Living the Dream — and Not.

July 3, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

For four summers running now, my youngest daughter, her very closest friend, and I go camping every summer on Burton Island, far north on Lake Champlain. The lake is noticeably cleaner than it was four years ago; the girls are definitely older. We recount the year the raccoons ate our food and the year I forget the stove. This year became the year we forgot the tent poles. The girls fashioned a tent from a tarp and rope.

Always, this island enchants me with its summertime mystique, the fluff of seeding trees wafting like fairy confetti in the warm breeze. We’re never eaten too badly by bugs. The girls drink a crazy amount of hot chocolate.

I wake up early in the mornings and read by the lake — this chilly year in my jeans — watching the loons and the ducks with their offspring.

It’s both sweetly idyllic — how could such innocent happiness not be? — and simultaneously not idyllic at all. I write this not to draw attention to my own particular family scenario, but because so much of social media pushes families to believe that everyone is living that glossy, idyllic life. So, in my family, we are, and we aren’t. And I’m darn glad for every bit that we are.

Age 14

Wear Your Sunscreen

June 28, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

As if to compensate for last winter’s length, June turns ineffably beautiful. Last night, a downfall again: this morning, our world sparkles, the greenery drinking up rain and growing — every day. Every day, the mock orange beneath my bedroom window unfurls more leaves. The skinny pears in the front yard are fattening their branches lushly.

From New Hampshire, my 14-year-old writes me, I went on a 10 mile hike today. Today, with family, she and her sister are kayaking in a river. I can’t help but remind her wear your lifejacket, use sunscreen. After work, I swim in the evenings with my friends, whose children — paired up in ages and friendship with mine — are also elsewhere. Down the pond, a loon fishes. We make up a silly story about a goose and goslings we see, and the other goose who makes its way along, later….

This June is not a variation of Ram Dass’ Be Here Now. The past is always with me, clinging, and the future unfolds around me, every day, mine and the lives of others’ around me. But there’s this: from where we live we can see deep into the valley where our town, Hardwick, lies. We can see storms mixing in the distance, the white sheets of rain before water dampens my garden. We’re surrounded by the mysteries of the world — the swifts, the pollinators, the raccoon determined to eat our chickens. We’re here, at this moment, taking it in.

And… my daughter’s photo (much to her happiness) heads up my recent Postcard from Hardwick in State 14.

Summer, Age 14

June 15, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

14 years ago yesterday, I sat in my friend’s kitchen nursing my newborn while she labored to bring into the world her daughter. Her mother-in-law served me a bowl of chicken soup from an enormous pot she had cooked.

Returning from a walk yesterday evening, I spy my daughter reading on front porch with her cats. Those days with an infant I hardly had a sense of evening from afternoon, in that churning wheel of nursing and diapers and tending.

Time passing threads all through my writing — how can it not? — and yet, sometimes I find myself staring through a window, thinking, here we are, right at this very moment.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Edge of the Earth Might Be Here…

June 6, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

…. or not.

There’s nothing quite like visiting your very early childhood territory with your youngest child, who’s now 14 and partly worldly as heck and partly a jigsaw-puzzle-loving kid.

An unrequited desire of mine had been to visit somewhere or someone from my past — a college best friend or a former lover. Instead, on near impulse, my daughter and I visited northern New Mexico. Hiking through the national forest, I realized I’ll never be able to view New Mexico as a dispassionate visitor, only — mysteries of mysteries — through the dewy and amorous eyes of very early childhood.

Edge of the world? Surely in early childhood the edge is always tantalizingly near…..

My Torrid Love Affair…

May 14, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

… with T. C. Boyle continues — although his most recent book is not my favorite.

I first linked up with Boyle as a high school student when I found Budding Prospects, then World’s End. I was reading East Is East as a college student, when my boyfriend was driving through rural Nevada, and somehow took a wrong turn. All you’re doing is just reading over there! he said. Many years later, I read the lovely San Miguel. Here I am, all those pages and years later, still reading Boyle in bed.

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something.

— T. C. Boyle