Morning March Music

March 19, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I unlocked the elementary school yesterday morning when the day was yet in that black-turning-blue phase of dawn. I was there to get the coffee going for that venerable New England tradition, pie breakfast. Allow me to brag for a moment about my town. With a population of 902 (including newborns), nearly 200 pies appeared in the school kitchen, carefully wrapped, many warm from home ovens.

Pie Breakfast is a hustling sweet-and-savory morning, bursting with conversation, live music, laughter, lots of kids. The most welcome melody I heard, though, was the red-wing blackbirds in the white pines below the library. My booksale volunteers and I stood on the icy pavement in the brilliant March sunlight, surrounded by two feet of sparkling snow, listening to the first harbinger of migration’s return, the promise of spring, the full-throated song of mating.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all…

– Emily Dickinson

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Snow Child

March 14, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

It’s an Ezra Jack Keats kind of snowy day (or days) in Vermont. If you’re not out foolishly driving around (and not many are), the snow is spiraling down exquisitely. After hours of tedious work inside, while the snow swirled against the windows, I walked along our unplowed road. Pausing on my way to meet my neighbor, I remembered those winters when my firstborn was a toddler, and winters really were one months-long housebound snowstorm.

Every day, I pulled my chattery child along the road on a runner sled. Always, at the same place she would beg me to lumber through the deep snow into the woods and pluck a few miniature hemlock pinecones from a low hanging branch.

Years later, unboxing this red snowsuit for her younger sister, I discovered tiny pinecones in every pocket.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

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Mother

March 9, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One rainy Saturday when I was a kid, my dad drove me and my siblings to the movie Watership Down in Manchester, New Hampshire, in an old green Commando Jeep he drove most of my childhood. On the way there, approaching an intersection, the brakes failed, and he slid through an intersection blaring his horn and flashing his lights. Under a benevolent star that day, we cruised through the red light unharmed, and my dad pulled over, doubtlessly nearly breathless with relief.

For a child, that memory remained as a flashy bit of drama. As a parent at the wheel with three kids, terrible misfortune averted. When I told my 18-year-old daughter to drive safety the other day, heading to high school or work or out with her friends to the movies, she rolled her eyes. I reiterated that I will always be your mother, so bear up, my beloved.

Today is my mother’s 80th birthday, two days after my father’s 80th birthday, both children of the Depression, with their own long lives which have touched so many people.

I think of parenting like the proverb from an old Tom Selleck movie: The ox is slow, but the earth is patient, plodding along with heavy-hooves, but overhead spreads the changing, infinite sky, the eternal constant comfort of the earth beneath our feet.

Best wishes on your birthday, mother.

…Let me congratulate you on
the birthday of your son…
You didn’t make him prosperous or famous,
and fearlessness is his only talent.
Open up his windows,
let in the twittering in the leafy branches…
Give him his notebook and his ink bottle,
give him a drink of milk and watch him go.

– Yevgeny Yevtushenko, from “Birthday”

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Radius of This Afternoon

March 4, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The cold hammers down around us again, returning with March’s powerful jaws, reminding me of all those years when my daughters were little, and we were housebound around the wood stove. Always, I bundled up the baby and walked out into the cold, even in the rawest of days, and the house’s warmth welcomed us on our return.

My friends would bring stacks of Sunday New York Times, and I would read months-old news before the wood stove, children playing with dolls or wooden frying pans, devouring the news aptly while eating popcorn. Such was the world of living with little children…. Today is merely a dip back in my mothering days, a memory when the girls couldn’t zip their coats or read a book.

I’m glad to welcome this reprise from the world-out-there of news I’d rather not hear but will make its way to our door, one way or another, eventually. For now, I’ll shake down the coals, lay on more wood, and brew tea.

March is the in-between season, of library books, knitting, board games. End-of-winter pause.

The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,
it brings no relief from winter.
My neighbor stares out the window,
talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,
trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.
It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.
We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light…..

From Louise Gluck’s “March”

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Flipping the Lesson Inside Out

February 28, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As part of my on-going museum fascination, my daughters and I stopped by the Burlington library today to check out a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about human evolution. Pointing to one panel, I (no doubt, tediously) explained to my 11-year-old about the progression of homo sapiens’ brain development depicted by a series of illustrations.

My girl pointed to a nearby rack of magazines with a crazy-haired illustration of our nation’s current commander-in-chief and laughed. We’ve progressed?

Which pretty much ended my history lesson.

We walked down the street for coffee and little cupcakes.

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

– Charles Darwin

Photo by Molly S./Burlington, Vermont

Out!

February 27, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

These are kite flying days – wild and windy – the kind of Saturdays I remember from childhood, hiking through fields, with the breeze somewhat raw and ice slivers in the soil under our boots. How glad my siblings and I were to be outside, after a long winter.

Although I’m looking for another house, I’m not moving that far. In a reverse kind of way, I’m looking to move back towards my childhood, to a small town surrounded by lots of woods and fields, open for foot travel, with the same patterns of walking to the post office and the store, where just about everyone knows who you are.

That’s a mixture, always. No warmth without knowing cold, and the familiar sometimes grows old. Here’s a photo of my girls on a breezy Sunday afternoon, as we laced up and went for a XC ski in the woods behind the high school, my younger daughter in the lee of her sister, shielding herself from the wind. At times the snow hardened to root-riddled ice; in the others, the skiing was phenomenal.