Dissonance

July 8, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

One good thing a day — take joy in at least one thing a day — is my new mantra.

Swimming or drinking coffee. A colleague moved a rock in her garden — how happy that made me. Spying foxes down in the woods. My daughter’s pleasure in making bracelets. A giant swan floatie my daughters bought while I was at work one day.

I’m not hoarding; I simply note that one thing. The odd thing is, once I note that, I find endless amounts of good things — the Sweet William in my garden, laughing on the phone as I ask a librarian to put out a book for me, please, and then calling through the (closed) library’s door — thank you!

None of this alleviates or alters the world — that I live in a state of incredible wealth where thousands of people have lined up in their cars for eight hours to receive a box of free food. The future is utterly obscured — from a national level literally igniting, to a personal level, where so many people’s lives around me are in upheaval.

This summer, as my daughter steps happily into the driver’s seat, I sit beside her, cautioning — slow down for this intersection. Don’t expect others to turn their turn signals. Be wary of children on sidewalks.

The truth is, I resist this stage of parenting, of giving her the physical keys to head into that vast and confusing world. Yet, it’s her world, too.

So, I identify those good things, like stones in a turbulent river, as we undertake a crossing.

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery.

— William Carlos Williams

Independence…

July 5, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Just after dusk, I stand by my garden talking to a friend when all kinds of things begin happening — a luminescent full moon quickly rises; a fox appears at the edge of a nearby woods and watches us; and our kids burn sparklers. In the neighborhoods and hills around us, people set off fireworks. Colored sparkles decorate the horizon.

Like everything else — a completely confusing holiday.

In the night, I wake when a light rain begins to fall, and I get up and take in my sandals I’ve left on the back porch. For a moment, I stand in the darkness, breathing in the scents of damp soil and rain. Maybe for a bit, I wonder, it might be better to understand the world not as a whole, but piece by piece, beginning with the moon and the kids and the teenagers, the sandals I’ve taken in and that I’ll wear today, dry.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

— Tracy Kidder

Greensboro, Vermont

Car Keys

July 1, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the evenings, my daughter lifts the car keys from the hook on the wall, and we drive.

In the passenger seat, I laugh a little, and she looks at me from the edges of her eyes. What?

I haven’t accepted, yet, this switch from driver to passenger seat, and she says seriously, I got this, before smiling with utter pleasure. She no longer asks where we should go; she’s at the wheel.

In the midst of so much other upheaval, from global to personal — my teen has hit the summer of growing up. If I had my license, I’d drive across the country, she says. I have two more months before school starts.

A light rain falls. Neither of us know if school will start, or what her last few years of high school will look like. I’ve driven across country numerous times, but what will her trek look like?

My thirsty garden drinks up the rain. At our house, an enormous mock orange bush reaches our second-floor bedroom windows. For weeks now, I’ve wondered if this bush will bloom this year — here it is, madly blossoming, sprinkling the grass with its fallen white petals.

Such a moon —
the thief
pauses to sing.

— Buson

Photo by Gabriela Stanciu

Driving Lessons

June 17, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the evening, as the dusk moves in, we play hearts on the back porch, my feet wet from watering the garden. It’s dry, with no rain in the forecast but thunderstorms possibly moving in this weekend.

After dinner and dishes, before I water, the 15-year-old drives, and I sit in the passenger seat. She’s largely on her own these days while I’m at work. In the high school parking lot, I get out of the car and watch her park and back up and park again, over and over. At last, she stops and leans out the window. She’s taken an extra key and put it on her first key ring, beside our house door.

She grins at me, full of exuberance and joy. “Want a ride?” she asks, then pulls up beside me, leans over, and opens the door. “Let’s take the long way home.”

The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill.

— Eihei Dōgen

Sunday

June 14, 2020June 14, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Meanwhile, domesticity.

I’m weeding the garden after dinner when my youngest comes out of the house with the car keys in one hand and her driver’s permit in the other. I’m leaving, she says, smiling at me. Why don’t I come, too, I offer, since that would make her driving legal.

She drives around the nearly empty town, and then up to the high school where she practices the turn known as the K turn in every state — except Vermont, which calls it the Vermont turn. Saturday night, and no one is out. The streets are empty.

She wants to drive to San Diego. We’re both laughing, nearly giddy in that parking lot, me wearing my knitted hat as it’s darn cold for June, and she’s teasing me about that, too.

On this Father’s Day morning, I woke thinking about when I learned to drive, all those hours of driving with my father, on roads all around New Hampshire, those uncountable hours and effort and care that go into parenting.

My older daughter, infuriated, asked me the other day, What is the point of all this, any way? — That same, aching existential, human question. I’m not offering my daughter any answers; those are hers to seek and glean. Thirty years older than her, I’m still wrestling with that question.

In the meantime, while I’m now in the passenger seat, I’m keeping a wary eye, offering a steady stream of advice about jaywalkers, kids on bikes, pickup trucks who run stop signs, don’t speed, keep your hands on the wheel, use your turn signals, assume other drivers are impaired — be careful!

She looks at me from the edges of her eyes, loving the driver’s seat. Just loving it. I got this, she assures me.

Silently, I’m praying she’ll someday teach her own daughter or son to drive. Despite my own terror at switching seats, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, just as all those years ago, I wouldn’t have traded those conversations with my father.

#Porchlife

May 29, 2020 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

On the cusp of turning 15 — 15!— my daughter lounges, reading the newest installment in The Hunger Games. Across our short, dead-end street, the little boy digs in his sandy driveway with toy trucks, talking to himself, busy in his world. By the afternoon, his whole family splashes in the kiddie pool.

We are waiting for rain in our quiet corner of Vermont.