#soccer

Sticky Notes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A week of chaos, a jumble of days.

By yesterday afternoon, my desk was littered with multiple sizes and colors of sticky notes, scrawled in my lousy handwriting. Before I headed home, I stood staring at this mosaic and considered chucking the lot in the recycling bin.

Instead, I decided to let that wait until next week.

Despite all this, we’re headed to the state championships for a soccer game — socially distanced, with masks, in the brilliant sunlight. At the beginning of soccer season, in September, my daughter’s high school team wasn’t even sure they would be able to play a game, but it was enough to practice together. Then they lost the first five games. Now, apparently beating bad odds, they’ve progressed to the state championships.

In this midst of utter adult chaos, what a pleasure to see radiant teen joy. Here’s hoping that joy is a harbinger of better days, all around, for all of us.

Laughter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Standing in the rain watching my daughter, behind the socially distanced spaced out row of spectators, I hear a sound through the downpour steadily pummeling my borrowed umbrella. It takes me a moment, but then I realize two women cozied up together beneath their umbrella are laughing.

On the wet field, the girls are playing hard. Their ponytails and masks and uniforms are sodden. Many are covered with mud. Beyond the field, patches of pale gold leaves glow in the misty rain.

For a moment, I have the sense this sums up the pandemic — alone and isolated with my mask and raincoat and umbrella — and yet together. I stand there, happy the girls are playing, listening to the laughter of strangers through the downpour.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’

Random Evening

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After dinner, I suggest walking to the post office with the mail that needs to go out.

My 15-year-olds says hopefully, Drive?

I’d rather not. I rather walk by the food pantry and admire their stunning flower garden before this season’s blossoms fade, but I say sure. For a few more months, she can’t drive without me.

There’s hardly anyone out this evening, as she drives to the post office, then up to the high school where she parks, and we laugh, and we walk around the building. The school’s been closed for months now. Weeds from the front flowerbed spread across the cement walkway.

There’s no one around. A heron wings across the sky.

At the parking lot’s exit, she brakes and asks me, Which way?

You’re driving, I answer.

She turns away from home.

As she drives, I think of that old cliché, that having small children brings you into the hear-and-now. Same for the pandemic, I suppose. She circles through town and stops at the community gardens, where I get out and admire the raised beds.

Each of these days is a kind of bouquet — filled with work and exhaustion, with garden picking and wood stacking, with my daughter’s wondering, Will soccer really begin this Monday?, with our little family, sometimes getting along, sometimes out of sorts, but always pulling together in one way or another.

As she drives, I think of history and all the hard, hard times people have endured. The future lies before us, a great unknown, and yet, each day, this daughter edges one day closer to her own womanhood.

She pulled over to the side of the road, parks, and get out. Look at the sky, she says. She snaps a photo, making a memory of these days.

Photo by Gabriela S.