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Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter told me today, It will be bad for me in a few years.

Why’s that? I assumed she was pre-mourning her older sister’s forthcoming passage into adulthood and that ached-for leap into adult life.

My child said, Because my aunt buys my really nice pajamas at a place where she buys her boys’ pajamas, and we love these pajamas, and the sizes don’t go above 12.

My child will never remember this conversation. Two years hence I could bring up this remark around the woodstove, and I bet cash now she likely won’t remember this. But today, here, this meant something to her. A summertime world of utter happiness, a way of living this season where she and her two beloved cousins sleep in a small room, reading and giggling, all in their same beloved pajamas. These are days filled with bikes, swimming, endless meals –  also of ears primed to hear, trying to piece out the puzzle of adult lives, the constant threads of conversation and emotion. Mainly, though, these children seek space for their growth and energy. Tonight, this child wanted to go walking in the gloaming. We went out, all of us, walking along the gravel road, and didn’t cross back into the house until long past dark.

Here’s Dylan Thomas on childhood in a stanza of “Fern Hill”:

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Vermont Travels

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Early this Sunday morning while the girls were sleeping and dew lay slick in the garden, I was reading Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail, his new book about traveling across long stretches of the Oregon Trail in contemporary America. By the time the kids were up, I was itching to read parts of the book to my girls, as Buck’s brother Nick reminded me in many ways of my own brother Nik.

I said, Girls, it’s settled. We’re headed out west next summer in a prairie schooner.

One of the girls remarked somewhat disinterestedly, I thought we were driving the Toyota to Alaska, and why are we out of bagels again?…

In rural Vermont, so much of our travels are undertaken in a car. Today, with effort, we loaded the canoe on the car, drove to Number 10 Pond and unloaded the canoe. We had the loveliest paddle. People were swimming far out in the pond, and they called cheerily to us, hello, hello! and a little Jack Russell terrier yipped at us from a peninsula. My older daughter, in the canoe’s rear, guided us into a patch of water lilies, and while she meticulously photographed the aquatic flowers, I lay on the canoe’s bottom and watched the cumulus clouds drifting. Then it was back in the old truck again, with the transmission’s curious tendency to lurch out of third gear as we rattled along. All this time, though, we held the pond within us, its cool surface pinged with skittering water bugs, and the clouds reflected in its green depths.

Buck writes:

In a covered wagon, while riding slowly out in the open air, every blade of grass, every fence post and farm, or the mallard ducks rising from the streams, assumes a visual and olfactory intensity that you can never feel while trapped inside a speeding car. While on a wagon seat, the land embraces you, emotionally. The rumbling wheels, the creaking top, the pull of the driving lines in your hands multiply the pleasure of travel. A part of me would always long for that strength of feeling again, and no other form of travel could match it.

–– Rinker Buck

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Waterlily by Molly S.

Art and Gambling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My older daughter attended an art institute this summer that emphasized art for art’s sake. That’s a particular phrase that’s always rankled me, likely much to my discredit, as my daughter pointed out that art for art’s sake reigns fairly prominently in our unfinished abode. She was wholly annoyed by that proposition, too. When I asked why, she said, When I grow up, I want a salary. Clearer thinking, perhaps, than I’ve ever achieved. She doesn’t want what honestly amounts to the gambling I do with our lives.

Nonetheless, she loved this art institute. She loved the whole-hearted infusion of art, of walking across a college campus and meeting fiction writers who read thirty-second stories, of poetry slams, of improve and theater. That Government Night was run by a political filmmaker.

What if our culture truly was infused with art? If poets were valued more than CEOs? Is that so improbable? So foolish? Or too revolutionary?

But I, without a penny to my name, I still say that when it comes down to it, money is one kind of currency and painting is another.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Is of Value

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, in a driving rainstorm that almost instantaneously altered to sunny skies, I took the girls with me to a staff meeting in Burlington. They read for a while, then headed down to the lake’s waterfront, and by the time I arrived, they had both decided Burlington was THE place to live.

On the way home, we stopped in at Big Box Store Land. With all our recent house guests, our towels have been revealed in all their deplorable condition. While I wandered around a mammoth store looking for towels in what had been advertised as a bath store, but had a sizable luggage department, too, the girls scoped out the premises.

They were truly amazed: hair clips could be bought in a plentiful pack and three dozen hairbrushes were on display. One daughter murmured, I’ve never seen so much shampoo in one place.

Such marvels! We left with towels and hair clips. Back at our house, in the cool and rain-fresh evening, we walked around the garden, the little girl noting the singing crickets, while the wood thrush trilled her inimitable melody. As summer winds down, the birdsongs gradually diminish.

The world of plastic baubles thoroughly admired, the girls and I sat on the couch and read.

(Donald Hall) is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer–the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns–those fleas–he turns to the work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one.

– Dani Shapiro

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New Hampshire White Mountains by Molly S.

Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A number of years ago, visiting an elementary school with my daughter, I asked the teacher about the school’s philosophy. He told me every child has been brought into the world for some particular, unknown destiny, and so the whole child needs to be educated to fulfill that destiny.

Destiny and children? When my first daughter was a baby, even then I believed a rich inner life was invaluable. I’m not the kind of mother who bought stocks or purchased a life insurance policy.

Today, I drove through New Hampshire. In the backseat, my younger child worked mightily at her inner life by reading Harry Potter. My nephew, at 11, leaned forward between the front seats, and we passed the time by talking about being present. We are here, he said, and even when we’re up there, ahead, we’re still here. If you think about it, we’re always only here. Only my father enjoys this trend of conversation, so we talked about him, too.

In the mirror, I looked at my daughter with her sun-streaked hair, her tiny blue earrings, so immersed in this book, the first book she’s carried all day, the first I’ve seen her enraptured in pages, deep in the world of imagination.

That’s something, my nephew said, this always hereness. I like it.

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

– Buson

Bee on elecampane by Molly S.

Bee pursing its destiny on elecampane by Molly S.

The Present Moment

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Note: guest blogger Yasuhiro Nikolai Shinozaki wrote this entry. He is an eleven-year-old novelist, and a Vermonter currently growing up in Charlottesville, VA.

When I first got this assignment, I wasn’t sure what to write about. So I sat looking out the window at the white blanket of clouds hanging above the green trees. It was 7:47 in the morning.

That’s when I got my idea I would write about just this morning. Nothing much big. Just the present moment.

I always liked mornings. There is always a new day ahead and nothing yet to regret. Everything seems new and bright: the sunlight marching through the window and the silence yet to be broken.

Other than nights it’s always been mornings and evenings people have time to sit around. Most time is consumed by actually doing stuff. So here I am waiting for the rest of my family to get up at now 8:05 in the morning.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.