Clouds.

July 24, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Saturday morning, I pick up a stack of library books at a town just north of where I live. As I drive away, I see an acquaintance crossing the road with a baby against his shoulder. This is a tiny town with a white-fenced green in its center where a farmers market has sprawled. I stop my Subaru in the middle of the road and jump out. “Let me see your baby!”

The baby is beautiful, its cheeks fat beneath a sunhat, rosebud mouth gnawing on a blanket.

The father and I talk just for a moment. He shares the baby’s name, and I tell him how rarely I seem to see infants these days. A car appears behind us, and I get back in my car. As I’m leaving, the father calls after me that he loved my book.

Driving home, I pass Lake Eligo, a deep glacial cut, all the blues and greens I can think of mixed into this sunlight-glittering beauty. From work, I know the skinny roads around this lake, and I follow a dirt lane to a dead-end. I park and wander down to the wetland shore. I’m thinking of an essay I’m writing about my last pregnancy, puzzling over how to arrange pieces of time. What makes sense? A linear timeframe, but we experience the world beyond the linear timeframe of course.

The lake empties both north and south, an anomaly, too. The planet is burning up, but the edge of this lake is almost cool. A bullfrog bellows in the weeds. I let those words and that writing koan slip away. For this moment, I’m in no rush. Clouds, water, and the reflection where they meet fill my sight.

Norma Fox Mazer & Mark Twain.

July 23, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

As a kid, I wanted to grow up and live on a farm. We lived in a New Hampshire village and spent a few summers driving west and camping from Wyoming to southern New Mexico. National Forest camping was cheap in those days — a dollar or two per night — and we cooked over the Coleman stove and slept in tents. My parents were frugal. They didn’t rent motel rooms, hardly ever bought a cup of coffee, and generally operated on the rule of don’t spend (a learned lifeskill I remain grateful for). My father bent that rule in a Boulder, CO, bookstore when the reading material we’d packed in our green Jeep needed an infusion.

The summer I was ten or so I read Huck Finn and Norma Fox Mazer’s I, Trissy over and over. In retrospect, the books were a good pair for a kid.

Last night just after dark, I walked out to the herb patch for a handful of mint to brew tea. After a long day of high heat and the evening’s dew, the world smelled sweet, alive. I had mowed the lawn in the late afternoon, and I breathed in freshly cut grass.

What was it I had wanted when I dreamed of living on a farm? To be outside as much as possible, to put my hands in the dirt, and to see where the sky meet the horizon. Three things I achieved in one Friday, if little else.

That adolescent me, the girl who was, as I remember her, insecure, unsure, dreaming, yearning, longing, that girl who was hard on herself, who was cowardly and brave, who was confused and determined-that girl who was me-still exists. I call on her when I write. I am the me of today-the person who has become a woman, a mother, a writer. Yet I am the me of all those other days as well. I believe in the reality of that past.
— Norma Fox Mazer

A Thousand Things. Summer Moments.

July 20, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

On my way home from work, I stop in to visit a small building just recently finished. Inside, the room smells of freshly cut cedar. The visit is a pleasure, with a building well-designed and completed. Its owners will take joy here, that’s nearly certain.

I’m at the far end of the lake, and so I take the long way home over dirt roads. I make one more stop, where someone I knew years ago has finally begun building a long-planned retirement house. Building is both fast and slow these days — a craze to build and a shortage of materials. There’s no one at this site, and I stand for bit, admiring the view of the Black River valley. I hope this place gives the owners their share of joy, too.

Where I work now is the town where I spent so much of my daughters’ childhood summer days, swimming and hiking. There was plenty of joy in all those things, too. The afternoon is redolent with humidity, exactly as I remember in my childhood.

In this steamy afternoon, I have a little pocket of time before an evening meeting. In my garden, I pick two zucchini, some lettuce that’s gone to sour, and a red coin onion. My garden grows as tall as my shoulders, more wild than not. A light rain patters down. I weed a little.

A thousand things I’ve done today. Or nearly a thousand. In this little moment, I let my own racing mind go. The snails have gotten into the lettuce. I lift one and then, gently, set it back down again.

Let it eat on, I think. I’ve plenty to spare. Don’t be greedy, I admonish myself.

Water. Sky. Lilies.

July 19, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Sunday morning begins hot and out-of-sorts in our house. As antidote, we load the kayaks on the car. We paddle through a passage between floes of waterlilies in a breathtaking landscape — clouds reflected in water and all those perfect flowers. We’re not far from home, but the kayakers and canoeists we pass are all strangers who raise hands in quiet hellos.

In no rush at all, we paddle to the pond’s far end, where we drift for a long while, talking and handing a box of crackers between us. A loon and a single chick bob nearby. The other loon parent appears with a string of lunch in her or his mouth.

Later, we pull our kayaks on a shore and swim out to a raft where we lie in the sun and talk about where we might be five years, ten years, down the line. A man swims out with his two daughters, and we talk a little with him about the raft and the sun and the waterlilies that cover the pond.

I’m reminded of William Blake’s line about seeing the world in a grain of sand as we slowly paddle back to where we began. I’ve walked across sections of this pond in the midwinter around ice fishing holes. A number of years ago, a teenager drowned here, a boy I knew as a baby. His parents were vendors in the same farmers market where my husband and I sold maple syrup and ice cream. We all had little ones in those days. On those hot afternoons, we shared stories while swaying with babies on our backs.

The pond this July day reflects only sweetness and beauty. At the shore, my daughters load our kayaks back on our car. I rinse off my bare feet at the water’s edge. A little boy runs to the end of the dock. His father stands waist deep in the water. He raises his arms and says, Jump. I’ll catch you.

Saturday. Stories.

July 16, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In the classic scenario of Saturday plans waylaid, I end up driving here and there this morning, for errands that may or may not make any difference at all. That seems to be where we are these days — maybe, maybe not.

July has warmed, and I work on the back deck, in the shade of our table umbrella, drinking cold coffee.

An acquaintance I haven’t seen in a while stops by. We stand in the shade of my house, talking. He found my book in a yard shade and bought it. Then he tells me his own story of drinking and how he rose up against it. I’d known a few strands of this story, little bits, here and there, that he’d freely given me before. But his telling and my listening slips me back into that sacred space of stories. The telling. The listening. Nothing maybe about that at all.

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
— Graham Greene

Mid-July.

July 14, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Rain falls again this morning, in this summer of such growth. Yesterday afternoon, between work and evening Selectboard meeting, I wandered in my garden, discovering calendula blooming in the zucchini. This morning, drinking coffee before I head off again, I add to my list. Oh, the list, and how it pales against this fragrant rain and those rose blossoms battling the Japanese beetles.

I’ve lived in New England for nearly all my life, and July is the month that renews my love of this place. Orange tiger lilies, pink cosmos, crimson currents.

All around me, the world stretches and tugs. My daughter grows up. The cats age. I work and spend. The planet spins inexorably on a course all of its own. But July is the month that reminds me the world is far, far larger than my own tiny house and acreage, my own dear family, that the world around me teems with life and thwarted longing and sometimes fulfillment, too.

The neighbors’ boys pedal up and down our dead-end street for hours, learning to ride their bikes, persistent as heck. Determined to master this skill.