Brett Ann Stanciu's Blog, page 152

A Few Words

Ice has hammered down around us. The sky is gray. All the kids along our road stayed home from school today, sliding in their winter boots over the slick roads. Inside, the wood stove burns hot. The children’s mittens dry on the hot tiles beneath the stove.

The ice has physically shrunk our world. No longer the season of long days and endless bike rides, the kids swing in the hammock hung in our kitchen and wonder when they’ll grow too heavy for that particular set-up.

My daughters’ father is far, far away these days, building shelters at Standing Rock in North Dakota. Scant word comes over the internet. Fuller stories arrive from a friend who has returned. My teenager is hungry for what shadowy news she can find. Late, late, into the nights we talk.

What can I say to her? History is a brutal, bloody business: merciless.

And yet – whether in one’s one tiny family or in the great sprawl of humanity, hope always, indomitably, rises out of struggle. Those few simple and enormous words, ancient as humankind itself: and now abideth hope, faith, charity.

Meanwhile, the ice falls.

…all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority.

– Charles C, Mann, 1491

Postcards From the Past

Looking for baby pictures for her senior high school yearbook page, my teenager came across a postcard from long ago I’d stashed in a box. My father had mailed me the card when I was sophomore in college (about a 100 years ago), and it had been thumbtacked over my desk for years – once scribbled upon by the girl who’s now a teenager, when she was a toddler. On the back, my father had written that famous Hemingway quote, about the little new each of us has to give: fatherly advice, about the costliness of knowledge.

In my less confident mothering moments, I wonder if I’ve learned anything.

Last night, reading Mary Oliver, I found a line that reoccurs in her poetry, over and over, like a familiar stitch: take responsibility for your life. One of the very simplest things, and yet one of the hardest. The flip side is I force myself not to responsibility for all of my daughters’ lives, too. Put your hand through a window at 17? Odd and hard as it may seem, I believed it would be theft for me to take my daughter’s responsibility for that action.

I think of my toddler in her pink waffle-weave long underwear, going at this postcard with a gleam in her eye and my felt-tipped pen in her hand. At some point, I realized I had to let her grow up; at some point I realized I had to do the harder thing, and step back.

But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness… And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

– Mary Oliver, Upstream

 

The Edge of the World

November light in Vermont is eerily dim, the daylight rapidly leaking away, and even what full sunlight we have is thin and scant. My older daughter complains, I don’t like this, to which I reply that no one does. Sometimes I wonder if an unspoken mainstay of my parenting might more concisely be: deal with it.

Yesterday, the girls and I took a short, unfamiliar hike in the White Mountains, switchbacking up an abandoned road. Below us, pine trees and mountains rose out of a sea of mist, and we never saw the valley floor. The girls were enchanted by this Lord of the Rings world. As we climbed higher, the view spread further, as if we peered down into an endless ocean with sacred islands rising majestically from its billows.

At the top, we found a blasted site where someone had once intended to build a house, and – likely through lack of money – abandoned that project and wandered off elsewhere. Fox prints tracked through the house now. The younger daughter remarked that the school bus wouldn’t come. She’d have to ski to school, she noted with real delight.

Stay honest whatever happens

says the bamboo bent under snow

over my window

– Buson

Mt. Washington Valley, NH

 

This Brief Place

These few days, we’re staying in a house without a clock, which makes me realize just how much of my life is sewn together by those magic hands. When my daughters were tiny, and I was mostly home with them, our lives unfolded daily in the ways of very young children: the endless cycle of eating and play and napping. Now, I arrange complicated days, while stringing together long hours of work. But even when I have that time, I am always aware of that clock hammering down: work, work, while I have time.

Now, time-out-of-clock. With the shades pulled down, we slept late this morning. The sky is sleeting, the house warm, the children here and well. We may never return to our empty house.

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings…

M. S. Merwin, “Thanks”

My List Begins…

When I was a kindergartener, I discovered Thanksgiving was combined with cool crafts of making paper turkeys by crayoning around my hand. I also learned that people called pilgrims who lived a very long time ago wore strange white hats. Which was the sum total of my knowledge of that holiday for an embarrassingly long time.

Many years later, when homeschooling my ten-year-old and digging through her father’s past, I realized her ancestors arrived on that rickety wooden ship called the Mayflower. I was riveted. Related to the pilgrims? Those hardy, fanatical souls?

This time of year, I can’t help but think of those Mayflowerites, and not because of the colorful paper turkeys everywhere, but because right around now the cold and dark encompass my cedar-shingled house, and, instinctively, as I go about calculating my wood pile and battening down storm windows for our house’s journey through the coming perishingly cold months, I imagine the keening worries of families who had too little for sustenance and shelter – and too much of illness and exhaustion.

My list of thanksgiving begins with what I have here: pies on the table, a sweater to knit for a gift, warm boots. Us.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

– Nathaniel Philbrick,  Mayflower

Photo by Molly S.

Birds, Black and White

When you drive down our dirt road hill, the woods give way suddenly to open farm fields along the river valley bottom where, before the rivers were polluted, must have made for amazing swimming. We never swim in the river, but the immense fields and the arching sky are beautiful, and all my many journeys along the brambly edge have yielded treasures – wildflowers I’d never seen or small running streams from the steep hillsides.

This afternoon, crows pecked  at the corn stubble. Something like white cloths fluttered in the light snow, and I realized those graceful swoops of white were seagulls. I’d never seen seagulls there.

If you’d been looking for an omen – and I had, indeed – that mixture of the black birds, with their beaks working where the open ground lay barren and brown, coupled with the downy white of seagulls who tilted upward in the breeze and drifting snow would have sufficed. It was just me and the birds, and the birds would have gone on quite happily without me, serene in a mysterious drama all their own.

…. you can

drip with despair all afternoon and still,

on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,

puffing out its spotted breast, will sing

of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

– Mary Oliver

Hardwick, Vermont, snowing

 

Easy Snow

Driving the neighbor girl home tonight, in the dark descended already at five, the headlights illuminated the pristine snow at the roadside; in the first real snowfall of the season, winter has returned with all its familiarity. The truth is, this season is profoundly beautiful, the nights deeply dark, the stars purer than any possible manufactured light.

Winter tugs out the humanness of us, too. In the descending cold, the hearth has genuine meaning: practicality bound into pleasure. In the backseat, the children laughed, the car steamy with the scent of my wet wool sweater, the snow around us gently falling, the merest whispers of winter’s roar yet off in the distance.

I write this by lamplight

holed up for the winter

there it is on the page

– Yosa Buson

Woodbury, Vermont

The Value of One Word

My 11-year-old opened a box with a brand-new puzzle today and said happily, “This smells puzzle-y.”

What a world this is, where a kid can make up a word that’s indicative of so much – winter evenings around a table, cheerfully chatting – and spin together that treasured past with the tangible promise of future pleasure literally in her hands.

Our physical world is dictated by laws of equal and opposite action; the earth gives generously, but the earth taketh, too, and doesn’t skimp on the taking. Which is perhaps why that word puzzle-y shines so brilliantly. Like Noah’s olive branch, my daughter’s word treasures the past and beckons in the goodness of the future.

And it came to pass… the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry…. (The Lord said) bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth… While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

Genesis 8:13-22, King James Version

Stowe, Vermont

An Invented Life

In the midst of a tedious work project, I took my laptop to the laundromat, which promised the double advantage of using a clothes dryer and providing me with a clean, well-lighted place. Hardwick’s a slow place this time of year, and I had banked on a quiet space.

As things turned out, I ended up closing my laptop and chatting with a woman working there. She shared stories about growing up in town, sixty years ago, and showed me her scars from heart surgery. And then – as though I were someone else entirely different – I told her a half-pretend life for myself.

I couldn’t do much about my careless ponytail, but I created a different occupation, a husband with a steady salary, and a childhood in Maine. While my daughters are brightening up the house with Christmas carols, my laundromat foray qualifies as November humor in Vermont.

…Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow…

– Robert Frost, “My November Guest”

West Woodbury, Vermont

Dirty Shoes

We’ve officially entered into the season of increasing darkness – not merely politically but because of the planet’s tilt. My teenager, home early from school, slouches at the kitchen table and moans about the gray. I advise her to head out for a run in the rain. She’ll return, pink-cheeked, and far more cheery, her running shoes smeared with greasy mud on their soles.

Post-election, all these words have surfaced again, the same ones Vermonters use over and over – community, persistence, hope – words that are distressingly meaningless without tangible action. How do our footprints mark our paths? For my daughter who will mature to adulthood under a new administration, I’m going to keep advising her to muddy your feet, girl. In my garden, the johnny-ups are yet blooming amongst the weeds.

I’ve been reading Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches, her memoir of growing up in Rwanda, and that’s all I’m going to write about this slim, powerful book.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

November color