Robert Louis Stevenson

Child, Tween, Teen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to live where things are consistently dull. My mother used to write me postcards from Santa Fe with ABD: Another Beautiful Day.

This Vermont summer drips messily with humidity one day, envelopes sticking together, the silverware slick with moisture. Today is edged raw, making me think not of watermelons and salad with fresh dill but macaroni and cheese steaming in the oven.

One extreme or the other, not much in between.

Maybe raising kids is the same way. With a houseful of kids and cousins, they’re all long tanned legs and appetite this summer, baby softness long since gone by. Mothering for me began with that extreme – crying or, blessedly, not – and so I began to understand parenting in that way.

Here’s another Summer Goal: reprogram myself to even out, as the children all grow taller (but not yet fiercer) than myself.

The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, from “A Child’s Garden of Verses”

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View from a Childhood Room Window

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My 11-year-old daughter G. sleeps with the window open just inches from her head. From her bed, she sees leafy branches of an ash tree and watched since April buds unfurling into the green that’s now turning to a canary yellow. In one of the few pounding thunderstorms this summer, I slipped into her room in the middle of the night. She lay awake. Her side of the house was mostly sheltered from the storm, and she wanted the window left open, with a smattering of cool drops blowing through the screen on her cheeks. “I like it,” she said.

The room of her childhood.

Late summer, I stacked a portion of our firewood between three straight-trunked ash trees beside her window, in an isosceles triangle. One side I left open, for a entryway. A younger child would have delighted in the three-cornered playhouse, but this child slept with her soccer jersey – number 21 – on the floor beside her last night.

Nonetheless, what composes her childhood room view – leaves on slender branches, woodpile with a beckoning in, and, further beyond, wild elderberry bushes and the old woods road where one afternoon we saw a shaggy-furred bear noiselessly passing by  – are the gateway near her head to the wider world, imprinting on her memory as she sleeps.

O it’s I that am the captain of a tiny little ship,
Of a ship that goes a sailing on the pond;
And my ship it keeps a-turning all around and all about;
But when I’m a little older, I shall find the secret out
How to send my vessel sailing on beyond….

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “My Ship and I” in A Child’s Garden of Verses

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September, Vermont

 

Spring Fever

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Since the time change, my ten-year-old daughter cannot sleep. At 10:30 last night, she peered from her bunk bed, cheshire cat-like in the dim room, insisting she couldn’t sleep because she was excited. But I don’t know what I’m excited about!

I reached up and held her slim, warm fingers. It’s spring fever, I told her.

But I don’t have a fever….

All day long, as much as possible, she’s outside, poking a stick in running streams, painting her fort beneath the pine trees, biking up and down with road with her friend. The two of them run into the kitchen, breathlessly excited about spying on her father and his friend in the sugarhouse. Their stories spill out about biking through icy puddles and finding turkey tracks along the road. Beneath our boots, more of the earth reappears in its muddy glory every day, shaking off winter. Spring!

….And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
– Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed in Summer”
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Molly S. Photo/Woodbury, Vermont