parenting

Vermont’s Version of Singing Over Balconies

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The little boys across our dead-end street invite another little boy to visit. My neighbor and I stand with the visiting mother at the end of our road, talking, my hands dirty from weeding. Although I’ve now lived in this house for four years, and the book I wrote about living here is heading towards fall publication, I’m still happily surprised to live in this tiny neighborhood.

The boys, none of whom are even in grade school, discovered each other. During the pandemic, the boys began calling to each other from their yards. The visiting child lives on my neighbors’ other side, across a fairly busy road. The children called, What are you doing? Could you come play?

The visiting parent shares her story of moving to Vermont last fall, her family life jumbled up and rearranged in the pandemic, too, now jammed in a one-room apartment and struggling with the dearth of housing in Vermont.

The boys rake last fall’s leaves and bury themselves, bursting out of piles, laughing.

Bouquet of flowering violets spread around our house. Little bits of green buds burst at the ends of lilac branches. For this moment, happy children.

May Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I have my winter tires switched for summers. In the garage, I ask the owner how he is. He leans back in his chair, shrugs, and lifts his hands.

I know, I say, but it’s May. It’s spring.

He shrugs again. Which sums up where we are now.

May reminds us why we live in Vermont. The world turns gorgeously green. My daughters and I walk and walk, discovering trilliums, rushing streams, the tiniest of leaves. In a world where we’re all worn down, spring’s beauty reminds us that the world spins on.

From Diana Whitney’s lovely new anthology, You Don’t Have to be Everything:

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House Work

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

I’m not a subscriber to so-called retail therapy, but I’m not averse to paint brightening up my patch of the world, particularly when I’ve chosen a light blue named Innocence.

My amusement mystifies my kids, and, honestly, myself, too. A better word to describe our life these days would perhaps be Koan. But try putting that on a paint can and marketing it. Who wants a little more koan, please?

Instead, I buy a used bureau from a couple who has seen far better days, or so I hope, and offer it to my daughter. From our basement, I pull out the can of yellow Little Dipper paint I used for our living room. She paints it on our back porch. I lean against the railing, looking at the trash that’s blown over the railing — junk mail, a used mask, a cardboard box I’ve used for kindling.

A sparrow sings in the box elders.

I turn around and watch her paint. What? she asks, looking over her shoulder at me.

Nothing, I lie. I reach for the quilt I washed that morning, hung over the railing, and fold it carefully.

I save my love
for the smell of coffee at The Mill,
the roasted near-burn of it, especially
the remnant that stays later
in the fibers of my coat.

— Marjorie Saiser

Emerging From Quarantine

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my youngest was just over a year old and not yet walking, I was at a child’s birthday party around a pond. I sat her to play on a blanket. Her back was to me, and, after a while, a little girl ran over to me and said something was wrong with my baby.

My baby’s eyes were watering terribly. Before long, she seemed to have trouble breathing. A woman I had just met drove me and the baby to the ER. I sat in the backseat, talking to my littlest, hearing my voice speaking quietly, as if I was dividing in two. I knew I was terribly afraid, because I wasn’t panicking.

By the time we had reached the ER, whatever bothered her had passed. Although I had her tested for multiple allergies, this event never occurred. But for the rest of the summer, I felt as though a knife had sliced over me, shearing off some essential part of me.

The pandemic has changed all of us — both over a year, and in smaller, sharper pieces, as in my family’s recent case. The New York Times shares stories today of new lives emerging, reshaping and reforming. Of lives going on.

Hardwick, Vermont

April

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The wind chimes on our back porch tingle and clang all day and all night long. Spring pushes in not just with purple and pearl and gold crocuses, but with birdsong. 5 a.m., when I step out with a bucket of hot stove ashes, the robins are at it already, mating and nesting, busy with robin family-life.

I lie awake thinking of that window of time when my daughter contracted Covid, imagining when she might have let her mask slip, rubbed an eye with her fingers, the slightest of gestures she’ll never recall. Then I imagine the hours when she was contagious, before this gorgeous healthy teen said, My back hurts. I’m tired, and I closed my laptop, looked at her carefully, and began to worry suddenly, in earnest.

With my own two negative tests, the virus has (at the moment) passed over my body.

Snow falls, all day, on April first. We sleep with the windows cracked open, and I smell the particular damp scent of snow in the night. I lie there, thinking of the practical, mundane things of my world (as a single parent, could I get with it and write a will?) and the visible and invisible mysteries of this world. How I’ve tarnished and sullied the prayer of my everyday life, distracted by things that mean very little, while all along our days are unfolding, one after another, in their finite number.

The cats insist on breakfast. I stand at the back door, drinking coffee, watching snowflakes drift in a gray dawn, listening to NPR and a courtroom in Minnesota.

It’s another month. Despite the snow, spring edges in.

You’d better get busy, though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I’m talking about. You’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world.

— J. D. Salinger

Quarantining

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Every morning when I wake in the dark, I think, I’m not sick, a revelation that begins the day. Although I’m not headed out of the house, for any number of days, I’m up especially early these days, thinking of Salinger’s Zooey telling Franny not to fritter away the best part of the day, buddy.

It’s all jumbled up here, even more than the past year. I am so grateful my daughter isn’t sick, that she’s counting down her quarantine days not with pleasure, but with her trademark resolution, her will do, but I’m plotting my summer plans….

For me, it’s wait and watch, a negative test followed by another test, results in 36-72 hours. Over us hovers the thought: which way will this go?

I set up work on the kitchen table, then move to the back porch in the afternoon. My daughter disappears on a long walk through the woods. At the tail end of winter, we haven’t pulled any outdoor furniture from the barn yet, so I sweep the boards and lean against what remains of the railing broken by falling ice.

In the late afternoon, I’m painting the interior windows of my upstairs office when I see the town librarian walking up my road with two books she’s leaving for me. I holler down, Thank you! We talk for a moment through my screen, and then she’s on her way again.

Like the rest of the world, I keep listening to the trial in Minnesota. My daughter appears and leans in the doorway, watching me. I tell her I’m going to savor this quarantine with her, that we’ll be talking about it someday, years hence, when she has twins and a baby and I show up to change diapers.

That’s wonderful, she tells me, and you have paint on your elbow.

Thank you so much, my readers, for writing in. It means the world to me.

Kitchen office, complete with (working) cat and borrowed tortilla press.