travel

Revision.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On the most perfect spring morning, I’m driving along route 107, a stretch of highway I’ve always loved that curves along the river. I’m listening to a This American Life story about two boys (and if you listen, listen all the way to the end, please), when the revision path for my novel abruptly unfolds before me, like a Jacob’s Ladder toy.

I’m in somewhat familiar territory, and so I pull over and scrawl down a few sentences. The day is suffused with dandelions and violets. I get a little lost to where I’m going, but not too lost. Later, I take a different road home, up route 100 along the White River Valley. Last year’s corn stubble patterns black fields that stretch to mountains where leaves freshen the gray with new green. The fruit trees are blossoming. I stop and finish the remains of my sandwich —pickles and sprouts and a coarse sharp mustard — keeping company with pink petals and pollinators.

My lunch companion remarked how a forest will do what a forest will. As I eat, I remember how poet David Budbill railed against writers taking themselves too seriously. He wrote, wrote hard, wrote productively, and revered the mystery of the imagination, the murkiness of creativity. His advice to writers, “Don’t think. Listen.”

On my way home, I listen to another This American Life story about a bird who sang to itself. I’m not making this up.

Remember.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Not long after dawn, under circling pigeons, we get on a train to the Rome airport. I’m nearly certain our tickets aren’t valid. My phone’s app shows me a mixed message of a cheery You’re all set! and a stern Seats reservations required! I can’t figure out where the tacky-tacky box to check to shell out for reservations might hide. The train car is nearly empty. My daughter and I sprawl out with our suitcases and backpacks. In a luminous honeyed light, the train winds out of Rome. We pass immense apartment buildings with balconies crammed with tables and chairs, hanging plants, yesterday’s laundry.

A conductor walks by, returns and holds out his hand. He speaks to me in Italian. I answer in the one language I command and point to the cheery sentence on my phone. The train picks up speed.

“Remember,” he tells me and disappears into the next car.

Remembering has always been my strength and my weakness.

As a girl, my family used to take the train from New Hampshire to Boston for the day, excursions crammed with cobblestone streets, swans, pastries, history, the ocean’s salty breeze. On this Italian train, my daughter, 17-on-the-cusp-of-18, presses her suntanned face to the window. Crimson poppies bloom along the tracks. Before we left on this trip, a friend told me the adage about pedestrians in Rome — the quick and the dead. Quick we are this morning, on this train with our baggage of wrinkled clothes, a few gifts, those library books I finished reading. A man stands on a sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, studying the train as we sway along.

The next morning, not smoking a cigarette, I stand beside an apple tree in my yard, studying a woodchuck who’s set up housekeeping in a den, the creature returning my gaze, eyes glossy, inscrutable.

Espresso.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Florence is crammed with tourists. My daughter and I sit on a stone bench in the shade and watch pigeons and people. Midday, we climb stone stairs into the duomo while the organ plays. I’ve never been in a structure like this, such an awesome concert of art and size, art and music. My daughter whispers, You’re going to keep talking about the organ, aren’t you?

Later, we eat pizza. At our table, strangers strike up a conversation with us, give my daughter wine, offer shopping and college advice, and an espresso appears before me. I lift the tiny white cup and drink the brew.

Pigeons.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

On the train to Florence, we strike up a conversation with a couple from Australia who are traveling with both their mothers. He’s interested in American universities and chats with my daughter about dorms and loans and degrees. He’s in banking. His wife works from home and hasn’t gone into the office in two and a half years. Sometimes, she says, she stands in the backyard and talks to the birds for company.

In Florence, our windows look over red roof tiles. Pigeons nestle in the ivy.

Cinque Terre, Italy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

We leave our dear friends in Switzerland. That morning, we walked in the forest among mighty mountains with their cat.

In Italy, the trains are jammed. We enter the wrong car. In a mixture of languages, people pass luggage back and forth. Lemons bend down tree branches here. We eat creatures from the sea. Such a long way we have come, to this world of color and wisteria fragrance. Cats sun themselves on ancient stone walls.

Paris.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A very long way we have traveled, the youngest daughter and me, stocking up on new sights of very old places, and now headed to dear friends.

In this enchanting, beautiful city, we drink coffee and walk until our heels are bloodied. This enormous world. On a rooftop garden, we discover a snail in a rainbow of blossoms, watch a wedding.