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Watering Down Deep

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was a kid in the backseat of our green Jeep while my parents drove back to New Hampshire from our trips to Toledo and then often west of the Mississippi, Vermont was the final stretch on a very long journey home, and my mother claimed it was always raining in Vermont. It sure can rain in Vermont.

This morning, mist waters broccoli starts I planted yesterday, spinach and lettuce sowed for fall consumption. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by Vermont, with its infinitely promising green depths – what’s in all those woods? We stopped at a sugarhouse, and I was lifted up to peer into an enormous pan steaming with boiling maple sap, where we tasted hot syrup from tiny paper cups.

Later, as a young adult, I lived for years not far from that very stretch of highway, Route 9, all tangles and bends, some of which the department of transportation straightened out since then, some which will always reflect the jagged steepness of those mountains. I later possessed a giant sap pan myself, and served countless cups of hot syrup to children.

What does a kid remember from a childhood, anyway? While my parents were fighting exhaustion and worn-out windshield wipers, bending the atlas, their younger daughter was in the backseat, sowing the seeds of her adulthood.

In retrospect: could have been worse. What’s going on in my backseat, while I’m reading the map?

Raising children was not about perfecting them or preparing them for job placement. What a hollow goal! Twenty-two years of struggles for what – your child sits inside at an Ikea table staring into a screen while outside the sky changes, the sun rises and falls, hawks float like zeppelins.

Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

 

On the Footpath

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rain last night – cold rain in July. What about a sultry summer sunset?

At my parents’ urging, my 12-year-old and I watched Lion last night, and driving to work this morning I thought about how this is a story about home – about longing for home and what that means – a story that unfolds with secret after secret, all the way until the very last line.

Lion is a journey story, too. My daughters and I have taken so many journeys in these last few years, literal and metaphorical, that I might almost be tempted to lay down the journey fascination if traveling weren’t at the very heart of human life.

As my daughters grow up, now long past the toddler or little kid age, that cuddling, hand-holding phase, the journeys we each take get longer, deeper, more intricately complex. At the crux of our journeys, like everyone else on the planet our travels are inherently about ourselves and our loved (and sometimes unloved) ones. Same household, same parents: but each of my daughters travels a uniquely bending path, which at least has the benefit of keeping domestic life lively.

Here’s a few lines from my early morning reading, from Dave Eggers’ Heroes of the Frontier.

That only having left could she and her children achieve something like sublimity, that without movement there is no struggle, and without struggle there is no purpose, and without purpose there is nothing at all. She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion.

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Where we live now, Hardwick, Vermont

The Ten Thousand Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I always believed Vermont champion of summer iridescence, but Prince Edward Island glows, vibrant with a handful of colors: greens, blues, lupine purples, and all that red earth, tilled in tidy mounds and planted with potatoes.

Walking along the hidden rust-stained shore of a lake last night, the kids and I discovered glass and ceramic shards newly-broken and raw-edged, and scattered bits of glass already worn into cloudy sea glass. This particular stretch of sand was lavish with sea flotsam: human junk and the sea’s live and cast-off beauty – scuttering crabs and half-submerged tires and an enormous fantail of shells, some nearly too small to see, pearly white and gray and violet, discarded from creatures’ lives and breaking into bits, returning into the sand and the sea.

My youngest daughter remarked on the mixture of things, alive and dead, exquisitely beautiful and not at all. Bald eagles winged silently, fiercely powerful, through the sky, and we kept walking on all that sand, red as the desert where I was born, far away on the earth’s curve.

… simple evidence. That life is relentless, demands of us to take us the reins of life and drive the wagon.

Jeffrey Lent, Before We Sleep – early morning reading.

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First Train Tickets

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter entered nursery school at three-and-a-half, in a sunlit-filled Waldorf school, with a teacher she had known her entire life. Her teacher tied an apron around her back, and she happily sat at a table, with a wide brush and bright yellow paint. She looked up at me and said, probably very nicely, Mommy, you can go now.

I must have looked bereft, because the teacher laughed and told me I could go around the school and look through the window. I considered this. I actually wondered how deep the weeds grew there, if I was tall enough to look in, and if the children might see me.

I ended up sitting in the school’s courtyard that morning.

Yesterday, I was at the Montpelier train station with my daughter just about all grown up now, with her boyfriend and their luggage, and we were laughing and joking, as she sat there eating watermelon. In the companionable train-traveling way, a woman joined in with our conversation. On the open-air platform, listening to red-winged blackbirds, the morning was all green Vermont May and enthusiasm for their trip. Then the great silver train rushed into the station, they got on, and I was alone on the platform, watching the receding back of the train with its two lights, the horn sounding at the next road crossing.

I was quite sure they were still laughing in the swaying train.

In my youth, I took so many trips, packed up an old black VW Rabbit and traveled west, and probably thought little of my parents. But standing on that train station platform before heading off to work, already missing my daughter, I thought of my parents, too.

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

– Mark Twain

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Montpelier Junction, Vermont

 

Wedding Dress

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As little girls, my sister and I played pretend in a pink polyester dress and musty-smelling man’s dinner jacket and clomped around the house in my mother’s high heeled wedding shoes, with the implicit expectation someday our small feet would fit into those shiny and coveted heels.

For my feet, not so. My grown-up women’s feet are size five, my older daughter’s size eleven.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I believed in a 1950s-framework of a long marriage, two or three children primarily reared by myself as mother, a college education, and a stable and possibly sedate life. It was a vision of life I was doomed to abysmally fail.

While those values lay deeply in my culture, they weren’t particularly in my own childhood home. Unlike every other family in the small New Hampshire town I grew up in, my parents were happiest packing up our old green Jeep and camping all summer on the cheap in national parks west of the Mississippi River. We spent our best hours cooking on a Coleman stove with our kitchen stuff in cardboard boxes, playing Hearts by lantern light and reading used books at the picnic table. “Leave It to Beaver” is a concept I culturally grasp, but I’ve never watched an episode, and I’m willing to bet my siblings haven’t, either.

So when my daughters discovered my wedding dress while cleaning a closet the other day, marveling that its size will never fit either of them, I laughed and told them it was just as well. Each of them can stitch or discover their own attire.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is one that sings.

– Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage”

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On our way to a performance of “Little Women,” we took a detour. Hardwick, Vermont

 

No Boundaries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Annie Dillard in The Writing Life has these lines: One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time…. give it, give it all, give it now…. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Yesterday, Burlington was the city of blooming trees, countless petals strewn over lawns and car rooftops. The fragrance of freshly-turned bark mulch reminded me of playing beneath the neighbors’ rhododendrons when I was a little girl, and how wide and endlessly wonderful the world appeared then. As if everywhere I walked, something new and marvelously unexpected would emerge, like the word biodegradable, strong and full of magic possibilities.

At the end of a sultry day, I drove my little silver car home beneath charcoal-smudged clouds, through raindrops one-by-one illuminated by sunlight.

One flowering fruit tree alone would have been stupendous. I traveled from the lake through the wide valley, deep into the mountains, and arrived home where the apple tree before our house had opened its white and crimson-hearted blossoms while I was absent. The girls sprawled on the porch, waiting for me.

On the rain-sprinkled earth, we stood talking, inhaling the sweetly scented sonata of opening petal, damp dirt, ruby-throated hummingbird: summer’s largesse.

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