Ode to the Miraculous Melon

August 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

And then there’s this: at the very end of Vermont’s summer months — August 27th, a day of jumbled work and bruised adult egos, a day of existential pondering, after a moonlit night when I consider my very genuine failings as a parent to my oldest child, a day of humidity that ends with my daughters sitting on the bank of the pond while I swim with my friend, in all that cool water, its glassine surface broken in circular ripples with biting fish, and I long to keep swimming, swimming, we drive the 30 seconds home with a garden-grown cantaloupe cradled in my hands.

The melon had already split at its oblong end, vaguely skull- and exposed-brain-esque. As I carry the melon into the kitchen, the girls eye it skeptically. Already, that cracked end is clustered with fruit flies — where did they come from? — and I brush them away quickly with my hand and open the melon with a cleaver. The orange flesh bleeds juice.

With the cleaver, I slice off irregular squares, and then I’m eating it — famished not for the fruit, not for the sugar, not for the sticky liquid — but for the sheer miracle of a hard-shelled seed turned into such sweetness from soil and rain and sunlight, for all that this summer has been — both amazing beauty and clustering flies and ugliness of split rinds and quickly — hush, wait, yes — how just momentarily — we’ll all disintegrate back into that dust.

But not yet. Not this evening, with its creamy, rising nearly-full moon, two girls and two cats, a handful of chickens, and the crickets all night long, their songs still soldiering solidly.

Omen

August 27, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Running on the trails behind the high school today, a owl swoops through the woods, heads along the path, and then veers rapidly into the canopy. I run after him, but he’s gone.

Omen, clearly. But of what?

My luck to see this winged beauty?

Or a warning to keep my eyes open? Or just an owl searching for supper? I can look back on my life now and see all kinds of omens I missed — or blatantly ignored — but maybe, I keep thinking, those were merely owls, then, too….

Then, sometime during the fourth year, the omens will abandon you, because you’ve stopped listening to them.

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Family Lore

August 25, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My father, visiting, tells the story of his parents driving from Michigan to California, in the fall of 1941. I imagine my father, 4-years-old in the backseat with his much older sister, his parents driving an American-made car on innumerable two-lane highways, in the time when cars were made with tank-quality metal.

Decades before blue jeans and seatbelts, his parents — both Romanian immigrants — must have been on the immigrant road again, traveling not for leisure but to size up the Golden State: could they make a living in this land of sunshine?

They returned with the intention to sell their business and property and move. That early winter, however, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. With the country at war, moving was no longer an option.

In the blue predawn, I lie awake, thinking of the journey of these people, a grandfather I never met, my grandmother and aunt, now long dead. How this terrible war ended the California dream of my grandparents, but made their grocery business; how my dad enrolled in the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he met my mother; and that his sister lived her adult life in southern California.

All a mystery, perhaps, that journey cloaked in the murky past — and yet not, the consequences of those years still unwinding in my life — and my daughters’ lives.

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation — a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here… Nearly every American hungers to move.

— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Postcard from Hardwick, swimming, 2018

Kidness

August 22, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m at a restaurant in town with my parents, expecting to meet my daughters. My older daughter walks in alone, and I ask, What’s up? Where’s your sister?

She’s busy apparently, in a kid kind of way, hiding in the back of her friend’s car, so she and the friend can surprise the friend’s mother.

Well, I think, good luck to the mother.

In a few minutes my daughter appears, in soccer practice shorts, her face tanned and glowing. That, she says, was so fun. She assures me the mother wasn’t angry, preoccupied with a math homework assignment, instead.

In the early morning dark, I lie awake, listening to the crickets’ low sizzle. Like the lilacs, the mating songbirds have finished for this year. On the grass beside my garden lies a swimming floatie that needs to head back into the barn.

End of August, turn of seasons. Except, perhaps, if you’re in the season of being 13: keep on being 13 for a while yet.

Here’s an unrelated quote from what I’m reading: Lauren Markham’s The Faraway Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life:

The United States cannot at once be isolationist — build a wall, kill the trade deals — and global, selectively reaping the benefits of an international economy, like lower-cost imports, cut-rate outsourced workforce, and cheap labor in our fields here at home. We have played a major part in creating the problem of what has become of Central America, and we must play a major part in solving it.

Cat’s Heart

August 18, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter’s cat lies on the gray-painted floor at the top of the stairs, just outside her room, looking in. She’s away with friends in Maine. Over email, her sister and I see pictures of her swimming in a lake and the ocean — all that great blue and green wilderness around her 13-year-old self.

Her cat, of course, knows nothing of this, but simply lies at the threshold to her door, waiting for her return.

This morning, the rain’s returned, a great downpour. In the garden, yesterday, I pulled out handfuls of dead lily leaves, the broken and blackened remainders of lupine stems. Middle of August, and school and soccer start soon. The evenings come earlier, and the Black-eyed Susans burst brightly along the weedy roadsides.

Things do not change; we change.

— Thoreau

A Sweeter Version of Macbeth’s Day to Day

August 12, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On our back deck yesterday, my 19-year-old and I talk about the crickets, how their songs are lengthening and yet quieting at the same time, their strength slowly leaking away with summer.

The sunflowers are high in our garden.

This summer has been one of the daughters coming and going, and myself mostly staying put. The younger daughter’s suitcase is packed again, as she happily heads to Maine with friends. The older daughter has been working mixed-up nursing home shifts — most recently the graveyard hours. Her bags are packed, too, as she anticipates returning to college.

We’re busy, sure, but not that busy. In the midst of all this, we cook dinner together when we’re all home, and in these long dusky evenings, we go for walks.

Last night, we were in the town’s community gardens, taking photographs in the pink-leaved echinacea. I remembered that very first year I was a mother, and I kept trying to grab some stability — Oh, this is what being a mother is like. This is how our life will go. But my baby kept changing. She slept, or she didn’t sleep. She crawled, and then she ran. She babbled. Sometimes, she cried fiercely. She was radiant and fierce and deeply loving — a babyhood version of who she is as a young woman.

But she grew and changed all the time, which is — and I really don’t know why this came as such a shock to me — the essence of this earthly life. But the deep down elements of our lives haven’t altered: her eyes are the same curious, merry upside-down crescent moons I first saw on the night she was born.

All this, I suppose, means that I intend to swim in the nearby pond as long as possible. The water is warm yet, and the banks are brilliant with goldenrod.