teens

Geographical Balm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

We moved two-and-a-half years ago, and only now does our house seem to feel worn in as a house should — both with memories and simply day-to-day use. While I’m a huge fan of tradition — like camping on the same lake every summer — this holiday I had an incredible need to mix it up, do something different. There’s three of us now when there were once four.

We left, just for a night, with a single cat feeding required, and didn’t even go far — a little more east in Vermont where there was even less snow. I was looking for a break from work and school, for talking together in the same darkened room before sleeping, for exploring a different place with no looming deadline of time.

Interestingly, the unexpected part was the pleasure in returning home, to our warm house and our cats and the patterns we’d left behind. That, perhaps, was worth the trip alone.

… writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing — of possessing — thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.

— Emilie Pine, Notes to Self

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After School Snacks

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

My 14-year-old meets me at the coffee shop in town on her way home from school. I close up my laptop and clear the table of my papers. She sits in the window drinking hot chocolate and talks and talks.

She’s making a phone call that afternoon with a stranger for a program reference, and I see she’s been thinking about that phone call all day. She’s not someone who likes talking on the phone. And to someone she doesn’t know?

In a complete non sequitur, she lifts the gingerbread cookie she’s eating and says that’s exactly the kind of cookie she wants to bake.

Looking at her, I marvel at how she’s all teen — both worrying and taking pleasure in that worrying — in a this is my thing, my life, what I’m doing kind of way.

Her grandparents have a sent her a small box with a card. When she lifts the lid, the box opens into a pop-up Christmas tree, and she laughs and laughs.

A group of teenagers come in the door, stomping snow from their boots. The barista says, Here’s the future.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

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December Sparkles

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When I was really little — probably three or so — I vaguely remember my family parked outside of town, watching the Fourth of July fireworks. My mother said the sprawl of lights in the darkness was Santa Fe. That’s how little I was — I didn’t even realize that magic was city lights. We lived on a dirt road then, out of town, and my guess is I hadn’t seen much of those bright city lights.

Oddly enough, I remembered that as I was taking out the compost the other night, just around 5 o’clock. The sun had sunk, leaving not even a smear of pale pink.

In the darkness, later, the dishes washed, my daughter and I walked around town, our jackets unzipped.

Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There’s always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.

― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

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Cat Joy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I returned from a school board meeting last night, so tired I might actually have been sleepwalking, the kids had taken the trusty yardstick, swept out the toy mice from under the couch, and the cats were ecstatic. Our house was reveling in utter joy.

I write this, because I admire those cats so much, epitomizing the be here now bliss of existence. But, bless them, these are cats.

After Vicki wrote in about the fires in Australia, my older daughter and I kept reading and reading about these fires. Our globe is literally in flames. Like just about everyone else on the planet, I’m lacking an answer, a real solution. I know just how privileged I am to live in what often seems like the Shire of Vermont, this particularly sweet spot.

When I was a young woman in the 1980s and 90s, the sentiment I was given was pretty much an all for yourself one. But for my kids, that’s not even an option. I didn’t think adults were particularly bright when I was young, but they were just adults, neither more nor less. Now, listening to my daughters and their friends, I know they’re thinking what a mess you’ve left us.

If only there was a yardstick solution to this…

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.

― Meghan Daum

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Stranger, Passing Through

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m weeding in my garden when an unfamiliar voice calls out. In the evening dusk, I’m thinking of my younger daughter eating dinner with her soccer team and, simultaneously, of walking to high school in the New Hampshire town where I was a teen. For no reason at all, I’m remembering walking on Union Street, which followed the railroad tracks above the Piscataquog River.

A neighbor I know only by sight is passing through. He stops and smokes a cigarette while we talk. His mother lived in my house, years ago. We talk about raising kids — his two sons, my two daughters.

The daylight recedes quickly. He asks for work, shoveling my roof in winter. We look at my house and its simple roof lines. We’ll do it, I say, and then he admits how much he hates shoveling roofs.

Mist has crept in, blurring the palette of zinnias and coreopsis in my garden. He’s gone, quickly, before I can ask more about his mother and this house.

On this final morning in August, ten feet tall, the sunflowers in my garden bloom. I planted late, but the mighty faces have peeled back the leaves over their gold faces, opening up to the sun. Their roots, thick as fierce fingers, dig into the sandy soil.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.

— Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

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Soccer Mom-ing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My daughter is now six years into soccer — a number that surprises me — as if, for me, each fall is a surprise. You’re playing soccer? How cool is that….

On a hot afternoon, I walk to the high school, in a rush from work, dust from the street blowing into my eyes. On these warm afternoons, there’s always pleasure at the chance to sit on the grass and simply spend an hour, talking with another parent about work and relationships, and the sometimes painful, often laughworthy moments in our parenting lives.

What’s odd is this: standing on the field, I study each player, figuring out which girl is mine. My own daughter. I blame this strange phenomenon on bad eyesight, until another mother confesses the same. The ponytail girls are growing up. I’m unable to recognize this metamorphosis — in my own daughter — but the girls are heading toward young womanhood, body and soul.

The way of the world, my soccer-mom friend says, and offers me some of her seltzer.

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have-as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

— Sharon Olds

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Hardwick, Vermont, August 2019