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.

I had to learn that I was a better mother and wife when I was working than when I was not.

— Madeline L’Engle, Walking On Water

Photo by Molly S.

Opening Up

August 9, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On a muggy afternoon, my daughters and I swim in a cold New Hampshire mountain stream with my brother’s girlfriend. She suggests going to the ocean the following day. I see my younger daughter’s eyes — the quiet girl — gleam with love of ocean.

While I drive that familiar way back over the mountains back to Vermont and back to work, the girls and my brother and his girlfriend head the opposite way, east, to the sea. Later that evening, I read Louise Erdrich while the cats sprawl on the windowsill, watching a pouring rainstorm. In my garden, the sunflowers stretch far above my head, not yet blooming, their golden faces not yet opened up to the world.

The Erdrich book is her memoir of early motherhood. Watching the rain with the cats, I imagine my 13-year-old when she was three, picking colorful bouquets of zinnias in my garden for her two best friends.

At 13, wearing sunglasses and jean shorts, she’s so often savvier than I give her credit for, happily stepping into a wider world.

… with each celebration of maturity there is the pang of loss. This is our human problem… how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts.

— Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

Maine/Photo by Molly S.

Morning Notes

August 5, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

An August Sunday list with the daughter:

put up dill pickles
can peaches
write questions for tomorrow’s interview
pick blackberries
pluck Japanese beetles from the bean vines and feed this salad to the hens
bake a tart in the pan found yesterday in a free pile
wander somewhere unknown

The screened door slamming tells me it is summer…

— David Budbill, “The Sound of Summer”

Last Sunday in this July

July 29, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early Sunday morning, the cat wakes me by biting my toes. Get up! Get up!

Camping on a lake, my younger daughter wrote us news of the loons calling crazily all night long. I think of her listening to those ghostly, ineffably beautiful songs, how years from now she’ll hear loons calling and think of sleeping on that lake shore.

At an art opening recently, a friend and I heard the artist speak. The artist said sometimes you see life more clearly, with precision, and other times through a mist or fog.

This morning, fog has already melted from garden. On my list of clear-thinking things to do — bake a pie with my 19-year-old. Swim.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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Snippet

July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

For dinner last night, my daughter fried beef for enchiladas. From the garden, I brought in a basket and began washing vegetables. Here, throw in slender leeks, sweet red peppers, onions with their fat greens. I filled a salad bowl with mesclun, radishes, sun gold tomatoes.

Do people talk about the weather as much as Vermonters do? What a summer, we say.

Yesterday: muggy heat, steady rain, a perfect evening. We swam in the nearby pond again, a little chillier after the rain. Then we gathered up our towels and went home.

Early July A.M.

July 21, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Midsummer, we’re at the numberless place in July where we might commence to take swimming at dusk as a given, to be exasperated by heat, to seek solace in a cool living room from the day’s sharp light.

As summer might unwind forever.