#familylife

Rain

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Rain fell yesterday morning. I stood in my dusty garden, thinking, Bring it on.

Halfway through the morning, the light held the thin green translucence, like we moved in a piece of sea glass that was alive.

All afternoon in my library, people wandered by, singly and in pairs — nothing more. Most had tidied up, wearing sundresses and ironed shirts — all with masks — as if swinging by the library was an outing. Which, perhaps, it likely was. We spoke with the same underlying uncertainy and loneliness, and a tender care with each other.

At the very end, I loaded up two bags for a 10-year-old hungry for books — my good deed for the day.

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June

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Hello, roses!

The day I bought this house, I realized roses bloomed beneath the dining room windows. Of all the things I scrutinized when house buying — location and purchase price and paint — I never considered these old, overgrown rose bushes. So early in the season, Japanese beetles haven’t yet set in with their hunger. The blossoms emit the sweetest fragrance, drifting around the back of the house.

Hello, gorgeous and ineffable summer.

There will never be more of summer
than there is now.

— Alex Dimitrov

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Yes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Driving home from work, I see my daughter and her friend walking through town, talking. I pull over, and they run across the road. We stand there for a little while, talking. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this at all. They tell me a little about kicking around a soccer ball that morning, and remark how hot the day has suddenly become.

They finish their walk, then we all go swimming.

These days, I sometimes think of my grandparents, whose lives were marked by the depression. As a kid, when we went out to eat with my grandmother, she’d swipe ketchup packets, because, she said, you never knew when you might need it.

For these teens, the pandemic will mark their lives, too. Someday, I imagine, they’ll be saying, remember when high school stopped, and we all stayed home?

They won’t forget. Sleepovers and cozy breakfast in the kitchen are on permanent hiatus, but summer is back. Sitting on the bank, watching them swim, I’m happy for just for this moment — sunlight and pollen-flecked water, croaking bullfrogs in the weeds, laughter — a little more childhood yet to come.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together…

― Tracy Kidder

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Photo by Gabriela Stanciu

Driving Lessons

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

In the evening, as the dusk moves in, we play hearts on the back porch, my feet wet from watering the garden. It’s dry, with no rain in the forecast but thunderstorms possibly moving in this weekend.

After dinner and dishes, before I water, the 15-year-old drives, and I sit in the passenger seat. She’s largely on her own these days while I’m at work. In the high school parking lot, I get out of the car and watch her park and back up and park again, over and over. At last, she stops and leans out the window. She’s taken an extra key and put it on her first key ring, beside our house door.

She grins at me, full of exuberance and joy. “Want a ride?” she asks, then pulls up beside me, leans over, and opens the door. “Let’s take the long way home.”

The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill.

— Eihei Dōgen

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#Porchlife

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

On the cusp of turning 15 — 15!— my daughter lounges, reading the newest installment in The Hunger Games. Across our short, dead-end street, the little boy digs in his sandy driveway with toy trucks, talking to himself, busy in his world. By the afternoon, his whole family splashes in the kiddie pool.

We are waiting for rain in our quiet corner of Vermont.

The cool breeze.
With all his strength
The cricket.

— Issa

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Wild Discoveries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Walking through the town woods after dinner, listening to what must be one of the loveliest sounds on the planet — the wood thrush — my younger daughter says quietly, “Cub.”

Just ahead, where we were about step into a hayfield, a small black bear wandered, sniffing. We stood for a moment, admiring, then slowly backed away and headed back through the woods.

Walking, we remarked on the proliferation of wildlife we’ve seen this spring — the cub, bald eagles, a den of enchanting fox cubs just behind our house. While the human world is fragmented, the animal world seems to be filling in those cracks, closer and closer.

In Vermont’s May, every day the world appear more and more alive — the leaves unfurled more, and the dandelions higher. Sure, invasive dandelions have their place — or the curse — in the world, but a field of dandelions? Joy — thank goodness for spring.

Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May…

— James Russell Lowell

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