Growing Girls

June 29, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Not that many years ago, the enormous trunk of my old Volvo held a stash of gritty plastic buckets and shovels all summer, tucked to one side, opposite spare oil quarts and a yellow jug of coolant: well-used childhood possessions.

This beach trip our family is entirely without sand toys, although we’ve been to numerous beaches, and even created castles with our hands and this fine red sand, with smooth stones and dried seaweed. I am likely the only one in our family who remembers those sand toys.

Here’s what we do now: on a chilly morning yesterday, the older daughter filled out a college math assessment on-line. At a particularly knotty problem, she looked at me. My own adolescence of function and cosecant reared up before me. I could feel myself teetering on a edge, before I said simply, Call your uncle if you want help with that one…. There’s only so much I can do, and cosecant no longer falls into my skills.

Which blended in perfectly with Jeffrey Lent’s beautiful new novel, Before We Sleep, about a daughter growing up – and much, much more.

There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense.

– Jeffrey Lent

Photo by James Dailey

Salty

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

Last night by the light of a crescent moon and the setting sun, the long red-earth rows of raised potato beds held shadows in their furrows, while all around was the sweetly pink sky, the cumulus clouds scudding across the blackening sky.

On the shore nearby, beach glass abounds, allegedly from numerous shipwrecks. On these pristine June days, I imagine the manifolds secrets buried unreachably far down. Swimming today in easy waves, I emerged with a salty mouthful, the brine of sweat and birth – of the sea.

“Dear old world’, she murmured, ‘you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.”

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Photo by Molly S.

The Ten Thousand Things

June 26, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I always believed Vermont champion of summer iridescence, but Prince Edward Island glows, vibrant with a handful of colors: greens, blues, lupine purples, and all that red earth, tilled in tidy mounds and planted with potatoes.

Walking along the hidden rust-stained shore of a lake last night, the kids and I discovered glass and ceramic shards newly-broken and raw-edged, and scattered bits of glass already worn into cloudy sea glass. This particular stretch of sand was lavish with sea flotsam: human junk and the sea’s live and cast-off beauty – scuttering crabs and half-submerged tires and an enormous fantail of shells, some nearly too small to see, pearly white and gray and violet, discarded from creatures’ lives and breaking into bits, returning into the sand and the sea.

My youngest daughter remarked on the mixture of things, alive and dead, exquisitely beautiful and not at all. Bald eagles winged silently, fiercely powerful, through the sky, and we kept walking on all that sand, red as the desert where I was born, far away on the earth’s curve.

… simple evidence. That life is relentless, demands of us to take us the reins of life and drive the wagon.

Jeffrey Lent, Before We Sleep – early morning reading.

Postcard From A Parking Lot

June 23, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One cool thing about being a writer is the liberty to do ‘research’ in the face of teenager sensibility. Honestly, though, curiosity often leads us into fun – or at least the unusual. In the middle of Maine, the kids and I walked along a highway, wondering who lives here, and why, then the 12-year-old discovered a squishy patch of asphalt which took our footprints for moments before they disappeared. In a field behind a parking lot, toadflax bloomed at one edge.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

–Anne Lamott

Suddenly Summer!

June 22, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One of the sarcastic and not-to-be-imitated jokes in our family is the phrase “Love Wins,” overused by a few people we know. Sitting on the stairs talking late last night, we mutter at each other Love wins.

What’s the battle anyway? And who are the footsoldiers?

Already passing the solstice, Vermont summer is cacophonious around us: the rhododendrons shed their petals as the iris beside them blaze up in violet splendor. Pulling into the driveway after work yesterday, the 12-year-olds leap on the trampoline, laughing, hair static-splayed.

Summer’s desire – love of summer – rampages. No winner and losers here, the season spreads on, with curling morning glory vines, Budbill’s ubiquitious day lily, robin’s eggs sucked dry by a predator. These dewy, sunny mornings.

…This (lily)
is coarse and ordinary, almost harsh in its weathered beauty,
like an older woman with a tough, worldly-wise and wrinkled
face….

David Budbill, The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July

The Adult Contingent

June 20, 2017 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The summer I was 19, I worked in a nursing home in Brattleboro, swing shift from 3 to 11pm, arriving at the hot and busy part of the day and leaving in the generally cool and always quiet night. Being 19 and filled with endless energy, I often worked a double shift, and left at 7 am when just about everyone else in Brattleboro was heading to work.

A few young residents lived in that nursing home – a woman crippled with arthritis, a young man irreparably injured by a drunk driver – but the older residents were there either because they had dementia or suffered an illness, or were simply old and had nowhere else to go.

One evening, my favorite little old woman rang her bell. I remember she had a small bedside lamp and a handmade quilt. When I appeared, she was polite, but she said clearly, Honey, I want a grownup.

I hurried to get the charge nurse, even though it was my job and maybe I should have stayed. I was very young, and the woman was very old – a territory wholly unfamiliar to me.

Early last Sunday, in the last push of moving, I desperately wanted the adults to arrive. I love kids and teenagers dearly, but there’s a time for adults, too. The adults arrived in force, moved us and stayed, and put our house together again, too. They ferried us down the mountain and over the river and up a hill, and took the younger daughter swimming, too.

Eternal thanks.