parenting

Travels through Time. Along the River.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Write a novel and, at some point, you’ll start henscratching or typing notes about when the protagonist moves from reaction to action. Why not think of your life as a novel you’re writing?

I drove down the long center of my Green Mountain State yesterday to return to Brattleboro, where I lived for years as a college student (so long ago). I bought my first car for $500 in Brattleboro.

For the drive, I had one rule: stay off the interstate. I began through the chain of towns I know, Montpelier and down through Northfield and Brookfield, along the Dog River. I headed up through a pass where the snow returned in clots along the road, and where trailers were surrounded by old cars and pickups, the kind of stuff that someday might be used. The forest flattened and gave way to fields where barns were built nearly in the fields. I drove through upscale Woodstock and the burned-out industrial buildings of Springfield.

Southern Vermont was like a magical dream — sunlight streamed over blooming daffodils, forsythia spread bright yellow, emerald green paired with black earth.

I met an old college friend who works at Everyone’s Books on Elliot Street. Thirty years ago, I lived right near that bookstore, and I spent a lot of time there. We exchanged thumbnail stories about our lives and kids and work and exhusbands and books of course. My book was in the front window of the bookstore, and she told me it “had been selling like hotcakes” — utterly gratifying.

In a park, I pulled out my laptop and wrote up a few notes. As I headed back to my Subaru, my friend Sean Prentiss walked towards me. He lives just a handful of minutes from me and was meeting his lovely family for a few days in Brattleboro.

I went to Brattleboro to meet friends from my past, and I met a friend from my present. Put that in as an interesting plot point.

On the way home, I listened to This American Life about babies switched at birth. I’m an TAL devotee, and this episode is especially fascinating.

Breaking Ice.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On a midday walk around the lake, I hear bits of breaking-up ice crash against a cement pier. Vermont spring — ice and green shoots, rain and rouge snow and sometimes sun.

This time of year — school break and tail-end-of-winter doldrums — many folks have flown to warmer and sunnier climates, seeking the old stand-by of the geographical cure. Around the lakes where summer folks own the large houses, hardly anyone is there, save for carpenters and roofers and painters, their pickup trucks clustered in driveways.

But the lake keeps on with its own steady world, the fierce ice gradually giving up its ghost. By the time these summer folks return, the water will have warmed again. For now, though, ice clinks as it breaks apart.

I tie my long hair back with a rubber band I found in my coat pocket. The breeze carries the damp scent of the earth, the dream of unfurling leaves, the memory of children crouched among the cedar tree roots, playing.

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day.”

~ Robert Frost

Mudding Nests.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Heavy snow falls this morning. My little cat sits at the back door, staring up at flakes swirling down through the porch light. The snow is dense and sopping wet and won’t last long. It will drive out the green that is already bursting through the tips of branches. Nonetheless, the damp eats into us. I’ve foolishly let the wood stove go dead. When I kindle a fire, the cats return, satisfied again.

Around us, there’s a raging dissatisfaction. The pandemic continues to unwind, and war rages overseas in the most sickening ways. My teenager asks with adolescent scorn what’s up with the human race, anyway, as if I’ve had a major role in shaping eons of stark unfairness. I toss the conversation back to her: you’re a piece of this human pie, too.

I long for heat and beach sand.

In the meantime, the great world spins on. The snow will melt by midday. We keep on.

Nature teaches nothing is lost.

It’s transmuted.

~ Laura Grace Weldon

Wildflowers. String.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Five Aprils ago, I was looking for a house for my daughters and me. In a nearby town, on a weekday afternoon, I climbed over a chainlink fence separating an empty house from a town cemetery. The fence spikes ripped the back of my leggings. I was on my way to the library where I was working, and I wore those torn leggings for the remainder of the day. I still have those leggings. I wear them when I paint, and they’re now stained with patches of lemon yellow.

When I walked behind the house, I discovered tiny blue quill — spring flowers I didn’t know. The house was surrounded by those flowers and the promise of profuse lilacs in June.

I bought the house in 2017, although it wasn’t until the pandemic nailed down that the house began to feel truly ours. We are not a rowdy family of nine. We are a family of three and now two housecats.

The thing about spring is — turn around and it’s there, quietly, blooming in some unexpected way.

Look at the silver lining, they say.

But what if, instead,

I pluck it off

and use that tensile strand to bind

myself to those things I do not 

want to lose sight of.

“Notions” by Paula Gordon Lepp

Mixing Memory and Desire.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Note the wood smoke from our chimney….

Note this photo was taken yesterday afternoon, when I walked outside and nearly froze the soles of my feet. Note snow surrounded our house this morning….

Note that spring comes hard, hard, in Vermont. Jumping the starting block a few days, I keep thinking of T.S. Eliot’s lines:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

dull roots with spring rain.”

The first time I read these lines was in high school, digging into the poetry stacks in the school library, mesmerized by lines like Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky….

Later, later, spring will bloom in all its tender-petal beauty. But for now…. T.S. Eliot knows the score in Vermont.

Next Steps.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A fierce year for mud in Vermont — the schools send home notices that the busses cannot run. My friends in southern Vermont live in a town where the schools have closed up for a few days. Heck, why not? A basketball game has spread Covid around through the community again, anyway.

Back from my visit to my parents in New Mexico, I work long days, catching up. On the phone with a stranger, I share a little of my trip, and he tells me about his mother. Listening, I stare through the window at the snowflakes fluttering down, little spits of flakes swirling in a gray sky. Then he clears his throat and advises me on my next steps.


Pain Management
by James Silas Rogers

One day, in your forties or fifties,
you will start to think that life is turning
into a long string of small extinctions.
You will feel the word gone rise inside you
and might even say it aloud, quietly, the way
you would say it if the house had been robbed
and, months later, you reached for an item
you never knew was missing, thought had been
in a drawer the whole time: Gone. Add these
to the workaday wrong turns you half-knew
were coming from the start-you know: the shy
girl with trusting eyes with whom
you did not sleep, the dad who let you down—
and you will begin to think that if you started
crying now, you might never be able to stop.
But that doesn’t happen.
What happens instead is you make a cup of tea.

You sit on the front porch, and there you look
at spindly asters on a September afternoon:
flowers with ragged edges that are barely petals,
a color from somewhere down the spectrum
after blue-the same blue of cold skies
in early winter. And behind them,
the deep green of bloomless morning glories.