raising daughters

Slouching out of the Teen Years

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This morning the February light shone with that clear and pure quality, as if it might endlessly extend, as far cry from December’s cramped miserliness.

Three nights running now, I found myself after midnight slouching on the couch with my daughter, talking, talking. If there’s any theme to my life and my writing these days, it should include both conversation and crackling woodstove. Domesticity.

I realized last night this young woman and I have entirely emerged from her teenage years. That’s it. All that angst folded up, as if in a fist. Our conversation is sometimes deep running, and sometimes merely about the daily pieces of our lives – who’s picking up the little sister, forward me that email, what do you think about tacos for dinner tomorrow – the day-to-day stuff that comprises our lives. Breathe deep.

Here’s a line from early morning novel reading, one of Obama’s recommendations.

He told her that every one of her enemies, all the masters and overseers of her suffering, would be punished, if not in this world then the next, for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.

– Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

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Keeping the Roof Intact

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other night, my daughters began shouting in the other room. In what I can best describe as my attitude of what fresh hell now? I asked what was up.

A raccoon was climbing up our cedar-shingled house in the dark. Which might fairly well explaining living with kids. Expect what you could never expect. Say you’re deep into an Elena Ferrante novel and you realize a mole has scurried out from behind a kitchen cabinet and is now in the sink, checking out an unwashed dinner skillet. Where is that on a day’s plan?

We trapped the mole and released it down the road (at the neighbors’ driveway), and the girls determined the raccoon tracks led into the sugarhouse and didn’t come out (fine).

The younger daughter and her friend ran into the house yesterday and grabbed ice skates. The roadside ditches were frozen perfectly for ice skating.

This afternoon is filled with sunlight and lemon meringue pie baking. How’s that for poetry?

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will.

– Epictetus

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Talented Kid

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Ever since the holidays, I’ve noticed the same boy riding a unicycle to the Main Street Middle School as I drive through Montpelier on my way to work in the mornings. The cycle is fat-wheeled, sensibly built for Vermont’s rugged terrain. I can see concentration tight on the boy’s face, as he cycles down the steep hill, wearing a helmet and a winter coat, pack on his back.

The boy is maybe eleven or twelve.

Although I don’t know this boy at all, I find myself looking for him on the sidewalk, admiring his tenacity as – at five degrees fahrenheit the other morning! – he pedals down that uneven, icy incline. I imagine him arriving at school, triumphantly cherry-cheeked, hoisting his one-wheeled steed over his shoulder. As I go into my own day, I wonder what kind of man he will become, this hearty, focused, child unicyclist.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind. 

– William Saroyan

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A Fierce Heart

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Years ago, the house we lived in had an enormous King stove, about as ugly as could be with a rust-colored shield. When that stove threw off BTUs, its damper clicked like a mouse in a live trap, rattling.

I once owned a terrible round coal stove I used for wood. Its damper sometimes slipped loose, and I feared that stove would burn down the house. Eventually, that stove was donated to the scrap yard.

Now, cold as my house is around the edges, with too many doors, recycled and unweatherized windows, far-from-well-done insulation, my stove burns its mighty heart, truly keeping my girls and myself alive in these wintry nights. Of the few objects I hold most dear – my cast-iron skillet, laptop, garden shovel, knitting needles – this stove, its brass-handled door so familiar in my hand, is my dearest companion these days, place of succor.

Around our house lies sugary white, sprinkled with a wavering trail of black ash, but inside is glowing red and yellow, flames laced at the edges with blue.

….Oh, now I sing praises to a wood fire,
to the heat this smoky burning liberates,
the heat that keeps us warm all winter.
Oh, praise this primordial fire, praise heat
in its most basic form:
the blessed warmth that comes from
our old, wood burning, Round Oak stove.

– David Budbill, “Ode to Fire, Ode to Heat”

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Photo by Molly S.

Ancient Arts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh, Vermont community! Young and older women came out on a cold morning to my library for knitting lessons, with bags of yarn, needles, questions, and a lot of desire. At the end, a young woman who had capably learned the three key skills – cast-on, knit, purl – smiled and said she hadn’t believed she could ever learn to knit. But I so wanted to, she said.

One of the things I love most about knitting is its communal aspect. Begin knitting and the world of knitters will come to you, drawn to the creation your fingers are spinning from yarn. Write a book, and you remain in your own solitary interior world, but cast on some stitches, brew a pot of coffee, work and chat. Creative counterbalance.

One likes to believe that there is memory in the fingers; memory undeveloped, but still alive.

– Elizabeth Zimmerman

 

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My 11-year-old daughter’s life skills

2017

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Vermont, the winter is ubiquitous and possibly unending now. Fresh snow falls frequently, and all day yesterday the children were in and out of the house, hanging snow pants and mittens and hats clotted with snow to dry beside the wood stove.

Last night, driving through the tiny town of Lake Elmore, I pointed to a glowing line of lights on a hillside, and mentioned to my teenager that I wondered who lived there.

She answered, “It’s obviously a merry-go-around.”

This is a terrific thing about having a teenager – despite the crabbing or the exhausting insistence that life should be fair when of course fairness is not a universal principle – teenagers are simply fun. Why shouldn’t there be a merry-go-round in rural Vermont? It’s possible.

So, beginning another year, I’m bending toward brighter possibilities. Maybe that line of lights was nailed up to outdo the neighbors, or maybe the lights were bought by a teenage girl and her sister with money they earned, to illuminate their house, or maybe it is a carousel spinning around, welcoming in 2017 with music.

Bless this my house under the pitch pines
where the cardinal flashes and the kestrels hover…
Please, no foreign wars.
Keep this house from termites and the bane
of quarreling past what can be sweetly healed….
mostly keep us from our sharpening fear
as we skate over the ice of the new year.

Marge Piercy, from “On New Year’s Day”fullsizerender