimes in the backseat of a daughter’s car, still looking around and wondering where I am. The view is different here — I’m going to readily note that — but it’s a view worth having, nonetheless.

Happy Sunday, all.

(And, I’m still having trouble with WordPress’s updates. Send me an email, please, if you notice anything off, or have advice to give, too.)

July 1.

July 1, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

This photo snapshots summer for me.

I snapped this photo of my beloved daughter’s bare feet at a gas station, just before I had a conversation with a couple who had left Tennessee (brutally hot, they repeated) for the romantic life in Vermont. I kept thinking, but you haven’t meet Vermont’s January yet….

After so long, we finally had a full dinner table on our back porch yesterday, myself and the daughters and the boyfriend and my brother and his partner, all of us together with summer’s greenery pressing in — the domesticity of my potted plants and the wildness of box elder and cardinals interwoven.

Rain sprinkled, and we grilled steak and vegetables. Our conversation wound through drought, the pandemic and the Delta variant, QAnon, and my teenager’s job in a general store this summer.

Over the valley, I saw clouds darken, and rain broke again. Plate by chair by glass we carried in what needed to be covered, and kept talking.

Changing Worlds

January 29, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The cold, my old familiar friend, sweeps back.

Carrying out a bucket of hot ashes from the woodstove in the early morning, I stand for a moment in the gusting wind. Is snow falling or merely blowing?

Inside, the cats pace, hungry, then hunker before the stove, waiting for warmth.

Midwinter, our days unfold in an unusual patience, a kind of dreamy standstill, fluctuating between work and home for my older daughter and myself, and the new version of school for my youngest.

In Vermont, the Agency of Ed aims to fully reopen schools by the end of April. My high schooler asks me, while we make spicy egg rolls, what that means. Among all the things she doesn’t like about this mixed-up world, she’s come to relish the kind of collegesque schedule she’s managed at the high school, coming and going at her own will.

At fifteen, she’s composed and level-headed, determined to get done what’s necessary.

I tell her what I believe — that the world will not revert to the way it was, that our future is already unfolding around us, in ways we don’t yet understand.

I can’t tell her what I’m thinking — seize the reins you’re already holding and steer your own fate — because I know she doesn’t want my advice. Maybe she doesn’t even need my advice.

Instead, I scrape out the last of the cabbage from the pan and say, “Do what you need to do. This is your life.”

Outside, this morning, the wind chimes bang in the wind.

In the bleak Winter
When the World is one color
Is the Sound of Wind

— Bashō

Driving Lessons

December 10, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The dress my daughter wore in the photo below was a thrift-store find. A soft flannel, the dress was her favorite those years she was two and three. She wore the dress until it was above her knees. I can still remember how her bare knees fit perfectly into the palm of my hands, her skin suntanned long into the fall, often lightly scratched or bruised from playing.

At fifteen, now, she feels light-years beyond those days.

Here’s a piece I wrote about this summer when she and I switched places in the car, beginning, “This fall, my 15-year-old daughter Gabriela was at the wheel of my Subaru when I panicked….”

Rich

December 6, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Snow drifts down this morning, officially or not marking the beginning of winter. As always, the cats and I are the first awake in our house, the cats hungry for a bowl of food and then sprawling on the rug, satisfied, happy with the prospect of another day.

The first snowfall perhaps belongs in the realm of childhood, the magical enchantment of waking and realizing the overnight world has silently transformed into white. No one in our house is in the Land of Little any longer, joyous at the prospect of a zillionth reading of The Snowy Day.

Nonetheless — and despite the months ahead of Vermont snow — these moments of gust and flake and the wind chimes singing, the daughters sleeping, the cats purring, are, for the moment, sweet and silent.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural….

— Louis MacNeice

Tuesday

November 17, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

… one can either choose to live, or not. We have to tell ourselves a story that makes living possible.

— Katherine E. Standefer, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

And so we go on, telling our stories. My daughter returns from her one high school class on Monday morning, and tells me so many teachers were out.

I head to work, leaving her in front of the wood stove with her chrome book, the cats sprawled on either side of her.

At the library, a teen comes in and tells me he thinks the school will close soon. The teen lives on a back road and can’t drive yet. He’s a voracious reader. In the spring, he told me, he read everything in the house, then everything again and again, and finally resorted to Netflix. I tell him to take as many books as he wants. He fills a bag. When he leaves, I wonder when I’ll see him again. Maybe Wednesday. Maybe not.

And so we go on. I name our little wood stove Jenny.

Okay, my daughter says. She is part of our family.

Stay well.