travel

More School

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Today, my youngest daughter starts high school. Time flies, sure, but it seems so long ago she first started school, a tiny girl. She was homeschooled until third grade, on our 100 acres, where I worked at home in our maple sugaring business, and at certain times in the year worked incredibly hard. It was a kind of life that, in retrospect I suppose, made some kind of sense to the adults.

When she was seven, she wanted to go to school. So, I sent her. Since then, she’s pretty much always loved school. Last night, I noticed she had packed so many bags, she appeared to be making a semi-move to the high school, approximately an 11-minute walk from our door.

Like anyone else, I’ve made a zillion — no, a zillion and a half — mistakes as a parent, some just downright terrible. But one thing I did realize at a certain point with my older daughter was that this is her life, and if I wanted her to live her own life with authority and imbued with her own female empowerment, I had to realize her life is different than mine. My own adult ideas, 90% or so of them, might as well go by the wayside.  Although I’m not in any way about to vacate the parenting scene, isn’t work out your own philosophy inevitably where the raising children scenario leads?

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Derby, Vermont

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

Nearly 9th Grade

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While the girls swim and jump off the bridge, I read a chapter in a history of Vermont — same old, same old.

We’re in the long, slow, cricket-singing days, just before school starts. The garden is jammed full, the leeks a failure, the nasturtiums a mighty army colonizing beyond their territory.

The days are jammed, too, with all the pieces of work, crammed in with When will we paint the barn? Fix the car’s exhaust. Mark when property taxes are due on the calendar. — All things I consider so important but will have forgotten in weeks, perhaps months.

The girls lean over the bridge in the sunlight, talking quietly, glancing at me and wondering if I’m listening. I am. I’m watching and listening, until I dive in and swim away, with only the lapping water against my ears.

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
— Issa

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Irritable and Not So

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

At the northern end of the reservoir, we kayak north, where the water flows into the Black River, crossing the Canadian border on its meandering way to the Atlantic.

Surrounded by cattails, we stop at a beaver dam, listening to the spilling water. The late afternoon is sticky, the water’s too mucky and weedy for swimming, the girls who have been up early either for soccer practice or work are out-of-sorts, irritable.

What’s on the other side of that beaver dam? I edge near, curious, but there’s no way I’m getting around.

Back on the wide reservoir, we spread out. At the far end, a loon calls, which fails to impress either daughter. The teenager says, I’ve heard that before.

And yet, hungry and tired as both daughters are, neither seems in any rush to leave. Clouds jostle against Buffalo Mountain in the distance, promising rain, but not too quickly. The girls’ paddles lie across their kayaks as we drift.

Later that evening, as I lie on the couch, reading, rain begins to patter down. The older daughter goes out for a run. The younger daughter and I pull on raincoats and cut through the thorny blackberries, silently, our faces wet.

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Buried Treasure

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I look out the upstairs window where I’m working and see my teen and her friend busily digging a hole where young lilacs are growing along the cemetery fence.

They’re planting a half-gallon mason jar — their time capsule — carefully filled with things like a map of our camping trips and lists of their favorite things to eat. I watch them talking, and then they tie a pink scrap of fabric on the chain link fence, as if that marker will weather through the years.

Right there, I think, is childhood in a nutshell: a world that intersects with my grownup days, and yet lives busily — in fun and in seriousness — in their own. I haven’t seen what they stashed in that capsule, but I expect to see what emerges, whenever that may be….

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them — they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

— Rilke

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Things on My Kitchen Table

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In my email in-box, these lines from Toni Morrison’s Paris Review interview appear:

I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space—a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out—life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in.

For a single mother who often works at home, clutter is a major issue — and I don’t mean the Marie Kondo kind of clutter with too many piles of perfectly fine clothes or an overstocked kitchen.

I simply mean the clutter of living. On our kitchen table when I came home from work yesterday were bowls of just picked blueberries and green beans, a full coffee thermos I had forgotten, opened mail including a jury summons and a pay stub, a tube of hand lotion, an unopened packet of spinach seeds I intended to plant that evening, a $5 bill, a list I wrote for the 14-year-old (mostly checked off), what appeared to me as a random assortment of dates on a scrap piece of paper, a wildflower identification book, a half-eaten cucumber surrounded by a sprinkling of salt. And a fingernail clippers.

My daughters were cooking dinner, and the dining room table was set and (mostly) cleared of clutter. Life without clutter would be sterility, boredom, an emptied-out house. Or so I tell myself.

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