gratitude

Pond Swimming — In October?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rain moved in overnight, but yesterday was a sultry 80 degrees, the school kids running into the library and standing just inside the door, panting, their faces rosy, sweaty. A grandfather and I stood talking in the doorway. About an hour more, you think, this lovely weather will last? I asked. He laughed.

After work, I swam while my daughter sat on the bank with our friend and her old rabbit, stroking the bunny’s white fur and talking. The pond water — when I thought swimming had ended weeks ago — had an initial flash of cold. Then I swam out where the deep, nearly inky water held me, tepid. The dragonflies are gone. I grabbed fallen, floating leaves.

I knew the sun would set before long. I had chores. My friend was leaving. And yet — swimming, October 10, northern Vermont. Mark that.

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#10 Pond/Photo by Molly S.

Cream Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

The other night, my friend and I stand on my back deck, watching the moon rise above the black horizon, a curved sliver at first, then quickly revealing all her radiant round beauty. In the house, my daughters and their friends play a game at the table, eating brownies and laughing. Little white lights sparkle above their heads.

The next night, fever lies me low, and my girls are awake in the wee midnight hours, comforting an oddly crying cat. As I rise out of the fever now, I think of how glad I am to return to our life. Worn out before, as we all get — buried beneath the everyday accrual of putting together work and life and parenting, and the non-everyday weight of am I failing? — I’m simply glad to return to the jumble of our lives, in this somewhat sleep-starved life, keeping the midnight shift, reading in bed or wandering around to the windows to admire the moon. Oh, the autumn moon.

Children grew in their sleep. They were growing now, bones lengthening like bamboo.

— Melanie Finn, The Underneath

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Photo by Molly S.

 

Lucky Charm

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

By the side of Route 14, my younger daughter leaps, waving at me to stop.  Nearby, her sister’s car is pulled over.

Flat tire.

The older daughter rails about her brand-new tire, likely ruined, and then her younger sister says simply, It’s just a flat tire.

“Flat tire” may become our new mantra — our own, hey, lighten up, change the tire and move on — maybe even a talisman, as if the tiny bit of ill luck might ward off the greater.

September 23 — birthday of the young man we’ve known since he was 1, who’s logged a million miles on his bike and is heading to Europe for even more. Safe travels. Much happiness in your new decade.

 

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Tiny Running Toddler

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A very tall father and his nearly-one-year-old daughter live across the road from my library and often swing by. Yesterday while I’m in for a board meeting, not really open, they swing by, and the little girl runs to me.

Not even 7 days ago, the small curly-headed girl was tentatively taking steps, and here she is now, rushing across our worn carpet, her smile radiant.

When my daughters were babies, I was amazed how quickly their nearly translucent fingernails grew, how rapidly a scrape healed.

Babyhood’s quicksilver, sure, but adolescence mirrors that age. My 13-year-old has changed so mightily in the last six months, in face and body, that when I arrive at soccer games and can’t easily find her — idiotic, that I can’t immediately recognize my own daughter across a field — her sister says, Look for the green cleats.

Really? I think to myself. Identify my girl by her shoes?

When I was a mother of a toddler, I would have found this situation sad, maybe even just awful, but — and this may just be a combination of worn-down single mothering and that my daughter’s busied her life with all kinds of great kid projects and friends — I find her endlessly interesting, like a blossom whose name I don’t know, opening petal by petal. Where are you headed, I wonder. Where are you going?

Because he’s so good, here’s a few more lines from Andre Dubus:

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another.

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Symphony of Our Small World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In high school, hidden in the upstairs of my parents’ barn, I read Russian literature — The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace — I read about life behind the Iron Curtain, Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn.

Late last night, the cats and I read M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, a book filled with hunger, fear, and love.

These summery, hot days continue to unfold, a world apart from coal-less winters in Russia. Our days are busy, jammed with my multiple work endeavors, with a daughter in middle school, and soccer practices and games, with her babysitting and my older daughter’s tender young adult life — can I build a tiny house? will I fall in love? — with pickling green beans and putting up salsa and somehow painting the upstairs floors while listening to Rumblestrip podcasts, and swimming at the end of the day as often as possible.

This life, messy with creativity and doubt, with love and grief, is lucky beyond belief. Thank goodness, I remember this at times.

Shostakovich states that at the beginning of the Seventh (Symphony) he depicts the peaceful life before the war in the quiet homes of Leningrad. But to a listener in Iowa it could mean the meadows and the rolling hills around his home. After the fantastic theme of war, Shostakovich has put into his music a lament for the dead — and the tears of a Russian mother and of an American mother are the same.

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Ode to the Miraculous Melon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

And then there’s this: at the very end of Vermont’s summer months — August 27th, a day of jumbled work and bruised adult egos, a day of existential pondering, after a moonlit night when I consider my very genuine failings as a parent to my oldest child, a day of humidity that ends with my daughters sitting on the bank of the pond while I swim with my friend, in all that cool water, its glassine surface broken in circular ripples with biting fish, and I long to keep swimming, swimming, we drive the 30 seconds home with a garden-grown cantaloupe cradled in my hands.

The melon had already split at its oblong end, vaguely skull- and exposed-brain-esque. As I carry the melon into the kitchen, the girls eye it skeptically. Already, that cracked end is clustered with fruit flies — where did they come from? — and I brush them away quickly with my hand and open the melon with a cleaver. The orange flesh bleeds juice.

With the cleaver, I slice off irregular squares, and then I’m eating it — famished not for the fruit, not for the sugar, not for the sticky liquid — but for the sheer miracle of a hard-shelled seed turned into such sweetness from soil and rain and sunlight, for all that this summer has been — both amazing beauty and clustering flies and ugliness of split rinds and quickly — hush, wait, yes — how just momentarily — we’ll all disintegrate back into that dust.

But not yet. Not this evening, with its creamy, rising nearly-full moon, two girls and two cats, a handful of chickens, and the crickets all night long, their songs still soldiering solidly.

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