Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

Diving In

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This in-between holiday week, our unstated goal has been to swim twice a day — in the midday hard heat and in the dusky evening, when the surface of the water holds warmth and our feet trail into the cooler eddies beneath.

We’re drinking our fill of milkweed blossoms, the reflection of clouds in rippling ponds, ice cream cones — as if this stockpiling might carry into the white and gray palette of Vermont’s winter.

I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue….
(The geranium flowers) are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.

— Hayden Carruth, “August First”

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Hardwick, Vermont

Independence Day, 2018

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What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

…  your denunciation of tyrants…  mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

— Frederick Douglass, 1852

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Montpelier, Vermont

Yes, Summer

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My 13-year-old wraps an ice pack in a kitchen towel and gently rubs it along her cat’s hot paws. The furry creature nuzzles his head against the cold pack. Hot, hot, the cats lie on the wood floor, panting.

Viridescence begins this July, these very long days slick with humidity, turbulent with thunderstorms, the domestic garden and wild woods pulsing, rampaging green — growing headlong, magnificently wild.

This slice of summer is the season of cousins, of sprawling sunsets and lingering dusk, s’mores, and the overarching goal for today: swimming.

In a New Hampshire river, my daughter stands at the edge of a waterfall — the rocks around us radiating heat, the water so cold the small bones in our feet ache. She disappears behind the waterfall, wholly hidden by the frothing water, then emerges blinking and drenched, her smile luminescent.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Takahama Kyoshi

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These Unbroken Days

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Nearly July, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had sun — an apt metaphor for life, I suppose.

Early this morning when the sun spread its inimitable crimson across the horizon, and the cats stepped on my hands, reminding me gently of their hunger, I lay listening to the birds and thinking how wrong I was to envision my life as pieces — work for these hours, sandwich in volleyball, the endless litany of email, handfuls of garlic scapes I picked from the garden, hanging laundry on the line.

Our lives — my daughters’ and mine, the others around us — flow as one stream, sometimes turbulent, sometimes sweet as a June rose petal.

I’m folding up the laptop for a few days, in this summer melody.

 According to Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer’s material falls into two categories: mystery and manners. The latter are, for the most part, observable human behaviors, often socially constructed…. while the former, which reside at our human center, constitute the deeper truths of our being. These truths we often keep secret, because to reveal them makes us vulnerable. To my mind, an even deeper mystery than the secrets we keep is the mystery of the way our hearts incline toward this person and not that one, how one soul selects another for its company, how we recognize companion souls as we make our way through the world…

— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders

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What Remains

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In a 21st-century version of a paper airplane, my 19-year-old texts me at work that her younger sister’s favorite chicken was devoured in the night hours.

I step out in the stairway and call home. Yes, I’ll bury the remains.

Every chicken owner I know has lost birds — to hawks, dogs, raccoons, the soup pot. There’s so many feathers on a chicken, or what the fox left of a chicken — golden and soft as milkweed fluff. As I bury the back and feet and the bright red guts, I remember walking my youngest in her stroller along our road, her tiny fingers carefully pulling apart milkweed pods so the fluff would drift away in the sunlight.

That morning at work, in a tiny and windowless room, I’m on the phone with a teacher who’s taught agriculture in a public school for over half a century, gathering some final details for the piece I’m writing about him. When chickens come up in our conversation, I mention my daughter has lost her first. He says one word, just a sympathetic, “Ah…”

My daughter, ever the pragmatist, says simply, “At least it wasn’t my cats. Foxes eat cats.”

As I walked home last evening, rain began falling, just a little mist that, during the night, slowly accumulated into a real summer rainfall. Drink it up, sweet earth, thirsty garden.

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To water or not to water?

The Vermont gardener question.

With my sandy soil, I’m watering — a showery hymn to growth.

One of the hottest and driest places I’ve ever been is Utah’s Hovenweep. A few years ago, my daughters and I spent one eternally long August afternoon beneath an aluminum picnic shelter, watching the sky. Thunderheads moved majestically slowly, then veered away, taking their rain — if they ever shed it — elsewhere.

Here in Vermont, we’re hardly parched. And yet, water, water…..

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust…
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

— Marge Piercy, “To Be of Use”

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