#raisingdaughters

Heron’s Return

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The snow’s back, keeping the population in Hardwick predictably low.

This time of year is both ugly and tantalizing — the trash bleeding up, the tree buds fattening, robins chittering. And yet, the snow lies ubiquitous.

What else would we complain about? a friend asks at a middle school concert. We sit in the very back row — she and her husband, myself and my knitting I take out of my bag, but no further. Quickly, we’re laughing, giggling, silly, admiring our middle school daughters, intrigued at their age and maybe a little afraid — so new, so new; everything about adolescence shrieks of heading over the nest’s carefully mudded wall.

Often, I think of Robert Frost’s line: In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. So it does. But, like anyone, I’d prefer life to go on better, rather than worse. So, perhaps, grousing about the weather is nothing.

Despite the snow, the lakes have opened up. The herons are back, their great wings cutting across the gray sky.

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What I’m thinking of….

 

Snippets From the Snowy North

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Snow falls on my 13-year-old’s hair as we walk through the falling snow. 13-year-old girls are empirically unable to wear hats. Ski helmets, sure. But hats? Get real.

Nonetheless, I ask her to walk with me. Beneath a pine tree, our neighbor’s streetlamp glows day and night at the end of her driveway, weirdly reminding me of the lamppost in Narnia. In this Vermont transformed to the otherworldly by so much snow might a faun appear around a snowbank? Has this neighbor left the lamp lit for someone? Or has she merely closed her curtains and forgotten?

We’re keeping tabs on the neighbor’s progress on his pale blue Honda. Before the storm, he’d removed the hood and laid it on a snowbank. With the recent storm, the car is buried again.

We speculate. Did he return the hood before the recent storm? Oooo, we hope so, thinking of the car engine open to 10 more inches of snow. Implicitly, we’re rooting for him, as if repairing this vehicle is synonymous with spring.

The Chinese junk
not stopping
moving on through the mist

— Buson

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Pre-storm….

Living the Dream—With Pie

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Twenty years ago, I was about to cross over into motherhood. I was incredibly curious to see my baby’s face, to meet this brand-new person who had been growing and swimming within me for nine months. Eventually, she was born via an emergency caesarian. On the table, my first flooding impulse, when the surgeon held up my baby in his gloved hands for me to see—even before the flooding relief that she was born healthy and well— was I know you. Her eyes were wide open. Across that cold and noisy operating room, she stared directly at me.

Twenty years later, so much living has gone down between us. Playdough and Charlotte’s Web, a million meals, diapers to driving, broken hearts and happiness: the stuff of life.

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Childhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

We drove to Maine and back on a Sunday, my older daughter sleeping in the passenger seat, stunned-looking from the night shift. We traveled with another driver and, true to my experience in Maine, pulled over a few times to consult whether we’d gotten lost or not.

At the end of our journey was an airy summer house on a blue puzzle-piece lake, and my 13-year-old, looking even taller, walking under the shady oaks to us.

A narrow wooden-slat bridge led from the shore to boulders in the water. The wind blowing over the rocky crest and the stunted pines growing from stone reminded me of climbing above tree line — one of our cherished summer activities — surrounded by terrific swimming. On the shore, the scent of sunlight on the sandy soil and the fallen pine needles reminded me of camping in the high desert mountains, so many long weeks of tent-living when I was a girl.

This usually quiet child chattered all the way home, about kayaking around the lake with her friend, the four pizzas they made for dinner one night, visiting a yarn store she knew I would love; about the snails her friend’s father gathered and she didn’t eat; about the fish he smoked that was delicious.

Then we were home again, to her cats and her chicken chores and her own bed.

I once described this child’s great strength as pragmatism. Like any parent, the jury’s still out on what she’ll cherish from her own childhood — in a terrible illustration of the best-laid plans heading south, her father has disappeared — yet she’s sunny and even-keeled, happy to be with these people, happy to have this summertime adventure.

Star Hole

I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star, watching light
pour itself toward
me.

— Richard Brautigan

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Opening Up

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On a muggy afternoon, my daughters and I swim in a cold New Hampshire mountain stream with my brother’s girlfriend. She suggests going to the ocean the following day. I see my younger daughter’s eyes — the quiet girl — gleam with love of ocean.

While I drive that familiar way back over the mountains back to Vermont and back to work, the girls and my brother and his girlfriend head the opposite way, east, to the sea. Later that evening, I read Louise Erdrich while the cats sprawl on the windowsill, watching a pouring rainstorm. In my garden, the sunflowers stretch far above my head, not yet blooming, their golden faces not yet opened up to the world.

The Erdrich book is her memoir of early motherhood. Watching the rain with the cats, I imagine my 13-year-old when she was three, picking colorful bouquets of zinnias in my garden for her two best friends.

At 13, wearing sunglasses and jean shorts, she’s so often savvier than I give her credit for, happily stepping into a wider world.

… with each celebration of maturity there is the pang of loss. This is our human problem… how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts.

— Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

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Maine/Photo by Molly S.

Need Chickens?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In this glossy month of May, a black pile of manure in the tilled-up garden surrounded by emerald-green grass, my 12-year-old suggests we need chickens. With previous owners, chickens lived in our barn for decades, so a home for chickens exists with nesting boxes. My daughter’s friends, many of whom have chickens themselves, say, Of course you need chickens.

Maybe it’s just May, season of sunlight and long days, of wildflowers blooming rampantly, of my soil-dirtied hands and dinner outside, maybe my memories of ice and dark winter are already slipping, since I say good idea, and like that, chickens arrive.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

— William Carlos Williams

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