#amwritingVermontLiteraryFiction

Long Childhood Summers

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In this room is a photo of my daughters I took a few years back, maybe ages 3 and 9, a summertime shot, the girls’ heads tipped together. Both girls smile, radiant. The oldest daughter’s arm is wrapped around her sister, in the unabashed ownership she has claimed over her sister since the youngest’s infancy. The littler girl is snuggled to her sister, eyes closed in bliss, knowing her most rightful place is with her sister.

At 18 and 12, the oldest is still preening her sister, asking (and sometimes not asking) to brush her hair, trim and paint her nails, for your own good.

This week marks the youngest girl’s first week of overnight camp. Reaching into a spill of moonlight on the porch tonight, I wondered how the moon flows over my girl, this pure light. How gritty is that sleeping bag? What stories will you tell us?

Sure, I embrace this opening of my growing girls’ worlds and my own release from near-constant mothering, while remembering the incomparable sweetness of an infant sleeping, cheeks milk-flushed rosy, along my forearm. Lady Moon shining over all of us: familiar friend.

Summer Kitchen

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.

– Donald Hall

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The View From Here

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My youngest daughter, aspiring to be an FBI agent, discovers FBI training teaches its recruits not to believe in coincidences. As a writer, I’ve taught myself the same principal. Understood or not, isn’t the world laced through with meaning?

Leaving my house in the dark early this morning, I tipped my head back and admired the firmament, the moon sunk down over the horizon, the innumerable stars one of my earliest memories. Yet each time I see the stars I have that odd swirl of familiarity and the unknown: always magnificent.

Driving through the country dark, the roads empty of any traffic, a coyote sprints before me, so near I spy its shaggy coat, eyes focused ahead, intent on its course.

Here’s a few lines from Roxanne Gay I read last night, in her memoir about super-obesity.

In the before of my life, I was so very young and sheltered. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t know I could suffer or the breadth and scope of what suffering could be. I didn’t know that I could give voice to my suffering when I did suffer.

– Roxanna Gay, HungerFullSizeRender

Back Again

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In a rosy dawn yesterday, we left Prince Edward Island, the sleeping kids sprawled in our little Toyota, sun-browned and a little too red on one daughter’s shoulders, myself driving and drinking coffee from my thermos, listening to CBC.

As I listened to the Island Morning’s interview with Henry Hank Gallant who walked across Canada in 1967, I thought how different the tenor of this place feels compared to my own country, even relatively liberal-minded Vermont. Much later, deep in Maine’s interior, listening now to Maine Public Radio, Trump’s voice whined over the airwaves about a great trade agreement, and all three of my young passengers who were playing Blackjack on a folded-over atlas howled. We are not Trump aficionados.

But Trump’s word great gave me a thread of the difference between these two nations: America, so fiercely militaristic and competitive, and its civil life – while doubtlessly filled with decent people – underpinned with suspicion and distrust.

We were glad to sail over the Connecticut River and return to our little Vermont village, to stop at the grocery store and have the teenage cashier whose hair was now dyed iridescent green rather than the cherry red from two weeks ago ask, How was your trip?

Dripping humidity here, the kind my mother abhorred when I was a child. July – the growing month in Vermont. My older daughter laced up her shoes and disappeared into the mist for a run.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

– Martin Luther King

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Nearly perfect strawberries I bought from an old man with just a few teeth along a roadside in Maine.

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

The Ten Thousand Things

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I always believed Vermont champion of summer iridescence, but Prince Edward Island glows, vibrant with a handful of colors: greens, blues, lupine purples, and all that red earth, tilled in tidy mounds and planted with potatoes.

Walking along the hidden rust-stained shore of a lake last night, the kids and I discovered glass and ceramic shards newly-broken and raw-edged, and scattered bits of glass already worn into cloudy sea glass. This particular stretch of sand was lavish with sea flotsam: human junk and the sea’s live and cast-off beauty – scuttering crabs and half-submerged tires and an enormous fantail of shells, some nearly too small to see, pearly white and gray and violet, discarded from creatures’ lives and breaking into bits, returning into the sand and the sea.

My youngest daughter remarked on the mixture of things, alive and dead, exquisitely beautiful and not at all. Bald eagles winged silently, fiercely powerful, through the sky, and we kept walking on all that sand, red as the desert where I was born, far away on the earth’s curve.

… simple evidence. That life is relentless, demands of us to take us the reins of life and drive the wagon.

Jeffrey Lent, Before We Sleep – early morning reading.

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Postcard From A Parking Lot

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One cool thing about being a writer is the liberty to do ‘research’ in the face of teenager sensibility. Honestly, though, curiosity often leads us into fun – or at least the unusual. In the middle of Maine, the kids and I walked along a highway, wondering who lives here, and why, then the 12-year-old discovered a squishy patch of asphalt which took our footprints for moments before they disappeared. In a field behind a parking lot, toadflax bloomed at one edge.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

–Anne Lamott

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