spirituality

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

Whose Baby Are You?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Searching through my younger daughter’s baby pictures the other day, gathering a handful of images for her sixth-grade graduation ceremony, I sometimes wondered, is this her? Or her sister? Once upon a time, I couldn’t believe parents might confuse their children’s baby photos; now I join those ranks of beleaguered – and, admit it, lame –parents.

In her face now, I see her woman’s visage emerging: my brown eyes, her father’s thin shape. As a writer, I’m trained to note specifics, like the way she regularly trims her own bangs these days. But details are only bits of her story, keyholes for my curious eyes.

These early wet May days, wildflowers bloom profusely – trilliums, bellflowers, spring beauties, Dutchman’s breeches – each day seemingly a new variation, every stalk and petal one tiny voice in the overall chorus of spring. The symphony rages mightily. So, too, with my daughter, in this spring.

I find myself listening to the symphony-in-the-creation of her.

In writing, you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

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Lounging on the Lawn of the Loony Bin

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

When my older daughter was a babe-in-arms and all through her toddlerhood and young childhood, she and I delivered tiny bottles of maple syrup for wedding favors, usually tied up with ribbon or raffia, with a small slip of colored paper with the couple’s names and wedding date, and a cheery phrase, like Eat, drink & be merry! Or A Sweet Beginning.

With my little kid, goldfish crackers and the Vermont Gazetteer, we met people in  Price Chopper’s parking lot, tony lakeside resorts, or – one of my favorites – outside the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane in Waterbury. The hospital then had locked wards, and the purchaser of maple syrup bottles came down and met us on the grass. She was on her lunch break and had time to chat. I offered that my mother is a RN, and had amused us as children with her nursing school stories of the woman in the state asylum who swallowed spoons.

My daughter, who was four, looked up at me, completely puzzled. Why?

The woman and I laughed.

Of all the people who bought my wedding favors, this woman is the one I wonder about. We lingered on the grass that day, the sheer expanse of tended lawn a novelty for my child and I. This woman was happily getting married in a few days, and I took my child to a playground that afternoon. There were not enough playground trips in that girl’s childhood. Maybe that’s one of my few pieces of advice to young parents: more playgrounds. Linger barefoot on the grass. The strangeness of people who devour spoons doesn’t disappear.

The American way of life has failed – to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it. We persist in believing that the empty and criminal among our children are the result of some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected), that the bottomless and aimless hostility which makes our cities among the most dangerous in the world is created, and felt, by a handful of aberrants, that the lack, yawning everywhere in this country, of passionate conviction, of personal authority, proves only our rather appealing tendency to be gregarious and democratic. We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be, and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.

– James Baldwin

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Waterbury, Vermont

Craigslist Adventure, Again

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After 10 pm last night, in the rain and profuse dark, a stranger with one eye appears, wanting a military truck I’d posted on Craigslist. My teenager grabs a flashlight and insists on coming, too.

By his car headlights, he examines the huge beast – drivetrain, winch, cab, engine – noting with disapproval the Glock bullet holes. What he’s looking for, precisely, I don’t know, but I have a real sense he knows.

The rain lets up, and we stand in his headlights, my tall daughter just behind me, his car packed with three men and the engine running. He reeks of cigarette smoke and sweat, and he’s panting for breath. We talk a little about money and about his cancer; he’s likely telling the truth. Wheezing, he says, “I keep telling the doctors you can’t kill the devil.”

He says he’ll take the pile of mangled gutters for scrap metal, and then I offer more: an old plow, tire rims, twisted fencing. He’s a scavenger. But I see more, too, as I can’t help but stare at that loose pocket of flesh where he once had an eye. When I became a single mother, I began toeing a line where I slip sometimes over into grifting, needing childcare, a car repair, property tax money: a place of needing assistance I find incredibly to my dislike. In his drooping flesh, I see a dimension of my own self mirrored back.

We part ways. Walking back through the sweet-smelling, wet spring woods in the dark, my daughter agrees I might have lost that transaction, although I have one less problem and grocery money in my pocket. More: I have two eyes. She laughs at the night’s oddness as she heads to bed; we mutually agree to let this one go.

And that vehicle, built long before I was born, witness to what I can’t imagine, heads to its next chapter.

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

– Wendell Berry

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Lovely Girl

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh… parenting a teen. More daffodils, please. Devour sunlight. Dig up the first shoots of emerald garlic and fry the savory greens with eggs. Read.

Nourish a flourishing sense of humor.

When we get into a mood of complaining about life we often start telling this long epic, a story about our personal journey. It involves a series of misfortunes, trials, and tribulations. It often starts with being born into the wrong family, with the wrong parents, and with very inauspicious circumstances.

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home

And Grace….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When I attended Sunday School briefly as a child, I remember reading about the Resurrection in a paper booklet and studying an illustration of Christ standing in a white robe beside a boulder, his clean hands outstretched to a gape-mouthed Mary, his hair neatly brushed. What the heck was that about?

The presentation was like reading Macbeth on Disney character flash cards. How would this be possible? Why would it even be desirable?

Hallmark’s proliferation of bunnies and tulips to the contrary, this holiday is a mystery, bloody and ethereal within a span of days, a profoundly condensed version of human life.

More than anything else what I resent about that sanitized illustration is the belying that the crucifixion is also the story of nearly unbelievable persistence, of a man who endured physical torture, an extreme crisis of faith, and phenomenal resilience against the human tendency to flee when the going gets tough. Over and over, I’ve met that Joseph Campbell line “you must be wiling to give up the life you’ve planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.” On this Easter morning, I’m reminded again that the price of grace is fiercely earned, and, yet, eternally possible.

…modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

– Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

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library book reading…