parenting

Being a Child

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Later in the summer, when the gardens are overrun with weeds, and cucumbers and string beans need to be picked from sagging vines, and the days are long with children swimming, and smoke hangs in the air from cooking outside, there’s often a point in the late afternoon when the world seems just a little much: that so-called witching hour mothers of babies know. We’ll move through that hour, through dinner and dishes, and washing up, and the cool leisure of evening comes in.

But now, in the spring, the world is yet at that new place. The weeds are nowhere near knee-high, and the warmth is as welcome as a novel in my hands I want to read.

I imagine this is how childhood should feel.

…And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams…

– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

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Montpelier, Vermont

Reasons to Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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The Little Hermit Thrush

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Around my garden, hermit thrush are nesting for the season, singing their enchanting melodies, amazingly pure and piercing sounds from a bird so small it’s a handful of feathers and bone. The thrush is not a songbird from my childhood. As an adult, backpacking along the spine of the Vermont’s Green Mountains and sleeping outside, I first heard these unmistakable notes, and here, at this house on the edge of forest, these birds became my companions.

Now the thrush’s song has been a litany through my adult life, from before I become a mother to watching my children grow up. The birds lived here before I planted a garden, and no doubt will remain, long after my work with a hoe and spade have ceased.

Morbid? I don’t think so. There’s a real grace to be gathered here, listening to these symphonies of tiny songbirds – admission gratis. These mating calls are an audible tapestry that renders time not so sparse and dear but stretches it out into an immense arc of infinity. Sing on!

Nothing’s certain….

Watching, we drop to listen,
a hermit thrush distills it: fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end what source
links to wonder….

– Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”

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Woodbury, Vermont, twilight

 

Break That Cliche: Writing Lesson from the Kids

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My ten-year-old came downstairs the other morning dressed in shorts although it was only 39 degrees. No. I immediately said. But it might warm up, she insisted.

In this afternoon’s rain, the kids have headed down the road to the neighbors’ trampoline because it’s fun in the rain, apparently, even in a cold May rain.

These Vermont kids, like the unfurling leaves in my apple trees, are vigorously unstoppable with their own flowing sap. At ten and eleven, the world is as new to them as this magnificently unfolding spring. Lacking rigid expectations, why not leap in the rain? – Although I did notice the girls had the foresight to pull on extra pairs of socks.

 

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.

– Federico Garcia Lorca

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Vermont dusk

Prayer for A Little More Kindness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning at my daughter’s elementary school, the littlest kids shared their work and ended singing a country western song together. I’m no particular fan of country western, but listening to these small kids sing, I realized this song was really a hymn, a prayer for children to retain their sweet and noble natures.

The share had begun with stories the children had written, envisioning their grownup lives, but the song took the children’s stories to a different dimension, mixing qualities of the heart with their written projects. Maybe some of these kids will never remember this song, but my guess is more than a few someday, in the midst of their own unexpected (and hopefully marvelous) adult lives, will remember singing in their kindergarten classroom with real fondness. 

Am I still kind? Humble? Do I yet have the better part of who I am? Then again, maybe this song is really an adult prayer.

…When it’s hot, eat a root beer popsicle
Shut off the AC and roll the windows down
Let that summer sun shine
Always stay humble and kind
Don’t take for granted the love this life gives you…

– Tim McGraw, “Humble and Kind”

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Photo by Molly S.

Good News for Friday?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

After a hellacious week involving, among other things, painful injury, dire disease, divorce, despair, and unforeseen car repairs, I find myself reading my horoscope in the local paper, looking for good news.

There are potentially important messages you’re not registering and catalytic influences you can’t detect…. Now here’s the good news: You are primed to expand your listening field. You have an enhanced ability to open certain doors of perception that have been closed. If you capitalize on this opportunity, silence will give way to revelation.

That advice is some of the best I’ve received in quite a while. Children, quiet, please; I’m listening for revelation. While I’m doing that, please go pick up your socks or something.

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Greensboro, Vermont