photography

Young Women

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My younger daughter collided with a basketball in practice the other day and returned home with a swollen lip. Her older sister, a tiger by nature, immediately asked if she should provide restitution. (It was an accident.)

Today, in her high school guidance counselor’s office, my teenager is all long legs, a combination of gawky and ravishing in her black parka and dark eyes. Like sparks, she emanates loyalty, desire, heartache, anger, joy. Yes, all this.

I’m reading the new biography of Emma Jung, and I can’t help but wince that this talented woman, like so many others, was under the “vaulting ambition” of her famous husband. As a society, we haven’t made it all that far from those days. How much I want for both my daughters not to bend under their future partners’ ambitions, and to expect with impunity equality in parenting and in creative fulfillment, to know that before we can demand justice anywhere else on the planet, our own relationships must at least be threaded with decency.

My fierce tiger, my mighty one.

If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms.

– Carolien Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want (Put this book on the required reading list.)

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Greensboro, Vermont

Winter Travels Near to Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We drove home through falling snow tonight – real snow – not ice, not grapple, not nerve-wracking freezing rain. As my kid and I wound up our steep dirt road, the visibility diminished to just a blue twilight, white flakes and road, and my windshield wipers.

That narrow vision mimicked my day – both parenting and working. In my twenties, I would have raged; now in my forties, I still rage, but at least I’ve figured out the value of endurance.

Working in Greensboro today, I stopped by Caspian Lake, scene of so many swims, beach chat, peppermint ice cream cones. On camp stools, three ice fishermen sat in the lake’s middle, beneath the open sky.

Winter solitude —
In a world of one color
the sound of wind.

– Basho

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Winter Sky

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Last evening, I stopped by Lake Elmore, summertime sacred scene of popsicles, barefoot children running over immense lawns, swimming and more swimming. My daughter’s happy birthday parties, the little girls in their flowered dresses.

8 degrees Fahrenheit under a half moon and scattered stars, Orion’s belt hung over the snow-covered lake, hoarfrost creeping up the crumpled remainders of weeds. Scraps of clouds passed quickly over the moon. After too many meetings and too much talking, I gulped the cold eagerly, my boot heels on the sand-scattered road the only scuffling sounds. Ancient, great-horned Taurus, the bull in the spinning constellations, hung above me, familiar and dear as the oldest of lovers.

… There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed….

Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

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A sunshiny bit of my world….

Early January, at Home

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the morning, driving along the Lamoille River and its flanking snow-buried farm fields, my daughter and I note the river’s ice buckled across its serpentine surface and speculate about its thickness. With this year’s early insulating snow, the fire department posts warnings about treacherously thin ice.

These days are long, beginning in darkness and ending in darkness, arcing over the eye of grayish light in the middle. Last night, our windows filled with spinning snowflakes, while my teenager and I held onto the day, talking, talking, our words swirling around each other, sharing our worlds.

Later, as the wind howled over the house, I read from my library book Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times – irresistible title.

Poetry is like the sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellow shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.

Jaan Kaplinksi, “‘Once I Got a Postcard…..'”

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North Calais, Vermont

Magical Realm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

As the kids and I drove into Barre, Vermont, this afternoon, the little boy in the back seat said,  I really don’t like Barre.

I’m with the kid, I’m reluctant to say, for reasons no doubt wholly different than the boy’s. We were headed to The Nutcracker, in the gracious Barre Opera House. On the way there, I drove behind the county courthouse, repository of windowless hallways and claustrophobic rooms, countless tears of human misery.

But I trusted ballet could rewrite my experience of that city, and the magical dance did not let me down. At the performance’s very end, high up in the balcony, I realized  – in what should be a, well, duh, moment – that ballet was all about the transformative might of imagination.

All the way home – and here’s yet another driving story, yet another journey – we drove on icy roads through the smokey blue-black twilight, and then arrived in our own home town with full darkness ringed all around, velvety and deep, and the village lights twinkling white. The town itself might have been the opera house stage, lit-up and beautifully arrayed for the holidays.

When I was twenty, I worked nights for a summer. I loved driving at night as a young woman; the darkness around my two Volkswagen beetle headlights felt ripe with possibility, and I believed myself invincible with youth. In an odd juxtaposition, nearly thirty years later, possibilities stretch out even more infinitely before me. Although I now know the illusion of invincibility, I think I’ve traded that for something deeper and far more valuable in those sparkling lights.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes, “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

– Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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While The Season Lasts…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was eight, my family moved from a cluster of townhouses to a rambling old house in a New Hampshire village. Behind the house lay tumbling down stone walls, overgrown gardens, and a great swathe of forest. Those third-grade autumn days – much like this one today – I stared through the classroom windows, longing to be out in those pine woods, building forts from fallen branches, lying on the earth still warm from the summer, so sweetly fragrant with fallen needles and hummusy soil.

Autumn is quintessential childhood.

This evening, my teenager leans out the door after dinner in the dark and insists we go for a walk. Along the dirt road, the crescent moon follows us, the air balmy, the light so clear the evening is a prolonged twilight. Three dim figures trail our heels: moonshadows.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky–
the moon seals it.

– Buson

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Woodbury, Vermont