#raisingdaughters

Heart in the Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my husband and I bought our first house, I intended to live there forever, unpack my two cast iron skillets, have a couple of kids, dig a vast garden, and stay. Then there’s that Robert Burns’ line John Steinbeck retooled, and maybe I should have reflected that line might encompass the lives of women, too…. The best laid schemes of mice and men…. and so on.

Luckily, what I perceived as plans awry has evened out – at least for now. Intrepidly exploring the terrain of where we’re living, I realize, again, just how corporal our lives are, how the angle of light through the kitchen window – whether wide open or filtered through mist  – shapes the kernels of our days. Walking through the dusky forest with three girls last night, the muddy path surrounded by August’s copious greenery was all alive, alive: pencil-thin snakes, slugs, a darting rabbit, Cooper Brook running over its pebbles, shallow and clean. As we entered a field of goldenrod and chicory, crickets sang wildly, lusty in the heat of summer.

Simultaneously, I’m re-entering the landscape of the heart through my own daughter stepping into her young adulthood. What a bodily world is love. Those well-made schemes? Perhaps that’s what makes our lives so fascinating – our clever designs, and the universe’s unfolding and rearranging of our blueprints.

A summer river being crossed
how pleasing
with sandals in my hands!

– Buson

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First Star I See Tonight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Dislike of burning fossil fuels notwithstanding, I love driving through the White Mountains, this journey from my brother’s house to mine. Last night in the crepuscular light, my feet wet in sandals from kayaking, my 12-year-old daughter quiet beside me, we wound through the granite mountains as dusk fattened into dark.

Just before we left, my brother and I walked through his house, talking, feeding his dogs leftover bits of dinner. My brother remarked how much he remembered this one particular hike we took as kids on countless Saturdays: in black-fly spring, humid summer, autumn’s splendor. We saw a snowy owl, an opossum in a tree hanging by its tail, scads of wildflowers, a few other hikers.

Driving through that gorgeous sprawl of granite and forest, white-clapboard towns and curvaceous river, with the sky morphing from blue to onyx by our evening’s end, my daughter and I talked about little things, her hands around glass my brother had given her from his brewery. Playing music from her teenage sister, she asked if I knew a particular song she didn’t: AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. Sure, I knew that one.

Through all the other junk in my head, I realized about the time we saw the first single star poised over a St. Johnsbury steeple that the infinity of childhood hiking – through days laughingly glorious and those heartless ones when we bickered and were terribly out of sorts – braided in one long inseparable whole, as sacred as I’d ever get in this earthly realm.

Will my daughters, looking back on their childhoods filled with both love and grief – as we all come to, in some variation of measure or another – see the same? Perhaps that actually may not matter. Maybe the journey together will be sufficient.

that midsummer night…
the cold moon
fills my whiskey glass

– Chenou Liu

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Sacco River, New Hampshire

 

 

Sunny Skies

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last year, my daughter played her snare drum in Hardwick, Vermont’s Memorial Day parade; afterwards, a pragmatic child eyeing years of marching band ahead, she traded in the heavy drum for a skinny clarinet.

In one of the best small town rituals, just about everyone I know attends the parade and festival afterwards, on the dandelion-studded field with a sagging-roofed granite shed at one side.

Years now into this town and these people, from the summer days when I had a baby in my belly to now, when some of these once-upon-a-time little kids head into their own travels, what emerges clearer and clearer to me is the muchness of our lives, my own family story linking through the tales of others, each of us with our own unique desires for a patch of earth and a well-built home, the latitude for creativity, the comfort of kin, the nectar of happiness.

In this day commemorating profound sadness, early summer is best begun by vanilla ice cream, a rainbow sheen of soap bubbles.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

– Henry David Thoreau

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Living the Dream

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My friend’s mother has a phrase we repeated when we dwelled in the Realm of Raising Toddlers: after happiness comes tears.

After playing with sand, a spat over ownership of a small red shovel – as if the earth’s continued rotation depended on who held that plastic scoop.

Yesterday morning, I passed my friend’s once-upon-a-toddler driving his Toyota with two bicycles strapped on the roof, while my once-upon-a-toddler drove the opposite way in her Toyota, heading to her final days of high school.

We are long past the short, declarative sentences of small children, deeply into the lyricalness of years upon years unfolding. Punctuation is an illusion – toss it out and let the days and nights unspool….. happiness… tears… a stuffed toy rabbit worn down through affection… mason jars of crimson and gold tomatoes with fat emerald handfuls of basil… children lying on sparse grass beneath a maple tree, staring up at breeze-trembling leaves, wondering….

We’ll never mow the grass, hardly ever
rake the leaves. Adopt a goat for the lawnmowing
and squirt her milk into strong tea….
moonlight clothes snap
out on the line, extended
under stars.

– Megan Buchanan, from “Dreamlife” in Clothesline Religion

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Stretching Beyond Kidhood

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

At dinner, my nearly-12-year-old daughter laughs with her friend, dirt smeared in patches on her face – under one eye, at her forehead’s crest – possibly where she’s swatted at black flies, or where she’s lain on the earth this summery Sunday, looking at something I’ll never know.

Over their bowls of rice, the girls plot a run and ice cream, our kitchen where the light filters through the apple tree tinged chlorophyll-green, dappled with shadow.

These girls are in the growing-nearly-by-the-moment phase, long legs, budding breasts. And more – their curiosity digging to matters of the heart, parsing apart their actions and their friends’, trying to unraveling the complexities of human relations. In our conversations, we circle around and around, and I can feel swimming beneath the surface of our talk these two girls grabbing those age-old themes of justice, happiness, heartache.

As I’m cleaning through drawers, discarding what I no longer need or want, her friend gathers a chunky handful of assorted keys and knots them together on a piece of wire. She ties them beneath the seat of her bicycle.

I ask what her plans are, and she answers she’s making wind chimes. The keys clink as the girls pedal away, merry.

I wish it would slow…
I want it all
to last, the chimney falling
back to bricks,
the orchard on its way to bud…

Laura Foley, from “The Orchard on Its Way” in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

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Elmore, Vermont

A Little Bit of Sweetness….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My sixth-grader and her class visited the middle and high school yesterday, dipping in their 12-year-old toes for next year’s migration from the crayon-scented world of elementary school to the locker-walled hallways.

Her sister, hanging out in art class, gave her a glazed blueberry donut.

Later that night, walking through the halls with the kids and my friend, I remember my own adolescent claustrophobic years, calling my high school “the cannery” as I felt like a fish parched for wild waters.

As a sprig of forsythia in a vase greets visitors into my kitchen these days, that donut likely welcomed my daughter into the next phase of schooling. Sweet….

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me…..

From “Instructions on Not Giving Up” By Ada Limón

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