August Evening. Mosquito Bite. Driving.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Waiting for a Planning Commission meeting, I end up with an odd half hour and swim in the lake. What does ‘planning’ mean anymore, anyway? It’s enough that I grabbed my swimsuit on the way out the door.

My life feels like an intersection between work days, rising Covid cases, an upcoming book release, and the very real stories of my daughters.

The world, indeed, goes on. My daughter and friend swim in the same lake in the early afternoon. When I return that evening, we stand on the back porch, eating cucumbers and avocado toast, talking. My oldest returns after dinner out with a coworker who’s packing up and moving elsewhere, in a story full of switchbacks.

My youngest drives us up a nearby hill. The sun has just lowered below the horizon, and the sky is swirled with rose-petal pink and hues of blue, golden at the horizon. We walk up a short path for a better view, and she leads the way into a field of goldenrod. The crickets sing madly. A mosquito lands on my upper arm and sinks its proboscis into my skin. My daughters are both talking. The mosquito swells with a drop of my blood, then disappears into the fattening glooming.

As we head home, my daughter drives with the windows open, one elbow cocked over the door. I love to drive, she tells me, her eyes on the road.

Sunday Morning Reading.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

On my drive a few weeks ago to New Hampshire, I listened to Donald Antrim’s essay in The New Yorker about his hospitalization shortly before he published a memoir about his mother’s death. He was eventually treated with electroconvulsive therapy, partly at the urging of David Foster Wallace.

In this sticky August weekend, I’m reading that memoir, The Afterlife.

Here’s a line from this fiercely written book:

People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing?”

— Donald Antrim
Greensboro, Vermont

Vermont Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Soccer practice begins. School looms. In the night, I wake and wonder what does any of that mean anymore? What is this strange time? Sleepless, I read The Farm with a cat on my feet. Through the open window, the humid night swallows sound, the crickets’ nighttime singing almost a whimper. Unlike the raucous spring mating season, late summer sounds dwindle.

But the season is fat, full. I dream of delicata squash lying on the ground, beneath their wide leaves.

*

My youngest sits on the couch beside me, with a bag full of pens and paper that her uncle bought her for school. She snaps open her binder and replaces last year’s ragged dividers with unmarked manila pages for this year. On the tags, she writes CALC, then APUSH, outlining her junior year courses.

I pick up my knitting — yarn I’ve unraveled from a previous sweater I never finished. Maybe this project will remain on the needles forever, too.

*

Sebastian Junger, one of my favorite writers, collaborated on a documentary, The Last Patrol. Combat veterans take a long foot journey, searching for what’s good about America — particularly relevant these days.

“The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it’s disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction—all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most.” 

― Sebastian Junger

One Word.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I kept remembering when we took our youngest camping beside a pond when she was two. She pointed to a purple flower growing in the water and learned to say pickerel. For days, she practiced that word, pick-er-el, saying it slowly and carefully, over and over.

Fourteen years later, she’s mastered that name and much more, working for days last spring at what appeared to me to be pages of math. She won’t remember one bit of that trip, but it’s in her, still.

In the evening, my daughters disappear to go running. I wash up dishes, then sit outside near the garden and where the wilderness edges up behind our world, with milkweed and raspberry brambles. As the dusk filters in, I read. The late summer crickets chirp their songs, and the world keeps moving on and on at what it does.

Sunflowers. Japanese beetles in the green beans. Tomatoes red on the vine. The rich scent of the promise of rain moving in.

Come

Let us dine on barley grain

On a journey nowhere“

— Bashō

So Much Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the chilly August evening, my friend and I swim after dinner, while our families kick sand on the beach. We swim into the sunset, and I’m on the verge of shivering before we hit the ropes that mark off the swimming area.

When we return, the beach has been emptied of everyone except our families, and a little girl who wanders, eating from a bag of potato chips while her mother reads a tablet. The breeze raises goosebumps on my skin, and I pull clothes over my wet swimming suit.

I ride home with my youngest, the seat warmer toasty, the car’s windows filled with the sunset’s iridescent strawberry.

She wants me to trust her driving. Because I am me, I feel all around us the coldness of autumn creeping in, and how that cold whispers its own story. This evening, though, I lean back in her car, my bare feet shedding sand on her floor, and let her drive.

A half moon rises over the hillside, the pearl color of shell’s interior.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

— Jack Kerouac
Greensboro, VT

August. Somewhere.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In the midday heat, my youngest drives us north, following vague directions, and we hike along two small ponds. The merest wind blows, ruffling sunlight over the water like sparkling scales.

Through the woods, we follow a trail up and then sit on a rocky ledge, admiring the view, drinking water and eating crackers and talking. The humidity reminds me of summers in southern New Hampshire, and how a summer seemed so long as a kid.

The sticky heat spreads out this day, elongates it. There’s plenty more ahead — my daughter heads into work and then goes swimming with a friend; I write on the back porch; my oldest returns from work and attends class on the upstairs porch; our cat catches his claw on the window screen. Rain falls.

But before all that, my youngest and I stop by a farmstead, and eat drippy and creamy-delicious vanilla ice cream cones. As we get into her car to leave, my daughter bites into a fresh peach. A friend pulls up beside us, and we talk for a bit. Our conversation winds quickly to work and misogyny. My friend apologies to my daughter for our conversation flying around.

My daughter asks politely, What? and pauses with that half-eaten peach in her hand.

My friend says, Oh, she’s in that lovely peach world.

Hard-working house cat, Acer.