Petal. Stone. Blood.

August 28, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Just before school starts this year, we spend a Sunday driving to the other side of Vermont, down along Lake Champlain, and crossing at the Crown Point bridge. There’s little traffic anywhere. We stop in Bristol for coffee, and then I keep driving, my friend and I in the front, our three daughters with their long legs sprawled in the back.

We’re headed to Fort Ticonderoga. Our daughters are taking an intensive history course this year, and I’m thinking the girls view the trip at first as a combination of the dusty past and an Instagram opportunity. Very quickly, we realize this is a site of stone, metal weapons, rammed earth, strategy, and bloodshed.

In the day’s sultriness, we wander behind the fort and discover the Fort’s immense gardens, now given over almost entirely to flowers. There’s few visitors and apparently no staff.

Below us, the lake lies still as a photograph, blue surrounded by the green hills. The crickets unfurl their slow late summer song. We’re in absolutely no rush at all, lingering among these flowers petals while, up on the hillside, someone bangs a constant dirge on a drum.

This ruined temple
should have its sad tale told only
by a clam digger.”
— Basho

August Evening. Mosquito Bite. Driving.

August 25, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Waiting for a Planning Commission meeting, I end up with an odd half hour and swim in the lake. What does ‘planning’ mean anymore, anyway? It’s enough that I grabbed my swimsuit on the way out the door.

My life feels like an intersection between work days, rising Covid cases, an upcoming book release, and the very real stories of my daughters.

The world, indeed, goes on. My daughter and friend swim in the same lake in the early afternoon. When I return that evening, we stand on the back porch, eating cucumbers and avocado toast, talking. My oldest returns after dinner out with a coworker who’s packing up and moving elsewhere, in a story full of switchbacks.

My youngest drives us up a nearby hill. The sun has just lowered below the horizon, and the sky is swirled with rose-petal pink and hues of blue, golden at the horizon. We walk up a short path for a better view, and she leads the way into a field of goldenrod. The crickets sing madly. A mosquito lands on my upper arm and sinks its proboscis into my skin. My daughters are both talking. The mosquito swells with a drop of my blood, then disappears into the fattening glooming.

As we head home, my daughter drives with the windows open, one elbow cocked over the door. I love to drive, she tells me, her eyes on the road.

Sunday Morning Reading.

August 22, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On my drive a few weeks ago to New Hampshire, I listened to Donald Antrim’s essay in The New Yorker about his hospitalization shortly before he published a memoir about his mother’s death. He was eventually treated with electroconvulsive therapy, partly at the urging of David Foster Wallace.

In this sticky August weekend, I’m reading that memoir, The Afterlife.

Here’s a line from this fiercely written book:

People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing?”
— Donald Antrim

Vermont Day.

August 20, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Soccer practice begins. School looms. In the night, I wake and wonder what does any of that mean anymore? What is this strange time? Sleepless, I read The Farm with a cat on my feet. Through the open window, the humid night swallows sound, the crickets’ nighttime singing almost a whimper. Unlike the raucous spring mating season, late summer sounds dwindle.

But the season is fat, full. I dream of delicata squash lying on the ground, beneath their wide leaves.

My youngest sits on the couch beside me, with a bag full of pens and paper that her uncle bought her for school. She snaps open her binder and replaces last year’s ragged dividers with unmarked manila pages for this year. On the tags, she writes CALC, then APUSH, outlining her junior year courses.

I pick up my knitting — yarn I’ve unraveled from a previous sweater I never finished. Maybe this project will remain on the needles forever, too.

Sebastian Junger, one of my favorite writers, collaborated on a documentary, The Last Patrol. Combat veterans take a long foot journey, searching for what’s good about America — particularly relevant these days.

“The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.”

― Sebastian Junger

One Word.

August 18, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I kept remembering when we took our youngest camping beside a pond when she was two. She pointed to a purple flower growing in the water and learned to say pickerel. For days, she practiced that word, pick-er-el, saying it slowly and carefully, over and over.

Fourteen years later, she’s mastered that name and much more, working for days last spring at what appeared to me to be pages of math. She won’t remember one bit of that trip, but it’s in her, still.

In the evening, my daughters disappear to go running. I wash up dishes, then sit outside near the garden and where the wilderness edges up behind our world, with milkweed and raspberry brambles. As the dusk filters in, I read. The late summer crickets chirp their songs, and the world keeps moving on and on at what it does.

Sunflowers. Japanese beetles in the green beans. Tomatoes red on the vine. The rich scent of the promise of rain moving in.

Come
Let us dine on barley grain
On a journey nowhere“
— Bashō

So Much Water.

August 16, 2021 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the chilly August evening, my friend and I swim after dinner, while our families kick sand on the beach. We swim into the sunset, and I’m on the verge of shivering before we hit the ropes that mark off the swimming area.

When we return, the beach has been emptied of everyone except our families, and a little girl who wanders, eating from a bag of potato chips while her mother reads a tablet. The breeze raises goosebumps on my skin, and I pull clothes over my wet swimming suit.

I ride home with my youngest, the seat warmer toasty, the car’s windows filled with the sunset’s iridescent strawberry.

She wants me to trust her driving. Because I am me, I feel all around us the coldness of autumn creeping in, and how that cold whispers its own story. This evening, though, I lean back in her car, my bare feet shedding sand on her floor, and let her drive.

A half moon rises over the hillside, the pearl color of shell’s interior.