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Summer Sustenance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Swimming in the lake last night until the children were shivering and laughing, the rosy sunset spilling over the still water, I imagined myself like the black bears around us, storing not calories but summer’s barefoot warmth, the ease of lying on the sand, the way you might swim with your eyes at the lake’s surface, all that water stretching from shore to shore, filled with the teeming mysteries of animal, vegetable and mica-flecked rocky life.

An acquaintance once gave me a piece of advice: if I wanted to change my life, do one or two changes well, and see how that spins things around. In those toddler-raising days, I chose two things: I baked our family’s bread and learned to knit. O, once upon the time as a very young woman, I teased and mocked the domestic, little knowing its ancient power and life-carrying grace. Once upon a time, too, I brushed off August swimming as frivolity, back in those days when I chopped my life into pieces, ranked weeding the garden above sand between the girls’ toes, misunderstanding how that lake nourishes our human hunger.

…Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

– Robert Frost, “October”

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Heart in the Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my husband and I bought our first house, I intended to live there forever, unpack my two cast iron skillets, have a couple of kids, dig a vast garden, and stay. Then there’s that Robert Burns’ line John Steinbeck retooled, and maybe I should have reflected that line might encompass the lives of women, too…. The best laid schemes of mice and men…. and so on.

Luckily, what I perceived as plans awry has evened out – at least for now. Intrepidly exploring the terrain of where we’re living, I realize, again, just how corporal our lives are, how the angle of light through the kitchen window – whether wide open or filtered through mist  – shapes the kernels of our days. Walking through the dusky forest with three girls last night, the muddy path surrounded by August’s copious greenery was all alive, alive: pencil-thin snakes, slugs, a darting rabbit, Cooper Brook running over its pebbles, shallow and clean. As we entered a field of goldenrod and chicory, crickets sang wildly, lusty in the heat of summer.

Simultaneously, I’m re-entering the landscape of the heart through my own daughter stepping into her young adulthood. What a bodily world is love. Those well-made schemes? Perhaps that’s what makes our lives so fascinating – our clever designs, and the universe’s unfolding and rearranging of our blueprints.

A summer river being crossed
how pleasing
with sandals in my hands!

– Buson

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August Fragrance

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My car stunk of shit when I arrived in Vermont’s capital city Friday afternoon, the debris from an enormous manure spreader I’d passed on a dirt road in Calais jammed in the undercarriage. Add to that, the fat stalk of garlic I’d nabbed from the school’s garden. I’d tugged it out to see how near (or late) to picking it was, and the pearly head, beneath the crumbling dirt I’d thumbed off, smelled so fragrantly delicious I decided to bring it home for dinner. Manure, garlic, and someone’s running shoes left in the backseat.

This past month, fierce thunderstorms have deluged us, and our piece of Vermont fluctuates between sodden and freshly-dried, smelling of wild blackberry vines and the pine bark mulch I gleaned from the town garage. Yesterday afternoon, my weeding interrupted, I read Adam Gopnik’s line in his article about Buddhism in The New Yorker – “…the things we cherish inevitably change and rot…” – which is likely the entire, unvarnished sum of human suffering.

The kids complained about the co-mixture of odors in the car – naturally. And, inevitably, I laughed off those complaints. Even with this early morning rain, I think we’ll swim today.

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More Midsummer, Memories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the crimson-hot July sultriness downtown yesterday, standing on a sidewalk, I flashbacked to what my parents used to call with enthusiasm “being on the road.” For years, we trekked from New Hampshire to humid Ohio to visit the anticipated happiness of cousins, and often far across the Mississippi, spending weeks in nylon tents and cooking canned corn over campfires.

I picked up that thread through much of my adulthood, crossing over from the backseat to the steering wheel. As a kid, of course, meshed in with my siblings, the primary concerns revolved around swimming possibilities and how good a campsite we were going to score.

The landscape from the driver’s seat looks mighty different. Navigation ranks right at the top of my list, something I never would have considered as a kid. Life on the road, I believed, would always get us from here to there. But maybe there’s a real element of truth there, too.

Our road has landed us here, on a dead end street, in a house whose property is bounded by lilacs on two sides. Last night, into dusk, I pulled out the deep weeds along these bushes, listening to the girls laughing about a game they had made up on the trampoline with four deflating soccer balls. We’ve put away the atlas for now, and traded in the scent of fresh asphalt for black soil, damp with early falling dew.

stream in summertime—
this joy of wading across
with sandals in hand

– Buson

 

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Growing Girls

/ 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

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Photo by James Dailey

Oh, Joy!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about taxes.

On the street, I see young mothers everywhere, babes cradled in arms, or kicking their tiny heels in strollers. A young man intently mows the State House lawn. I stand on the wide porch of The Pavilion, a warm wind tugging hair into my mouth, as I plot changes in my life.

An old woman walks down the street with two shirtless teenage boys. All three lick ice cream cones.

Collective good will. Collective promise of spring in all her tender green beauty.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

– Yosa Buson

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