summer

A Postcard From Vermont…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. might include a redwing blackbird suddenly rising from the stream behind the post office as you emerge from the weed-lined path with your brass key. The bird’s feathers hold the hue of burned-out embers.

Or a crumpled Bud Lite can propped neatly against the cinder blocks of the building’s foundation.

Or maybe cows crossing the road as you’re waiting behind a trash truck, the girls tossing cherry pits out the open windows.

Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.

— Anne Sexton

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Hardwick, Vermont

Yes, Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My 13-year-old wraps an ice pack in a kitchen towel and gently rubs it along her cat’s hot paws. The furry creature nuzzles his head against the cold pack. Hot, hot, the cats lie on the wood floor, panting.

Viridescence begins this July, these very long days slick with humidity, turbulent with thunderstorms, the domestic garden and wild woods pulsing, rampaging green — growing headlong, magnificently wild.

This slice of summer is the season of cousins, of sprawling sunsets and lingering dusk, s’mores, and the overarching goal for today: swimming.

In a New Hampshire river, my daughter stands at the edge of a waterfall — the rocks around us radiating heat, the water so cold the small bones in our feet ache. She disappears behind the waterfall, wholly hidden by the frothing water, then emerges blinking and drenched, her smile luminescent.

The short summer night.
The dream and real
Are same things.

— Takahama Kyoshi

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How Things Spiral: the Crabby Woman’s Garden Entry

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Today: by late afternoon, a day of complete frustration. Early at my laptop, I rewrote pages that made no sense, spelled specify wrong, sent an angry email to an innocent person I had to balefully retract, became enraged over a request from a friend I could never fulfill, filled out paperwork that marked a new low in the bureaucratic world for me, screwed up so badly at work I wept….. and that’s merely scratching the surface of this day.

To salvage, I went running before dinner while my daughter biked, and we met up with a neighbor who was strollering her two little kids. I’m very crabby, she immediately told me. Hey, me, too.

Later, we walked through my garden, and she cut handfuls of lemon balm and sage and mint, basil, and a fistful of hydrangeas. Her little boy ate sun golds. My garden, which has withered and died in entire beds this season, rampaged wildly in others, so neglected I’ve despaired–my garden. Yet, snipping these great handfuls for her, a cacophony of sweet scents wafted around us, and I realized what strange and unexpected beauty rose from my patch of earth this year.

After dinner, my daughter biked to her friend’s for trampoline jumping, and his mother phoned and apologized for sending my child home late. They kept laughing, she said. I had just walked into the kitchen with my dusty feet and my skirt full of tomatoes and peppers. One by one, I laid these fruits on the table. Fine, I said. Let them laugh.

This tiny seed
do not belittle:
red pepper.

–– Basho

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Elmore Mountain/Photo by Molly S.

Long Pond Cape Cod

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Ten-year-old Gabriela Stanciu is a guest blogger today. She loves to eat watermelon and read Harry Potter.

I was on a vacation at Cape Cod a few days ago and we had just gone swimming in the ocean so we thought we should wash the salt water off by swimming in a fresh water pond. We went to Long Pond. It is a Pond in Wellfleet Cape Cod. so we showed up and parked. Me, my Grandparents, and my dad got out of the car. When we got in it was really warm compared to the ocean. It was a beautiful lake. The water was crystal clear all the way through. And it was really shallow. When I got like a third of the way out into the lake it was only like five feet deep. The sand at the bottom was really soft and there wasn’t any rocks. Like 15 minutes later my sister and aunt showed up. My sister didn’t want to go swimming but my aunt did. When my aunt got in she got in over my head so I hopped on my dad’s back since I can’t swim very well. We swam for a little more and then got out.

Next we went to this store that we call the floatie place even tho we have never been there. Well, it has a ton of giant floaties all over the building. They probably have any floatie you can think of in that place but we did not go there to get a floatie we went there to get a life jacket so I could float around in the sea. My favorite floaty was the giant flip flop but it probably wouldn’t fit in our car. But what we did get did fit in our car.

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Summer

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My younger daughter told me today, It will be bad for me in a few years.

Why’s that? I assumed she was pre-mourning her older sister’s forthcoming passage into adulthood and that ached-for leap into adult life.

My child said, Because my aunt buys my really nice pajamas at a place where she buys her boys’ pajamas, and we love these pajamas, and the sizes don’t go above 12.

My child will never remember this conversation. Two years hence I could bring up this remark around the woodstove, and I bet cash now she likely won’t remember this. But today, here, this meant something to her. A summertime world of utter happiness, a way of living this season where she and her two beloved cousins sleep in a small room, reading and giggling, all in their same beloved pajamas. These are days filled with bikes, swimming, endless meals –  also of ears primed to hear, trying to piece out the puzzle of adult lives, the constant threads of conversation and emotion. Mainly, though, these children seek space for their growth and energy. Tonight, this child wanted to go walking in the gloaming. We went out, all of us, walking along the gravel road, and didn’t cross back into the house until long past dark.

Here’s Dylan Thomas on childhood in a stanza of “Fern Hill”:

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Is of Value

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, in a driving rainstorm that almost instantaneously altered to sunny skies, I took the girls with me to a staff meeting in Burlington. They read for a while, then headed down to the lake’s waterfront, and by the time I arrived, they had both decided Burlington was THE place to live.

On the way home, we stopped in at Big Box Store Land. With all our recent house guests, our towels have been revealed in all their deplorable condition. While I wandered around a mammoth store looking for towels in what had been advertised as a bath store, but had a sizable luggage department, too, the girls scoped out the premises.

They were truly amazed: hair clips could be bought in a plentiful pack and three dozen hairbrushes were on display. One daughter murmured, I’ve never seen so much shampoo in one place.

Such marvels! We left with towels and hair clips. Back at our house, in the cool and rain-fresh evening, we walked around the garden, the little girl noting the singing crickets, while the wood thrush trilled her inimitable melody. As summer winds down, the birdsongs gradually diminish.

The world of plastic baubles thoroughly admired, the girls and I sat on the couch and read.

(Donald Hall) is a writer who (at least on the best day) does not succumb to inner or outer pressure but, rather, knows that what he calls “absorbedness” is the answer–the only answer. Through all of life’s twists and turns–those fleas–he turns to the work the way his grandparents turned to the soil, to the harvest, which waits for no one.

– Dani Shapiro

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New Hampshire White Mountains by Molly S.