siblings

Holiday Chat

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Perhaps in no little part due to my hammered-up lower jaw, I let the holidays simply unroll (albeit with some effort before).

Here’s a scruffy shot of my brother cooking Christmas dinner, while I shiver, and we talk about Marx’s assertion that people make their own history but not in self-selected circumstances, family camping trips and the collapse of the American Empire.

Afterwards, he hung up his beer cans on the line with clothespins. That’s some quality family time.

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

— Basho

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Sisters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This morning when my older daughter left with friends, the younger sister watched her drive away as sadly as if the sun and all its life had departed, leaving only me, a distant and chilly star. The younger child’s first word was “Ma” – not a Ma for mama, but for her sister, Molly. Molly’s first word was mama and only mama, but her younger sister began with Molly and has pretty much defined her world from the sun of her sister. As the Inuit may have a 100 words for snow, the child had a multitude of variations of her sister’s name.

Hence, me – her mother – the distant star, or maybe at least the moon sailing by.

As the younger child added words to her repertoire, her words had a curious -y at the end, like coldy. Gradually, I began to realize Molly so deeply suffused this child’s world that even her emerging language evolved out of her primal interest in her sister. The truth is, I’m glad to hold my moon position, steady with my own unwavering gravitational pull.

Of course my girls bicker; of course they argue; of course at times they quarrel over things I find hideously unimportant like bagels; but at one thing I can count on is that they’re always watching the other’s back.

You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections; there is nothing like it in this world.

– Charlotte Bronte

 

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Woodbury, Vermont

Sisters

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

This evening, my older daughter got out of the car in our driveway and exclaimed, This is my favorite kind of moon! Inside, the little girl who had played a basketball game was ravenous. The girls had picked me up from a school board meeting, and the younger one, eating dinner in front of the wood stove, asked why a woman had said, Well, you two are definitely sisters. What does that mean? the younger girl asked.

What does bind a family together? Much more than the shape of a nose, or the hue of hair. Even more, I think, than a keening affinity for the moon, or a struggle to bend art. Our life is composed of many material things: our house, our garden, endless meals and piles of shoes, but also the things we can never hold in our hands. The way we argue fiercely at times but always apologize, how the younger girl laughed so happily this morning when I sleepily put a cup of coffee in the fridge. Oh mom! The way we desire for each other the kind of happiness where you can lie back and let that happiness hold you.

It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades….

–– Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

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February, Vermont, 2016