teenagers

Ode to Dirt

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

While my youngest cleaned out her chicken house, I kicked apart the compost and did a little ‘reorganizing’ of black earth — that chocolate for plants — mushy sunflower stalks from last October, paired with last week’s old rice.

Outside all afternoon, I remembered why I love living in this house, on this village hillside, in Vermont — especially when I found a cluster of heart-shaped leaves on the south side of our house, tucked up against the foundation wall, soaking up sun. The blossoms were the purest of white, the tiny petals streaked with deep purple. Common violets.

In this season of growth, four teens in my kitchen…..

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Gold Smudge

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

My work these days reflects the weather’s dreariness — grant-writing — work I implicitly believe I should feel jazzed and excited about — and maybe I will, maybe I’ll get there, but grants so often feel like closed doors, of no room at the inn and all.

To counteract that — and the terrible string of cancer deaths from a Waldorf school where my daughter was once a student — I’m holing up reading novels. Despite the rain, my daughters and I are in the woods every day. Even on late days when I’m at work, they send me photos. One daughter is just out of childhood, the other has but a handful of years left. Observing them, I wonder what of my parenting will stick with them.

The younger daughter and I found our first unopened trillium yesterday. The older daughter asked the blossom’s color. The younger asked if it mattered. Yes, her sister answered.

Everywhere, yellow smears of blossoming forsythia.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Natsume Soseki

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Croquet before the green….

Sticks and Girl

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My daughter picks at dirt on the cuff on her jeans, troubled by this, which interests me. She’s a remarkably easy and even-tempered girl, and I sometimes wonder at her own and distinctive understanding of the world’s order.

In my bare root order, I have a handful of what seem to be sticks with filigreed root balls. Walking behind our garden in the damp April evening, she asks me if I’ll still live here when these sticks become trees.

I’m planting for the property, I answer. That answer suffices for her. She stands with me, as we envision stick widening into trunk, twig fattening into branch.

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Making Sense?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

At dusk, after washing the dishes, my daughter agrees to go on a walk with me — she is clearly good-humoring me. It’s cold, and I sense she doesn’t care all that much about the gorgeous blue horizon.

Plus, she’s 13. Having once been 13 myself — albeit in the last century — I know 13-year-olds cannot wear hats.

Walking, she asks me why is this necessary? I offer my usual lines — that it’s pleasant to walk in the evening, that a little cold and adversity build character (my dad’s line). I remind her of my amazing wealth of character.

So, she says, you have character because you froze your ass off?

Put that way, I admit that perhaps not all the pieces of my thinking always hinge together perfectly. Or perhaps they do….

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.

― Basho

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Political Art? Or Just A Lot of Stuff Kicking Around?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A tower of filing cabinets? My 13-year-old is simultaneously entranced and dumbfounded. I don’t get it.

Maybe, I suggest, we shouldn’t think about getting it but just take it in. She gives me that look perhaps unique to only young teenage girls — a combination of you’re not making any sense in my world coupled with I’ll try to humor you. 

In the single degree temperatures, with a frigid wind blowing over Lake Champlain, I offer a quick rundown about bureaucracy, thinking Kafka, Kafka, remembering driving by the tall Bank of New Hampshire building as a kid, wondering how many people worked all day, buried deep in that building. Even at night, the building glowed: cleaning crew shift.

Despite the cold, she’s happy — I can see it — this kid on the cusp of shedding her childhood — her face reflecting that combination of WTF and how cool is that?

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Cobweb Sweeping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my daughters suggest a Saturday afternoon skiing with me, I’m immersed in that eternal list of must do, must do, as if the universe’s spin depended on my crossing out whatever rises next on the list.

Maybe I’m simply utterly annoyed at another half day of work I’ll lose again next week — no doubt in vain — seeking child support. But goodness, both teenagers want to cross country ski with me. The younger girl skies ahead, and then loops back. We ski through the woods and over streams, and then a long slow uphill through open fields. We can see all the way to Creek Road, where the bare branches of roadside maples link the sky to the snow-covered earth. Stripping off hats, sweaty, I remember again why I love Vermont’s stark and signified winter beauty, why I love Vermont’s patchwork of small farm and wild forest, why I was certain at 18 that Vermont was the place for me to live.

We ski all afternoon, passing by where our friends once lived, old farmhouse of such merriment. My older daughter talks and talks, about work and about love. At home, we cook dinner together, our cheeks beaming red with cold and happiness.

Pare Everything Down to Almost Nothing

then cut the rest,
and you’ve got
the poem
I’m trying to write.

— David Budbill

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Photo by Molly S.