July 31. Swim.

August 1, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

The dog is a new thing in our lives. My oldest daughter lives nearby with a sweet and curious dog. Yesterday, we brought the dog into our house to meet our two house cats. One cat remained on the kitchen table in his beloved cardboard box (I know, I know who allows things like this? a cat in a box on the kitchen table not for an hour or a day but for months?), paw crooked over the edge of the box, looking at the dog in the cool disdainful way of felines. Our other cat trembled in the doorway, holding his ground. Curious, cautious, verging on endearing and ridiculous. The dog seemed just happy to be there.

We decided to swim and took a giant floatie shaped like a pineapple that I had bought last year for camping. Jammed in the trunk, the floatie hung over the backseat which bothered the dog, who moved into the passenger seat. My daughters sat in the back under the floatie. I drove and talked to the dog. The wind blew in through the windows, muting my daughters’ voices. So many miles I drove with kids in the back, looking over my hands on the steering wheel. For few miles, I was back in the world of young motherhood.

Despite the heat, the lake wasn’t crowded in the least. A woman walked down the sandy path holding a beer can. She and the group at the far end exclaimed that they hadn’t seen each other in thirty years. My oldest whispered, Thirty years? I answered, What’s thirty years, really, forgetting entirely for a moment my daughter is far younger than thirty.

The drive to the lake was a short one. After swimming, we went up the road to the general store and ate pizza on the deck. We chatted with people we saw all the time, and some we hadn’t seen in years. The dog — good creature — waited patiently.

Authenticity.

July 27, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

With a stranger, I have a passing conversation regarding a documentary about Gabor Maté. My father recommended the documentary. I originally pointed my father in the direction of Maté when I picked up In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in a house where my daughters were catsitting. And so it goes…

This stranger, too, has coincidentally just seen the documentary. We’re standing outside the post office, talking, the afternoon sun bright in our eyes. The documentary is about drama and authenticity. I ramble on about authenticity, how I once considered an authentic life something like enjoying cheese, whether it was artisan cheese or Velveeta, just really leaning into life. What an utterly superficial understanding of authenticity, I muse.

What about doubt? What about fear?

This morning, fog lies in the valley, forerunner of fall. Authentic as all get-out.

“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield

Norma Fox Mazer & Mark Twain.

July 23, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

As a kid, I wanted to grow up and live on a farm. We lived in a New Hampshire village and spent a few summers driving west and camping from Wyoming to southern New Mexico. National Forest camping was cheap in those days — a dollar or two per night — and we cooked over the Coleman stove and slept in tents. My parents were frugal. They didn’t rent motel rooms, hardly ever bought a cup of coffee, and generally operated on the rule of don’t spend (a learned lifeskill I remain grateful for). My father bent that rule in a Boulder, CO, bookstore when the reading material we’d packed in our green Jeep needed an infusion.

The summer I was ten or so I read Huck Finn and Norma Fox Mazer’s I, Trissy over and over. In retrospect, the books were a good pair for a kid.

Last night just after dark, I walked out to the herb patch for a handful of mint to brew tea. After a long day of high heat and the evening’s dew, the world smelled sweet, alive. I had mowed the lawn in the late afternoon, and I breathed in freshly cut grass.

What was it I had wanted when I dreamed of living on a farm? To be outside as much as possible, to put my hands in the dirt, and to see where the sky meet the horizon. Three things I achieved in one Friday, if little else.

That adolescent me, the girl who was, as I remember her, insecure, unsure, dreaming, yearning, longing, that girl who was hard on herself, who was cowardly and brave, who was confused and determined-that girl who was me-still exists. I call on her when I write. I am the me of today-the person who has become a woman, a mother, a writer. Yet I am the me of all those other days as well. I believe in the reality of that past.
— Norma Fox Mazer

Water. Sky. Lilies.

July 19, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Sunday morning begins hot and out-of-sorts in our house. As antidote, we load the kayaks on the car. We paddle through a passage between floes of waterlilies in a breathtaking landscape — clouds reflected in water and all those perfect flowers. We’re not far from home, but the kayakers and canoeists we pass are all strangers who raise hands in quiet hellos.

In no rush at all, we paddle to the pond’s far end, where we drift for a long while, talking and handing a box of crackers between us. A loon and a single chick bob nearby. The other loon parent appears with a string of lunch in her or his mouth.

Later, we pull our kayaks on a shore and swim out to a raft where we lie in the sun and talk about where we might be five years, ten years, down the line. A man swims out with his two daughters, and we talk a little with him about the raft and the sun and the waterlilies that cover the pond.

I’m reminded of William Blake’s line about seeing the world in a grain of sand as we slowly paddle back to where we began. I’ve walked across sections of this pond in the midwinter around ice fishing holes. A number of years ago, a teenager drowned here, a boy I knew as a baby. His parents were vendors in the same farmers market where my husband and I sold maple syrup and ice cream. We all had little ones in those days. On those hot afternoons, we shared stories while swaying with babies on our backs.

The pond this July day reflects only sweetness and beauty. At the shore, my daughters load our kayaks back on our car. I rinse off my bare feet at the water’s edge. A little boy runs to the end of the dock. His father stands waist deep in the water. He raises his arms and says, Jump. I’ll catch you.

Saturday. Stories.

July 16, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In the classic scenario of Saturday plans waylaid, I end up driving here and there this morning, for errands that may or may not make any difference at all. That seems to be where we are these days — maybe, maybe not.

July has warmed, and I work on the back deck, in the shade of our table umbrella, drinking cold coffee.

An acquaintance I haven’t seen in a while stops by. We stand in the shade of my house, talking. He found my book in a yard shade and bought it. Then he tells me his own story of drinking and how he rose up against it. I’d known a few strands of this story, little bits, here and there, that he’d freely given me before. But his telling and my listening slips me back into that sacred space of stories. The telling. The listening. Nothing maybe about that at all.

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
— Graham Greene

Mid-July.

July 14, 2022 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Rain falls again this morning, in this summer of such growth. Yesterday afternoon, between work and evening Selectboard meeting, I wandered in my garden, discovering calendula blooming in the zucchini. This morning, drinking coffee before I head off again, I add to my list. Oh, the list, and how it pales against this fragrant rain and those rose blossoms battling the Japanese beetles.

I’ve lived in New England for nearly all my life, and July is the month that renews my love of this place. Orange tiger lilies, pink cosmos, crimson currents.

All around me, the world stretches and tugs. My daughter grows up. The cats age. I work and spend. The planet spins inexorably on a course all of its own. But July is the month that reminds me the world is far, far larger than my own tiny house and acreage, my own dear family, that the world around me teems with life and thwarted longing and sometimes fulfillment, too.

The neighbors’ boys pedal up and down our dead-end street for hours, learning to ride their bikes, persistent as heck. Determined to master this skill.