Last Sunday in this July

July 29, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Early Sunday morning, the cat wakes me by biting my toes. Get up! Get up!

Camping on a lake, my younger daughter wrote us news of the loons calling crazily all night long. I think of her listening to those ghostly, ineffably beautiful songs, how years from now she’ll hear loons calling and think of sleeping on that lake shore.

At an art opening recently, a friend and I heard the artist speak. The artist said sometimes you see life more clearly, with precision, and other times through a mist or fog.

This morning, fog has already melted from garden. On my list of clear-thinking things to do — bake a pie with my 19-year-old. Swim.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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We’re All Authors

July 28, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Yesterday, while my 19-year-old fried beef for dinner yesterday, I kept handing her vegetables to chop — onions and garlic I just pulled, some leek thinnings, a few leaves of kale.

She chopped and stirred and talked. She gives me the story of her life, daily. Tempestuous and brave and loyal by nature, her life is chock-full. When I was that age, I drove an old VW bug I bought for $200 with waitressing cash. A boyfriend taught me to adjust the valves. I was shy, so terribly shy. When I tell my younger daughter just how shy I was, she doesn’t believe me. Last summer, a woman hollered out her car window at me for jaywalking in downtown Hardwick, I walked over to her, and — while she was marooned in construction traffic — I offered her an earful about driving too fast and why I jaywalk. Understandably, my daughter was mortified. Good lord, woman of that car, if you ever read this, I apologize.

Stories change. All our stories change, through grief and sadness, but through wonderfully fantastic things, too. I see my tall, lovely young-woman daughter pondering this — where do I want to steer my life? Interspersed with vegetable washing, I’m glad to be the listener, offering an occasional Socratic, What do you think you should do?

Anyone who listens to Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugars podcast might want to check out Almond’s new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to our Country?

Almond writes:

I’ve placed my faith in stories because I believe them to be the basic unit of human consciousness. The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

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July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

For dinner last night, my daughter fried beef for enchiladas. From the garden, I brought in a basket and began washing vegetables. Here, throw in slender leeks, sweet red peppers, onions with their fat greens. I filled a salad bowl with mesclun, radishes, sun gold tomatoes.

Do people talk about the weather as much as Vermonters do? What a summer, we say.

Yesterday: muggy heat, steady rain, a perfect evening. We swam in the nearby pond again, a little chillier after the rain. Then we gathered up our towels and went home.

Train Trip

July 20, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Four summers ago, my family planned an Amtrak journey from Vermont to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what would be the longest family trip of our girls’ childhood. That summer trip evolved into an illustration of that Robert Burns’ line about the best laid schemes not following the script.

We set out with a curveball detour to Charlottesville, then to New Mexico via Chicago. Somewhere in the month of August, driving my dad’s old Subaru through the Navajo reservation, I wondered what if the hydrangea outside our back door was blooming, and if we would ever return home.

We did, of course.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck writes about how trips take over — true, true….

Yesterday, for a writing assignment, I took my 13-year-old and her friend to the southern end of Vermont on Amtrak — just enough of riding the rails, of licking ice cream and browsing bookstores, walking across the bridge spanning the Connecticut River so we stepped into New Hampshire.

Back the Montpelier station, we drove home through the breathtaking July dusk, along dirt roads flanked brightly with David Budbill’s ubiquitous day lilies. My daughter went to sleep last night with her cat curled at the foot of her bed.

I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation — a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.

— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America

Brattleboro Museum of Art, Vermont

Interlude of Laughing

July 18, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Camping on the shore of Lake Champlain this weekend with three enthusiastic 13-year-old girls, we did summer staying-on-an-island things — we biked and we swam for hours (and I mean hours). We walked on the breakwater at sunset. The loons woke us with their crazy calling at night. I read; the girls explored.

And we talked and talked and talked. The girls, giggling, spied on a father camping nearby. He told his two tiny boys, who wore only orange crocs, that Whining and dessert are counter to each other.

Someday, I told the girls, they might hear themselves saying something equally inane as a parent.

The island’s grass, always so lush and cool, had withered brown with lack of rain. The last morning there, rain began just after dawn. I lay in the tent, listening to the welcome patter, and then, just as I believed rain might be settling in for a day, it abruptly ceased, as if shut off.

In the unrelieved humidity, we packed slowly.

A glossy bit of summer in the land of childhood.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

— Flannery O’Connor

Burton Island, Vermont

Define Our Life Thus

July 15, 2018 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Walking home through the cemetery fields, I noticed how brown the grass is — pretty much withered.

That’s a particularly beautiful walk, high enough up above the village that I can see how Hardwick lies in a narrow valley along the river, cradled between forested mountains.

So much of my life often seems defined by absence — the children’s missing father, not enough money, shy of parenting patience, lacking skills to fence in my daughter’s chickens. And yet, here we live, nestled between these mountains, with two sweet cats and three laying hens.

Reminder to self: define by what is, not what isn’t.

Montpelier, Vermont

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

#familylife