parenting

August Gloaming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The foxes that denned behind our house did not return this year. A neighbor who lives around our hillside shares that she saw a kit earlier this summer, and we speculate that the fox family set up summer quarters nearer her. It’s all speculation, neither here nor there.

Who has returned are the turkey vultures, roosting in the pines between our houses, reliable as the rain this summer.

Mid-August, and the kids are trickling back to school. A friend texts me that her son is headed into his senior college year. I remember when this kid was born. He used to come to our house and stand on a kitchen chair and bake cookies. In this soggiest of summers, still time unspools inexorably. In the evenings, we sit outside and watch the sunset sprawl crimson, the mosquitoes drawing drops of our blood.

The pollinators suck at my small garden’s calendula, gold and orange. A few years back, I sowed a few seeds. Gone wild, the calendula reseeded rampantly, nestling against tomatoes, among cucumber vines. I haven’t the heart or will to pluck a single flower.

It rained for three days straight, a relentless steady rain that kept up its monotonous rhythm day and night, there being no periods of waxing and waning or moments of imperceptible brightening…

— Mary Hays, Learning to Drive

Ordinary Contentment.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Standing on the street in Greensboro Village, a pickup truck with a trailer full of hay slowly passes by, creaking through the tight curve. In the sultry sunlight, I wait, a shower of chaff drifting over my face, blinding me for just a moment. As I close my eyes, I see one sunburned arm waving through the open pickup window at me.

June. There’s plenty adversity that happens in this month, I’m sure, but the roses are blooming, the fields freshly shorn and growing again, the fledgling robins already swooping from the nest.

Some lines from the incomparable Jane Kenyon this Friday afternoon:

High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Robin Survival?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

This is now the sixth year we’ve lived in this house. I count these years by June 15th, the date I signed for the house, two days before my oldest graduated from high school, the date the sellers took us out to lunch and I stared through the diner window, wondering if buying this house was a good idea.

On this sixth year, a robin family has joined us, building what appears to be a well-made nest, strands of straw hanging from roof rafter. The nest is beneath the porch roof, covered from the weather. The nest is so close to our house that the mother robin flies away whenever we open the back door. My daughters and I wonder, Why not choose a rafter in the barn? A good old-fashioned tree limb?

The robins’ destiny is, of course, neither here nor there. We didn’t make the nest, and whether this family survives is largely beyond my purview. Certainly, my curious housecats will not harm these young ones. Yet I’m curious as my cats, wondering what drove this family to our porch.

June. We are surrounded by a hungry world that eats wee robins. I’m rooting for these young ones, hoping they’ll pull through. Come what may.

Apple Blossom Petals Like Snow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

When my youngest was born, nearly 18 years ago, my brother had a new cell phone that had a camera. I didn’t own a cell phone then and didn’t predict I ever would. Who wanted to carry a phone around with them?

Turns out, my brother had forgotten his phone, anyway.

I could rhapsodize about how many phones and how many laptops have now passed through our house, the zillions of digital images and words, but really…

This is the most amazing blossom season. In the late afternoons, I read beneath an apple tree while petals fall, the pollinators hum, the spring crickets creak on. The first crop of dandelions has already morphed into gossamer globes of seed. How fast this passes. Sometimes, waking in the night, I get up and read. I am now beyond those baby waking nights, no longer so hungry to rest. Jays bicker over something I’ll never know. The day slips along.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair…

— Matthew Arnold

Paris.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A very long way we have traveled, the youngest daughter and me, stocking up on new sights of very old places, and now headed to dear friends.

In this enchanting, beautiful city, we drink coffee and walk until our heels are bloodied. This enormous world. On a rooftop garden, we discover a snail in a rainbow of blossoms, watch a wedding.

Small Citizen.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A few streets over, the neighbors are out with their little girl. She’s wearing a helmet and holds the handles of a pink bike that I’m nearly certain is new to her from the cautious way she thumbs the handgrips, as if still thinking through what this might mean. This alone is good news for this windy April day, a girl and her bike and an imagination sparking in her eyes. As I pass by, I wave, but the girl is in her world, and the adults are bickering about dog shit under the front yard’s single tree. I laugh because, well, what else? Been there, on both sides of that equation. When I return from the post office, the girl is making long slow circles in an empty street, the adults are leaning against a fence, sharing a cigarette, and the sun promises to shine all afternoon — cold, brisk, exactly what we expect in Vermont’s April.

And, for no reason at all, one of my favorite poems….

Citizen of Dark Times

by Kim Stafford

Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.
When things go wrong, do right.
Set out by the half-light of the seeker.
For the well-lit problem begins to heal.

Learn tropism toward the difficult.
We have not arrived to explain, but to sing.
Young idealism ripens into an ethical life.
Prune back regret to let faith grow.

When you hit rock bottom, dig farther down.
Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song.
Keep seeing what you are not saying.
Plunder your reticence.

Songbird guards a twig, its only weapon a song.