teens

Fire

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Seriously? my 14-year-old demands. You want me to scrape paint? 

I’m merely suggesting it as a possibility, a fine August afternoon option before school begins next week. She opts to clean her chicken coop instead, which I can’t help but think is a healthier option.

At lunch, she shows me photos of the Amazon rainforest burning, immense swathes. She’s a Vermont teen; these are digital images that can’t possibly contain the heat and wind, the roar and terror of these fires.

Talking, I think of all the ways I’ve provided for this child and failed her, too — an American child who’s benefited from American largesse, and yet she’s a child who hasn’t seen her father in years.

On this breezy August afternoon, the crickets are working away, reminding us that summer’s yet here, but not for long. In her eyes, I see myself reflected. She cuts her grilled cheese sandwich in two and eats silently, filled with the power of adolescence.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year — the days when summer is changing into autumn — the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.

— E. B. White

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Female Talk

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A friend and I both read Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. We compare notes: where are you? Reading, I wonder what my friend will think of this section, or that; I wonder what we’ll say. Irritatingly, Taddeo divides these women’s three stories into mixed up pieces, so last night, I skipped through the book and simply read a story straight through.

My daughters return in the night and a rainstorm, bubbling with stories of kayaking and a friend. We talk and talk. Underneath, I sense how much more they’ve shared together, these three females, ages 14 to 20. I can’t help but wonder what I was talking about at that age. Not enough, I’m sure.

Three Women is about sex — sexual power and the inverse of that, sexual vulnerability. Good lord, I think, reading: finally.

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Reappraisal

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

When my oldest was seven or so, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed the way I think about food and the food industry that, inevitably, feeds the vast majority of the country. His newest book, How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics, is a book I’m reading exactly at the right time in my life. While I’m unlikely to be looking to score a few tabs of acid — I am a single mother who intends to stay on one particular side of the law, for one thing — the book is primarily about reappraising your life — in the supposed midstream, after a few years — maybe decades, compounded by child raising — of living.

What was I looking for at 21? Same, but different….

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

— Michael Pollan

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Teen Somersaults

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The rain cleared in the early evening, and my daughter and I hung out on her trampoline while she waited for her friend. She’s a pro; I’m a novice. Eventually, I lay back and stared at the clouds breaking apart, and the enormous box elders behind  our house, leafing out.

She, at nearly 14, demonstrated all the moves that can be done on a trampoline. In her face, I could see the sweet impishness of her earliest years.

Rain, rain this May. There’s a kind of rightness to this, the earth and the ponds and the saplings and plants rushing headlong toward green and procreation. May is the season for this, and there’s a sweet satisfaction in the daily discoveries of what’s grown each day. May: bring it on!

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.

—Hayden Carruth

Rapture

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Everyone was outside today. In all her golden beauty, Spring returned. I left my library door open, with a few patrons in charge, and walked down the dirt road to post a sign about state reps coming to visit the library in a few weeks.

The melodies of blackbirds followed me.

Rapture, as near as can be…. all afternoon, my nearly 14-year-old daughter and I were out, in a day so suddenly hot.  Yes, she’s a teen and wonders why I gnaw the edge of my thumb, there’s blue paint on the edge of my t-shirt, and is possible that I’ve shrunk? I say the word necklace with the wrong intonation of vowel. The knees of my jeans are stained, possibly with coffee.

And yet, on this particular day, I can see clearly how strange a creature I am in her eyes — who is this strange woman and how did she birth me? Likewise, I wonder, who is this miraculous not-girl and not-woman, and how did I birth her?

For the moment, though, there’s this afternoon, there’s just the two of us — as much rapture as I’ll likely ever deserve in this life.

We must risk delight….
We must admit there will be music despite
everything.

— Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”

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2 Things About Winter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Saturday morning, the snow is above my knees on the long path from the parking lot to the library. Halfway up the door, the snow has blown off the school’s soccer field, and I tug the door open. Snow and I tumble in.

A patron shows up while I’m shoveling, his glasses fogged with snow. He’s walking in my footsteps, and he’s laughing. Why do we live in Vermont?

After dinner, my oldest daughter asks her sister and I to go on a walk with her. Cold but not that cold, we walk against the landscape of sunset.

No one else save a few pickups pass us. A flock of geese flies inexplicably south. This whole long walk I remember exactly why I live in Vermont. We return after 7:30 and it’s not yet full dark.

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