Summer, Again

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On this first day of summer, mock orange blooms beneath our bedroom windows — an enormous bush that nearly reaches to the second floor — its scent so sweet it’s nearly liquid.

Yesterday, a day that perhaps reflects our summer world: chaos combined with a languid beauty winding through. The chickens fly over their fence. My two jobs clamber for my attention. My oldest daughter coughs. My bank account teeters on dipping into the red.

And yet, a small dog named Dammit wanders through the library. The little children play in the sandbox for hours, digging with bent spoons and old trucks. That evening, I return to the library for a novelist to read. Four kids whose mother is at the food shelf follow me in. They check out books. I give them handfuls of bookmarks and Reading Rocks! tattoos. The youngest plays on the floor with the dollhouse, eating potato chips, sharing her life story with me.

Each summer I bring friends out
to note and share the (garden) display and produce.
Here is life’s habit on grand exhibit
and the hard work hidden.

— Leland Kinsey

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White Mountains, New Hampshire

Age 19

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Oh, ode to June in all her lovely greenery.

Remember being 19-years-old? Remember desire, desire, desire?

The summer river.
It’s happy to walk across it.
My hands with zori sandal.

—Buson

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Dog River, Berlin, Vermont

Female House

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

The summer my second daughter was an infant, the season was particularly hot and sticky — at least in my memory it was. That summer I just didn’t do certain things — I washed clothes and probably even folded them, but I rarely put them away.

Domestic chaos? Maybe. But I knew I would never have another baby, the  irreplaceable sweetness of a nursing infant in arms.

We were at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center that summer with our 6-year-old for a very minor procedure, and my then-husband and I took turns walking up and down the hospital hallways with an infant. At one point, I stood swaying with my sleeping baby from foot to foot, reading the posters on the wall.

One watercolor was a purple hyacinth blossom with the words beneath: Choose joy.

When I drove away from the hospital, with all four of us, and crossed the river back into Vermont, I was so light-hearted, so happy. It was such a minor thing that had occurred, and we were all together and well.

Now that infant daughter is a teenager, the oldest daughter a young woman. Like all families, we’ve lived through the gamut of happiness and grief and rage. Every now and then, I remind myself, slow down, breathe deep, and finger the strand of life that’s joy.

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

— Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

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One Year

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Friday mornings find me in the Buffalo Mountain Co-op’s cooler, stocking Vermont milk, yogurt made just up the road, kimchi from ust down the road.

What a feast these bottles of milk would be for our little cats, who lie at home, curled in their blankets on this rainy morning.

One year ago today, in the early afternoon, I signed for this house on a hot, early afternoon. When the owner handed over the keys, I took one off and handed it to my daughter, who was about to graduate from high school.

Now, the girls and I have been joined by two cats and a small flockette of chickens.

Here’s a few lines from early morning reading:

For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion.

― Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

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Evening Pause

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Last night, just before dusk, I walked around gathering  the croquet mallets and put them in the barn, before the predicted rain today. My daughter came out to fold towels thrown over the railings, and we listened to geese fly overhead.

That morning, I woke remembering the fall she was a year-and-a-half, and I was frantically mailing maple syrup — as if mail-ordering maple would be a cash cow, although a very small one.

To that younger mother of myself, I think, Slow down. Decades of evenings lie ahead.

I finally take my own advice to myself. I don’t weed a patch of the garden where I’d been heading. I listen to my daughter, and then she heads out into the gloaming, on a solitary walk.

…Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.
From Marge Piercy’s “More Than Enough”

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Lady Lupine

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Here’s a line from a children’s picture book — my younger daughter’s favorite — You must do something to make the world more beautiful.

Last evening, I overhead the girls planning to spread lupine seeds gleaned from the flowers blooming before our house. Maybe that thousand and one readings of Miss Rumphius sowed deep, or maybe spreading these blossoms is just instinctual, part of being alive.

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Photo by Molly S.